Why I Love Star Trek Voyager: A Post from 2015

This might be a bit of an unusual choice from 2015, as I approach the tenth anniversary of this blog by "re-running" a blog post from each year. I'm not sure if any of my current readership are Trekkies. But here goes, anyway. I'm fond of it, especially the musings on provincialism towards the end. Please forgive the wonky formatting, I've tried to fix it for about fifteen minutes and I don't want to waste any more time on it.

It occurred to me today to write a post devoted to Star Trek: Voyager, a programme I've mentioned often enough. I've watched a lot of it in the last few months-- or half-watched it, since I usually have it on when I'm making dinner or cleaning up.

It's true that I've written a post on Star Trek as a whole (and if I link to it again, I'm liable to prosecution under the Control of Self-Promotion Act of 1932), but I think Voyager deserves an article of its own. It's a very different show.

(I am a little bit hesitant of going all Trekkie on my blog. But, then I think-- why ever not? Most people like Star Trek, after all.)

 

 
Star Trek: Voyager has been described as 'the red-headed step-child' of the franchise, and I can understand why. Despite running for a whole seven seasons-- which is impressive, considering the cancellation-happy nature of American TV networks (after all, the original Star Trek was cancelled after two seasons)-- it hasn't got a very good reputation. Most people who are at all interested in science-fiction TV profess a fondness for The Next Generation and for Deep Space Nine, but are withering about Voyager.

It's hard to disagree with most of their criticisms. I don't usually like bullet point lists, but I feel one coming on here:

• The whole Maquis/Starfleet device is dropped almost as soon as it is introduced. To those who don't know, the set-up of Voyager is that a Starfleet ship is stranded in a far part of the galaxy, out of contact with Starfleet, and-- through plot mechanics that I won't go into-- many of the crew belong to the Maquis, a terrorist/resistance organisation on which Starfleet frowns. This was obviously to set up dramatic tension in the series. But the two groups gel so quickly that it hardly seemed worth setting up, despite occasional (rather clumsy) attempts to revive this plot element later in the series.
• Many of the main characters are just dull. Commander Chakotay, the Native American second-in-command of the ship, has a face tattoo instead of a personality. The Vulcan head of security Tuvok, like all Vulcans, eschews all emotion in favour of logic. How exactly are the audience supposed to relate to such a character? The fresh-faced Harry Kim is everybody's little brother, but he doesn't really have much going for him apart from that-- he seems to have no interests or passions, other than an occasional amorous streak.
• Time travel is overused mercilessly. I'm not a big fan of time travel myself. It doesn't make sense to me. If you can change the past (or the future), isn't everything infinitely provisional? Doesn't that leech the drama out of everything?
• The aliens are terrible. When it came to inventing antagonist races (or even other races in general), Voyager was really the pits. Nearly all the races they run into are militaristic, beligerent, honour-obsessed races like the Klingons-- who are themselves the most boring of the classic 'Trek' aliens.
• The Borg and the Q, both brilliant concepts when they are introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation, are overused in Voyager to the extent that we grow contemptuous of them. The Borg, when first glimpsed, were terrifying and all-but-unstoppable. By the end of Voyager, they are about as terrifying as a koala bear.

But Voyager had a lot going for it, as well. Since I perpetrated one bullet list, I might as well have another:

• The captain, Katherine Janeway. When I first saw Voyager I was rather dreading a female captain. Not because I have anything against the idea of a female captain per se. But because I assumed they were going to make her the antithesis of every stereotype of femininity, and we would have a hardass, ball-busting Captain with ne'er a streak of tenderness.
  
  Thankfully, this counter-stereotype was avoided. Captain Janeway is as tough as anyone could ask for, but she's also very feminine. She's even maternal towards the crew. Above all, she is simply a very well-drawn character. Her particular combination of toughness and tenderness is very believable. A lot of this is surely down to the skill of the actress, Kate Mulgrew-- who is staunchly pro-life, as it happens!
•  There are other excellent characters, as well. Tom Paris, the jaunty and fun-loving pilot who has a love for twentieth-century Americana, is someone I would like to have as a friend. I'd like to be more like him, too. His romance with the half-Klingon Bel'anna is very believable, and their rocky courtship is well portrayed. I've always had a crush on Bel'anna. Fiery, brilliant women are the best, even when they have head ridges.
  
  Neelix, the perpetually upbeat alien they take along for the ride, is also an endearing and well-delineated character. And then there's the Doctor and Seven of Nine...but I want to devote a whole bullet to those.
  
• The set-up of the story is very compelling. A protagonist (or a set of protagonists) trying to get home is one of the most timeless and powerful narratives you could imagine. Indeed, I think that only the Christ story runs deeper in our collective consciousness.
  
  It's just occurred to me that, although Voyager is a very obvious reversal of the basic Star Trek premise-- "to boldly go where no-one has gone before"-- it actually has the best of both worlds. They are exploring unknown parts of space, but they are not exploring for its own sake-- they are desperately trying to get home.
  
  Star Trek Voyager has an 'all or nothing' dimension that The Next Generation lacked. The crew will either get home, or they won't. It gives the whole drama an added intensity and poignancy.
  
  Of course, as the journey goes on, the crew more and more come to see the experience as something valuable in itself. This is a theme that is very deliberately and quite skillfully brought out. Harry Kim, the eager-beaver young crewmember who is most intent on getting home, at one point gives a toast to that effect: "To the journey!". I just googled "To the Journey" and the first result was a Voyager fan podcast. I think this is an important theme, too. So many of the challenges in our lives are challenges we would never have chosen. If we can embrace them all the same, if we can affirm them, it is quite a triumph.
  
  The plot conforms to another classic story-telling convention-- the group of people who are thrown into a common situation, a common dilemma. This may be a cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason-- it works. There is such a loneliness at the core of the human condition that having a similar experience to others is of huge importance to us. It's why people join support groups and veteran groups and, well, groups of every kind
  .
• The Doctor and Seven of Nine. The Doctor is an emergency medical hologram on a ship with no human doctor. As the series unfolds, his programme is enhanced, so that he becomes more and more like a human.
  
  Seven of Nine is a liberated Borg drone who was captured by the Borg as a little girl. At first, she is none-too-happy about being restored to humanity, and her path to becoming an individual (the Borg are a 'hive mind') is long and painful.
  
  Obviously, both of these characters are 'Pinochhio' characters-- they are both striving to become human. This could be seen as a blatant retread of Data, the android who wanted to be more human from The Next Generation. And indeed, it is. But I don't see anything wrong with this kind of self-plagiarism. Indeed, I think the Doctor and Seven-of-Nine out-Data Data.
  
  Seven-of-Nine was introduced in season four, and immediately boosted ratings. It's easy to see why-- she is undeniable eye candy, and she wears a skin-tight catsuit that shows off her impressive physique to its best effect. There were complaints about the cynicism of this move, and understandably so.
  
  But there's a lot more to her than eye-candy. Her story arc is incredibly poignant, especially in episodes like 'Raven' and 'Someone to Watch Over Me'. First of all, there is the fact that she has gone from being part of a hive mind to being an individual, with all the sense of isolation that would entail. Secondly, she has to come to terms with her past as a Borg, where she helped to 'assimilate' millions of others into the Borg collective. And thirdly, she learns about her own personal past, and the fact that she was herself 'assimilated' as a little girl, when her parents-- who were scientists studying the Borg-- were captured. She feels conflicted about whether she should explore this past or not. At the end of one episode, she very poignantly puts aside the newly-discovered diaries her parents kept, accepting that she is not ready to look at them yet.
  
  Seven-of-Nine used to be my favourite character, but she has now been overtaken by the Doctor. (He has no name, as he keeps putting off choosing one.) Indeed, the Doctor has become my favourite Star Trek character of all. He has a longer story arc than Seven-of-Nine, featuring from the first episode to the last. He gets more humorous moments than Seven-of-Nine, given his tendency towards gross vanity and pomposity. (Obviously, there is a tender side to this, too, as his vanity is frequently both bruised and subsequently salved by his crewmates.)
  
  Most importantly, he is played by Robert Picardo, a wonderful actor. I'm not the biggest fan of the acting profession. I think rather too much noise is made about (and indeed by) actors in this world. And yet there are some actors I greatly admire, and Robert Picardo is one of them. He has the sublime confidence of the best actors.
  
  He seems to be a pretty good and fascinating guy, too. I follow his Twitter account (it's the only Twitter account I do follow) and I've watched various videos of his speeches at Star Trek conventions, which are always funny and graceful, and display an obvious desire to give the fans their money's worth. He's a practicing Catholic, too, who sometimes tweets about his faith! (Although, unfortunately, he did celebrate the SCOTUS decision on gay 'marriage'. Oh well.)
  
  This is what I said about both these characters in my 'purple notebook' series (perhaps a bit too self-revelatory, but I need to be self-revelatory to explain, and I want to explain):I find these characters fascinating because they are both learning to be human, painfully and in unusual circumstance. Apart from finding this dramatically compelling in its own right, I identify with them. Other than reading or writing, I was a slow starter in nearly everything-- sometimes to a spectacular degree. Tying my laces, flying on a plane, leaving the country, having a job, making friends, drinking alcohol, going to a party, dating, experiencing a first kiss-- I did them all later and often way later than most people. So much so that it's often hard to find my experience mirrored in fiction, other than Seven of Nine and the Doctor. And the fact that their story is interesting, that they are sympathetic and admirable characters, makes me feel better about my own story.

Star Trek: Voyager isn't really a quarter as good as Star Trek: The Next Generation. (I don't really care very much for the original Star Trek or for Deep Space Nine, and I've barely seen Enterprise.) But, in a way, I'm actually fonder of Voyager-- maybe even because it's not as good.

I suppose I've always had something of a tenderness for the second-rate. It's hard to describe. I'm not talking about a fondness for the underdog. I do have a fondness for the underdog, in buckets and buckets, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

I think it has something to do with being born in Dublin, and growing up there, and spending the vast majority of my time on Earth there. Not only is Dublin a capital city, but I think it's fair to say that it's one of the great cities of the West. Dublin was the second city of the British Empire (though I see that other cities vied for that title, but let that pass). You couldn't throw a stone without hitting a house where some famous writer, artist, statesman or intellectual was born. Every back alley is knee-deep in history. Indeed, Dubliners are often accused of forgetting that there is an Ireland outside Dublin.

As for myself, I was never a very proud Dubliner. (Though it's more complicated than that...but that's a story for another time.) Dublin always seemed to me like the bastion of metropolitan and liberal values, while rural Ireland was the stronghold of traditional Ireland. On my summer holidays to my aunt's farm in Limerick, I always felt more of an affinity with the red-necks (or 'culchies') than I ever did with cynical Dubliners. (And I grew tired of being confidently informed that "You wouldn't like it as much here in winter".)

However, I'm veering off the subject a little. My original point was that, as a metropolitan, I have always been fascinated by all things provincial-- by the very notion of the provincial. (This is why I like Trollope.) I still can't really get my head around the idea of living in a city that isn't the capital. Being at the centre of things seems like the ordinary, humdrum thing to me. Being a provincial seems downright exotic.

That is, perhaps, one source of my fascination with the second-rate, the second-place, the not-quite, and the off-centre.

Another source is that it seems less intense, in a way. Personally, I can never understand why anyone would want to stand in a noisy pub on a Friday or Saturday night, fighting to get the attention of the barman and making reluctant trips to a filthy bathroom. I like pubs where there is enough liveliness to create an atmosphere, but you have room to sit down and relax-- midweek pubs. Similarly, I don't really get the appeal to cramming into a cinema on the release day of a big movie. I prefer half-empty cinemas. And so on.

More abstractly, I like things that are a little bit neglected-- relatively neglected. I like the fact that I'm in a minority when it comes to being a Voyager fan. It's a popular show, but not nearly as popular as Picard and Co. I like that. It makes it more mine, somehow. It makes it more special, somehow.

But the thing I like most about Star Trek in general- both Voyager and its big brother-- is the basic set-up. 

In my favourite book of all time, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote: "Nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable." I think that this is the magic of Star Trek. It combines the ideal of adventure, of exploring new places and new situations, with the ideal of home-- of community-- of family. Wherever the crew go, they are always on Voyager, or on the Enterprise. That's very comforting.

And the tightness of community on Star Trek is something I find very appealing. Part of the reason I like my job in UCD library is because it's almost military in terms of how immersive it is. University College Dublin isn't just like a small town. Essentially, it is a small town. All the amenities are there-- shops, cafes, restaurant, bank, post office, church, swimming pool, cinema-- almost everything. It's a world unto itself.

I grew up in UCD. I was twenty-three when I arrived, and extremely shy and immature. I had no friends. I made my first friends in UCD-- many of whom I still have. In fact, I had an experience very similar to the Doctor and Seven-of Nine.

The drama of the individual is something I find fascinating.  Perhaps this is not very conservative of me. Perhaps I have been infected by our era of life coaches, self-actualisation, self-esteem, navel-gazing, 'head space', personal growth, and the inner child. But I don't really care. I do think there is something sublime in the fact that every man and woman is a unique personality in the history of the world. I do think it's fascinating that we have so many different needs, beyond our purely physical needs-- the need for community, the need for self-expression, the need for belonging, the need for adventure, the need for growth. I like Star Trek because it follows its characters not only in their external journeys but in their internal journeys. Perhaps more than anything else, that is what keeps me going back to it, when there are so many other TV shows and movies I've never watched, and so much else to see and do in our little span of time.

On a Dedication: From 2014

I like to think that this blog is, amongst other things, a tribute to the essay form. (I know I've written a lot about the essay form already, but bear with me.) When I was a kid, the word 'essay' had the same flavour as 'multiplication table' or 'technical drawing'. I couldn't imagine anything less exciting, less fun.

Even back then, this didn't make very much sense, as there were essays that I enjoyed reading without considering them essays. I had a collection of newspaper articles by Keith Waterhouse, the veteran English journalist and all-round literary jobber, which I read again and again. Later on, I became a fan of Flann O'Brien, the Irish literary genius and newspaper columnist, whose Best of Myles was such a favourite amongst several members of my family that it took on that familiar look of favourite books; not only was it missing the front and back cover, but several pages from either end, too. (It's heartily recommended, by the way, although much of the observational humour and the pastiche might pass you by if you're not Irish.)

Of course, much of my dislike for the idea of essays came from the sort of essay we were taught to write (and often given to read) at school-- the sort of essay where you start off by declaring what you are going to write, you write it, and you finish up by summarizing what you've written. I'm certainly not criticizing English teachers for requiring this from their students. The whole idea that education should focus primarily upon 'unleashing creativity' seems very silly me. Children, and learners in general, need to learn how to plod before they can somersault. (When I was about fourteen, our English teacher made the class come up with a list of words to use instead of 'nice'. When I grew older, I looked back on this exercise with scorn. But then I grew up a little more, and it occurred to me that, although there is nothing at all wrong with the word 'nice', youngsters are indeed all too inclined to pepper it in places where another word would make a nicer distinction.)

But, though the kind of essay I encountered in school was valid as a teaching exercise, there was nothing very inspiring about it. So it never occurred to me that a lot of the stuff I did enjoy reading was, actually, in essay format. Newspaper columns were essays. Magazine articles were essays. Memoirs, when they were reflective rather than just chronologies, were essays. Biographies, subject to the same condition, were essays. Film reviews were essays. Book reviews were essays. History books were essays. Introductions and prefaces (which were so often the best part of a book, in my view) were essays. And then, when the internet came along, blog posts and website articles were essays.

Or rather, they could all be essays. An essay, to me, implies a certain infusion of personality, a willingness to step back a little from the subject at hand, an atmosphere of being at ease rather than on duty.

Having developed a taste for the essay, I've found myself occasionally borrowing anthologies of essays from my library. I'm invariably disappointed. They're nearly always full of essays by 'masters of the form' such as William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Michel De Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Hilaire Belloc, Richard Steele and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Chesterton, too, although they usually choose his least interesting essays-- 'A Piece of Chalk' and 'On Lying in Bed', for instance.)

The sort of essays that appear in these collections, almost without exception, are written in either a 'whimsical' style-- as effervescent and flavourless as sparkling mineral water-- or are as ponderous as a speech at a headmaster's conference. A common perception of the essay seems to be that it should be a burst of linguistic and rhetorical fireworks expended upon a trivial subject-- the more trivial, the better. (This is why 'A Piece of Chalk' and 'On Lying in Bed' are the usual choices from Chesterton.) This sort of essay always has the tone of a clever, precocious schoolboy amusing his elders. On the other hand, essays by luminaries like Montaigne and Bacon, though I shudder to admit it, are so general and abstract as to be unreadable. (I have an ally in C.S. Lewis here, who wrote very witheringly of Bacon's essays.) The supposed masterpieces of the essay format tend, in my view, to be either too specific in subject matter, or too general-- 'How to Name a Dog' on the one hand, 'Of Friendship' on the other.

Anyway, all of that is-- believe it or not-- simply by way of preamble. It's not what I set out to write about at all.

A particular collection of 'essays' that I prize (though more for its atmosphere than its quality) is the splendidly-titled Don't Shoot-- I'm Not Well! by Ted Bonner. Ted Bonner, who died only two years ago at the age of 85, was a businessman, a motoring correspondent, a raconteur, an after-dinner speaker, and a writer and broadcaster. He was once a stand-in host for The Late Late Show, the most famous television show in Irish history.

(I couldn't find a picture of the book in question, so I used another one instead.)

I've never read anything he wrote other than this book, which has a very 'after-dinner speech' flavour to it. It's full of anecdotes of hilarious (or not so hilarious) mishaps and misadventures, observations on the absurdities and frustrations of everyday life, and so on. A fishing trip where it rains non-stop, an unsuccessful attempt to find the Washington Bridge, recollections of the author's enormous appetite as a child-- you know the kind of thing. It was published in 1974, so it has a nostalgia value for me (even though I was born in 1977). It belongs to that period in Irish history when we had a modern standard of living but we were still solidly nationalist, Catholic and genteel. (Genteel, at least, to the extent that explicit vulgarity and nastiness in print was rare.)

But even all that is preamble, and not my subject proper. I don't want to write a review of Don't Shoot-- I'm Not Well! I only want to discuss eleven words out of the whole text. And that's the Dedication at the beginning.

This is it: For anyone, anywhere, with whom I have ever shared a laugh.

I've found that dedication coming into my mind again and again recently. As a matter of fact, and in all sincerity, I find it profoundly moving.

Partly this is because I've been thinking about prayer so much lately. The more I pray, the more I find myself trying to remember as many people as I can in my prayers. And the more I do that, the more I realize how many people there are to cover, and how easy it is to leave them out. And I especially find myself thinking of all the people whose names I never even knew, or whose names I've forgotten; people I spoke to once at a party, or who did me a kind deed, or who laughed with me when we both witnessed something funny.

And that gets me thinking about the abundance of life. This is a thought that haunts me constantly. I haven't had a very eventful life-- less eventful than those of most people my age, or even younger. But every human life is packed with such a variety of character, incident, scene, atmosphere and plot that it outdoes the most ambitious of epic novels. I wrote this post to express it, once, but I still feel I haven't got close to expressing the wonder of the thing.

I once owned a children's encyclopedia (or, more accurately, a compendium of questions and answers) which included a reproduction of a painting called Dickens' Dream. It showed Charles Dickens asleep in an armchair, surrounded by a cloud of the characters he dreamed up. But we are all like Dickens in that picture. It fascinates me to think how any man, woman or child sitting in an armchair, alone, is surrounded by a similar cloud-- not of fictional beings only, but of memories and sights and sounds and knowledge.

Since I was a boy, and long before I started to write poetry in a disciplined way, there was a poem in my mind that I could never successfully translate into words-- a poem about how the lustre of a human eye is more wonderful than any precious stone's lustre. The pupil of a human eye is a gateway to infinity. Even a five-year-old child remembers and thinks more than he could ever tell you. This seems marvellous and surprising to me.

The closest this poem has come to existence is a poem by Pat Tierney, a local Ballymun poet, that appeared in a community newspaper. It was written to a priest (a athair is Father in Irish), and the only lines I can remember, and probably misremember, referred to the priest's eyes in this way:

Those God-made galaxies, a athair
How deep God made those galaxies.

In this light, a line like For anyone, anywhere, with whom I have ever shared a laugh takes on a certain sublimity, like the sky at night or the view from the top of a mountain.

But isn't it funny how important such acts of remembrance are, even for those who don't pray or don't believe in prayer? Why does the human race build memorials and statues? Why do we have days of remembrance? Indeed, why do we dedicate books? What does dedicating a book do? Ted Bonner dedicated Don't Shoot-- I'm Not Well! to everyone, everywhere, with whom he ever shared a laugh. Presumably, many (if not most) of those people will never know he dedicated it to them. But it doesn't feel like an empty gesture, any more than a song or a movie or a book dedicated to a dead person feels like an empty gesture. It feels very meaningful.

It's not just prayer that is a strange notion. It's thought itself. What is a thought? How long does it last? How complex can it be, and remain a single thought? Why do we feel that thinking of something, and especially of someone, can be a generous and meaningful act in itself? "There wasn't a day I didn't think of you" is the kind of thing one person might say to another to show how important she is to him. Or, conversely: "Did you ever even think of me?".

Even if you don't believe in prayer, finding a place in your thoughts for everyone you've ever loved, or liked, or shared a part of your life with, or even felt any kind of connection with-- the people who died in 9/11, or your remote ancestors, or some skeleton you saw in a museum-- somehow seems like an imperative. At least, it does to me. I don't imagine I'm alone.

But enough. I realize I've written hundreds of words on an eleven-word dedication, and I thus qualify for The Penguin Book of Essays.

Wooooo! Six "Nightmares" from 2013

The tenth anniversary of this blog (and my twentieth anniversary in UCD) is on Friday, so I'd better speed up my re-posting of a blog post for every year.

This one is from 2013, the year I got married. This time, since Halloween decorations are already in the shops (funny how nobody complains about Halloween being premature), I'm going to post some of my horror stories.

Back in 2009 (I think), I wrote a collection of a hundred very short horror stories. I gave the collection the title A Hundred Nightmares. It was the last thing I wrote in a burst of productivity (or at least, prolificness) that also included a High Fantasy novel, a kid's fantasy novel, and a horror novel. All remain unpublished, although a publisher did hold onto the kid's fantasy novel for a few months before sending it back.

The idea behind A Hundred Nightmares was that every story would be completely different from every other story. As a lifelong horror fan, I was frustrated by stories that were simply variations on a theme. So I tried to mix up supernatural and non-supernatural, dark and light-hearted, and so forth. Admittedly I stretched the term "horror" quite far for some of them.

The funny thing is that, as soon as I finished last words of the collection (of the framing story, to be exact)-- on literally that very day, which was a warm summer's day with a deep blue sky-- I was plunged into a deep spiritual depression. Suddenly my priority was not writing but searching for God.

Anyway, here are the stories. I try to break up the text of blog posts with pictures these days, but I'm pressured for time this week so I hope I'll be forgiven for not doing this.

Security

“Maybe you should spend less time listening to silly stories”, said Hannigan, “and more time doing your job.”

Wilson didn’t reply. It was a cold night and he wanted to go home, not argue with this fanatic outside the security station. He’d only known Hannigan for two months, and already he hated him more than he’d ever hated anyone.

The fact that Hannigan had worked in a high security prison before he’d come here showed that the company wanted to tighten things up. But he doubted they realised just how obsessive Hannigan was.

“Can I go?”, asked Wilson, meeting Hannigan’s stare.

“Please do”, said his supervisor, with a disgusted grimace. “But don’t let me catch you making personal calls again. And especially not spreading ridiculous rumours about the lab. It’s the last thing we need. Do you really believe that stuff?”

“I don’t believe it”, said Wilson, evenly. “And I don’t not believe it. I was just telling my wife what I heard.”

“Your wife”, said Hannigan. “A woman?”

“Don’t you like women?”, asked Wilson.

“Matter of fact, I don’t”, said Hannigan, turning his back on Wilson, and swiping his card on the panel at the door of the security station. There was a high-pitched buzz, a click, and Hannigan pushed the glass door inward and stepped into the station.

He felt happy here. It was tiny, and he had always loved small spaces. It gave him satisfaction to survey the bank of security monitors, watching the feed from the compound’s seventy-four CCTV cameras.

What were they making here, in this remote stretch of the Scottish highlands, ten miles from the nearest village? Rumours abounded amongst the security staff. It was a cure for cancer. It was a male contraceptive. It was a biological weapon. Vista Pharmaceuticals had been best known for cough medicine and laxatives until now, but it was pretty clear that they were onto something big.

They had made it clear to Hannigan when they’d hired him; keeping people out was important, but keeping information in was even more important.

To Hannigan, that included ridiculous stories. Who knew what grain of truth might be hidden in them? One of the previous security guards, it seemed, had seen a creature creeping towards him, some ten months ago. An enormous worm, he had said. He’d just managed to get inside the security fence before it reached him. Weeks later, he’d retired, shattered by the experience.

Well, this line of work attracted loners and disturbed people. As long as they did their job, Hannigan didn’t care how disturbed they were. But the problem was that they hadn’t been doing their job; when he had arrived, discipline had been horrifyingly lax. Hannigan had insisted on twice as many security cameras, three times as many inspections, and codes and passwords changed at least every week. His staff had howled with indignation, their cosy number robbed from them. Screw them.

He switched monitor twelve onto its third camera, and cursed. The screen was black.

“Tanner”, he said, into his walkie-talkie. “Get your arse to the main security post. I’m going to go look at a faulty camera. No, I’ll go. I don’t want to leave it to anyone else. Just hurry up.”

It was a big laboratory, and the grounds were even more extended. It was a fifteen minute walk to the malfunctioning camera.

Hannigan enjoyed the walk. He was a fitness fanatic, and he was happiest on his feet. The stars were out, too. This was a beautiful place. If only he didn’t have to work with these numbskulls…

He reached the camera. The red light on its side had gone out. It looked busted. Well, it was easily replaced.

He turned back in the direction he had come, and that was when he saw it.

It looked just as he had pictured it, from reading his staff’s emails. It was three foot high, and at least seven foot long. It was coloured like a seal and shaped like a snake, but enormous jaws snapped open and shut as it moved, with ghastly speed, towards him. He screamed.

“What’s wrong, Hannig—“ came Tanner’s voice over the walkie-talkie. But his voice was cut off. Hannigan had dropped the walkie-talkie in fright, and it smashed on the icy earth.

He raced towards the closest gate in the seven-foot high security fence. Thank God, it was only a few feet away, and in a few seconds he was tapping the security code into its number pad.

There was no click, no green light.

Hannigan tapped in the code again, before he realised what was wrong. It was Monday. It had been his idea to change the fence’s security code every Monday. He had set the new one just moments before, but panic drove it from his mind.

He tried again, and again, and again. And the creature slid closer. He could hear the snapping of its jaws.

......

Mr. Naughty

(Note: This was written at the end of the last decade.)

Katy was already bored of the party. Why had she agreed to come to the Dosshouse for New Year’s Eve? Because Sharon had asked her, that was why. Sharon had latched onto her and Katy was too polite to rebuff the girl’s overpowering friendship.

At least Sharon wasn’t pestering her right now. She’d become fascinated by a guitarist called Lee who was was explaining the genesis of his latest song, Never at Home to You. He’d had the idea while hiding from a political canvasser, he’d said. About ten times.

Since then Katie had fended off a hairdresser who had launched into a story about his latest tatooo; a design student who had asked her if she wanted to come home to his “regression party” afterwards; and a man in a grey suit who told her the Dosshouse was going to go bust within a few months.

Now, thankfully, most of the revellers had gone outside to look at the fireworks. The stragglers were lost in their own conversations.

Katy was coming back from the lady’s room when she saw him.

He was leaning against the bar, like a man in a cartoon. He wore artfully tousled hair, a fitted shirt with a thin black tie, and a grey cardigan. He looked very unhappy.

Katy always gravitated towards unhappy people. “You don’t like the New Year?”, she asked, in a raised voice, leaning beside him.

He looked up. He looked at her through glazed, indifferent eyes. He was not handsome. His features were rather too pointed. He might have been in his late twenties.

“Not this one”, he said.

“Oh well”, said Katy. “It’s only one day. What’s your name?”

The far-off light left the man’s eyes. He seemed to be seeing Katy for the first time. “Mr Naughty”, he said.

Katy guffawed. She had heard some horrible chat-up lines, but that was the worst. So bad, in fact, that it came out on the other side and hit brilliance.

“Really?”, she asked. “Mr. Naughty?”

“Not Mr Naughty”, said the man, with no hint of a smile. He didn’t look used to smiling. “Mr Noughties.”

“Oh, Mr Noughties?, asked Katy. “Like, the decade?”

“That’s right”, said Mr Noughties, looking around the club with narrowed eyes. “Like the decade.”

“No wonder you’re sad tonight”, said Katy. “Your favourite decade is over.”

His reponse was not what she expected. Now, she assumed, he’d have to at least feign a smile. But instead, he turned his eyes back to her, and heavy tears filled them.

“Hey, don’t cry”, said Katy. “I was only kidding.”

“My time is over”, said Mr Noughties. “You don’t get it, Katy.” (How the hell does he know my name, thought Katy?) “I am the Noughties. You’ve heard of the spirit of the age, haven’t you? Well, I’m the spirit of the age.”

Katy was stumped. How did you answer that? She might have told him not to talk nonsense, but somehow she knew he was telling the truth.

“But it’s past twelve”, she said. “Shouldn’t you...disappear or something?”

“Don’t be so provincial”, said Mr Noughty, and now he almost did smile. “It’s still December the thirty-first in half the world. Oh Katy”, he sighed, his half-smile fading, “what a wash-out of a decade. I did my best and I blew it. What will anybody remember me for? A global recession? Blogging? Recycled music? The war on terrorism? Harry Potter was the only highpoint.”

Katy felt bad for him. He looked so defeated. “Why didn’t you just...do something differently?”, she asked. “Give us another Beatles? Or some kind of...great awakening?”

Mr Noughty laughed bitterly. “It’s not as easy as that”, he said. “You can’t just ride a carriage and horses over free willl. A zeitgeist’s freedom of manoeuvre is limited. Miss Sixties and Mr Seventies...they were wonder-workers. I only appreciate them now. The awesome skill required...”

Katy reached over and patted the desolate-looking man on the shoulder. “Well, I liked the noughties”, she said. “I think you were a great success.”

A grim smile touched Mr. Noughties lips. There was a glint in his eyes.

“I know you did,” he said. “And they’re all yours, Katy. You’ll live in them forever. We both will. It’s no coincidence I’m here tonight.”

“What does that mean?”, asked Katy, beginning to feel afraid.

Mr. Noughty raised his eyes to the clock above the bar. “Because I’m going out with a bang, that’s why. In this town, anyway. Fireworks are dangerous things to leave lying around… I’ve chosen you, Katy. I’ve chosen you.”

Katy stepped backwards quickly. But it was already too late.

......

Monsters!

“Peter”, said Owen, sitting up on the bed. “Peter!”

“What?”, asked Peter, groggily, turning his pillow over to enjoy the cool side. The early morning was streaming in between the bedroom curtains.

“I’m afraid of monsters”, whispered Owen. “I’m frightened monsters are going to get in here.”

“Go back to sleep, bozo”, murmured Peter.

“But...”

“Monsters don’t come in the sunlight”, said Peter. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Really?”, asked Owen, brightening.

“Really”, said Peter. “Now go back to sleep.”

Of course, Owen didn’t go back to sleep. Once he was awake, he stayed awake. Peter was different. All the monsters in the world wouldn’t wake him up when he was tired. He pulled the blankets up to his chin.

* * * *
Owen was playing a game with a piece of eggshell and a spoon when Peter came down for breakfast.

“You’re not a superhero! You’re not a superhero!”, Owen was crying, in a voice even more high-pitched than usual.

“The dead have arisen”, said the boys’ mother, looking up at Peter as she poured out his tea. “Did you read that chapter?”

“Half of it”, said Peter, sliding into his chair.

“Shhh”, said a man sitting at the other end of the table. One side of his face was a mass of scars. His left arm stopped short at the elbow; he was wearing a long white shirt, and the left sleeve hung limply by his side. “I’ve always loved this song.”

Getting Better by the Beatles filled the little kitchen. Uncle Alan bopped his head, smiling. He smiled a lot, Uncle Alan, even though he was missing an arm and a foot.

“I remember when I first heard that”, said the boys’ mother. She was a thin woman, with a careworn face and dreamy eyes. Her name was Catherine. “It was a school disco. All the music was old music in those discos.”

“Old music is the best music”, said Uncle Alan. “At least we’ve been spared any more of that goddawful rap music.”

“I like some of that rap”, said Catherine, with a bashful smile.

Uncle Alan made a face. “Could you pour me some more of that tea, love?”, he asked. “It’s going to be cold today. Cold, I tells you.”

Catherine poured her brother-in-law another cup of tea, and they all listened to the Beatles in silence, apart from the voices that Owen was supplying for his eggshell and spoon adversaries.

As the Beatles faded out, a melodious female voice said: “Here is the news.”

Catherine frowned. She didn’t like the boys listening to the news, but she’d given up ushering them out of the room. Let them hear, Uncle Alan said. This is the world they’re growing up into, God help them.

“We have good news for you this morning”, said the newsreader. “Belfast has been recaptured. The offensive lasted throughout the night, and some five hundred birdmen and rhinomen were slain. Human casualties are estimated at less than a hundred.”

“It’s hard to know what’s propaganda or not”, said Uncle Alan, meditatively, laying his mug down on the table. “But even still…”

Suddenly, his fist slammed down the table. Plates, cups and sauce bottles jumped. So did Catherine and her sons.

“Goddammit, we stuck it to the bastards!”, he whooped.

Peter expected his mother to rebuke Uncle Alan—- he’d used the b-word, after all—- but she didn’t. She only smiled, and kept listening to the news.

“The battle for Manchester is still raging. Casualties are high...there are some indications that a resistance is forming in Russia. A radio signal was picked up briefly, two days ago.”

“I just wish I was out there”, said Uncle Alan, still grinning.

“You’ve done your part”, said Catherine. “More than your part.”

Peter stared out into the garden. There was frost on the grass. He remembered, in the first year of the attack, he’d reminded his father how he’d told him monsters didn’t exist. That’s what we all thought, his father had replied. That’s what we all thought, Peter.

The sun glittered on the frosty grass. Peter loved sunlight more than anything.

Because when the sun went down...that was when the monsters came.

.......

Where the Party Never Ends

Samantha had been working in The Rockery for three weeks. Once you got used to the non-stop heavy metal, it was a good job.

It wasn’t just heavy metal they played. There was fifties rock and roll, blues, punk, even some of the darker, more morose brands of country and western. But here, at least, the old slogan was true. Here, metal ruled.

And the music wasn’t too loud. Certainly no worse than the clubs that Samantha—sometimes, and reluctantly— visited with her friends. The clientele weren’t rowdy, the pay was good, and she wasn’t overburdened with work. In the middle of a recession, a student could do much worse.

“Did that poster come, Sam?”

Morgan, the Rockery’s manager, had finally made an appearance. Tonight, he was even later than usual. Sam had grown used to taking charge of things herself. At least she was learning how to use her initiative.

“Yup”, said Samantha, smiling at Morgan. He wasn’t a bad guy, even though he was catastrophically lazy. “Did you know it was glow-in-the-dark?”

“It is?”, said Morgan, leaning backwards as he always did when he was surprised, as though he had blown away by some new piece of information. He was a skinny man with a mane of black hair reaching almost to his buttocks. His face was lined, his eyelids baggy. “Wow. I hope I didn’t order the wrong one.”

“Picture of some kind of demon dressed as a cowboy…”

“Spot on”, said Morgan. “Hey, tonight’s a big night, you know that, Sam?”

“Tonight is Skid’s birthday”, said Samantha. “Yeah, you told me.”

“Well, it’s a big deal, Sam”, said Morgan, pulling himself a beer. “It’s a big deal.”

“Who is he, anyway?”

Morgan gave a very affected laugh, and shook his head ruefully. “Who’s Skid Nolan…? Man, I never thought I’d live to hear that question.”

“I mean, was he in a band or something...?”

“Was he in a band? He was in every band, baby. He was a session guitarist. But…he was more than that.” Morgan was watching the head form on his pint of beer, but now he looked back at Sam, almost solemnly. “He was a hellraiser. He was a legend.”

“How old is he?”

Morgan laughed louder at this. “Baby, with people my age, you don’t ask questions like that. Not even behind someone’s back. It dates us all. Skid...well, Skid is timeless. Leave it at that.”

“Sorry”, said Samantha, shrugging and smiling. “Hey, we need more fivers and tenners for the till.”

“I’m hearing you”, said Morgan. “I’m hearing you”. He spun on his heel and strode back to his office, nodding his head to the speed metal song that had come over the sound system, his fingers strumming the air.

The club began to fill up, quicker than usual. The clientele of the Rockery were always on the older side, though there were usually plenty of customers in their teens and twenties. Not tonight, though. Tonight, hardly anyone seemed under the age of thirty, and most of those were accompanied by lovers or friends in their forties, fifties, even sixties. A lifetime of partying showed its ravages on dozens of faces. Samantha thought there would be fewer bleary eyes and wrinkled faces in an old folks’ home.

They congregated at the bar, swapping stories about the mysterious Skid, who had not yet arrived. He was sixty today, she’d gathered.

“Did you hear about the time he sneaked into the private member’s club in London—- full of peers and judges and all these goons—- with a few guys from Bill Bush’s band, dressed as barmen, and they gave them all a blast of Headbanger’s Serenade? That shook ‘em up.”

“Phil Lynnott got the idea for Dancing in the Moonlight when he was jamming with Skid one day. It was four or five o’ in the morning. That’s what Lassie Tormey told me. I don’t know if it’s true.”

“I heard it was actually Skid who played the solo on Gingerbread Judy.”

A band set up on the small platform that served as a stage. Within a few minutes, an electric guitar was filling the air with its screech, and Samantha felt the thrumming of the rhythm section in her teeth and bones. Within a few more minutes, the floor had turned into a mosh pit.

Then, finally, Skid arrived.

She knew he’d arrived from the raucous cheers and the distorted rendition of Happy Birthday To You that the band had launched into. But it was some moments before she could make him out through the press of bodies.

A woman was standing behind him, perhaps his wife or daughter. Every few moments, she wiped his lips with a cloth. He wore tight, faded jeans and a black Led Zeppelin t-shirt. He sat in a wheelchair, staring at the people around him, his slack mouth twitching. He might have been trying to smile.

...........

She Wore Black

“Anybody sitting here?”.

Albert looked up from his portable chess-board. A woman dressed in a black dress-suit was standing there, holding a cappuccino. She was chubby but attractive, and she had a pleasant smile.

“Nope”, said Albert, smiling back.

She pulled the chair back and lowered herself onto it. “Are you winning?”, she asked, looking at the board.

It was not the first time Albert had heard that joke, but he smiled as if it was. “Just going over some moves. I’m off to a tournament, actually.”

“You’re a pro?”, she asked, her eyebrows raised in surprised.

“Semi-pro”, said Albert. “I wouldn’t make any money from playing, but I write and coach as well. So I guess you’re off to some crucial board meeting?”.

The woman didn’t seem to have heard him. She was absorbed by the position on the board. “When is your train?”, she asked, absently.

Victoria Train Station echoed around them. It was Albert’s favourite place in the world. How many thousands of lives, of stories, intersected here? It pulsed with possibility. And a pretty lady’s company made it complete.

“Not for another hour”, said Albert. “I’m a chronic early arriver.”

The woman gave a burst of laughter, and her eyes—still on the pieces—- lit with mirth. “Are you?”, she asked. “I can’t tell you how much I like early arrivers.”

If this was flirtation, thought Albert, it was a funny sort of flirtation. He was about to reply when she looked up, her amused smile a saucy grin now.

“I bet I could beat you, Albert”, she said. “Come on. Speed chess.”

His expression didn’t change when she used his name. A poker face wasn’t just for poker, as every good chess player knew.

“You’re Death, aren’t you?”, he asked.

Her lips pursed with momentary irritation, but soon her serene smile was back. “I’m not Death. Why does everyone assume there’s only one Death? I’m a Death.”

“Kind of like a store Santa?”, asked Albert, with a wry grin.

The Death’s lips pursed again, and her eyes narrowed. “So, do you want to play, or not?”, she asked. “Come on, I’ll make it worthwhile. Twenty years tacked onto your life if you win. And before you ask, no, you won’t be drooling and shaking for those twenty years. Twenty hale and hearty years.”

“And if I lose…?”

“Twenty years shaved off your life. Which— sorry to say— will leave you only ten years of your natural span. Well, you don’t live very healthy, do you Albert?”. She chuckled, her dimples showing, as though this was the jolliest of japes.

“Let’s do it”, said Albert. “How do we time it?”

“Leave that to me”, said Death. She reached down, clicked open her briefcase—- Albert saw a soft flash inside it as she did so-- and drew out two large, antique-looking hourglasses. “Half an hour each”, she said. “And you can be White. Well, what else could I be but Black, after all?”

She was already setting the pieces back to their starting position, grinning eagerly. Well, she won’t be grinning for long, thought Albert.

Twenty minutes later, he was staring down at his checkmated king. It was the first time he’d played to checkmate in his adult life, but who would resign with twenty years of life in the balance?

“Enjoy our remaining years, Albert”, said the Death, reaching towards his hourglass.

Albert reached out and grabbed her wrist, and said: “Double or nothing. Come on. Double or nothing.”

She sighed. “Really, Albert?”, she asked. “I trounced you, and I have the white pieces this time.”

“Double or nothing”, said Albert, setting the pieces back up again. “Come on, be a sport.”

She sat down with another sigh. This time she moved even quicker, and in fifteen minutes Albert spread his arms in the air and said: “I resign.”

The Death gave him her broadest smile yet: “Well, I guess you’re coming with me now, aren’t you?”

Albert raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I’m not sure about that."

The Death frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Well, according to the terms of our bet, I died ten years ago. You tell me how a dead man can gamble with Death— sorry, a Death— and I’ll come quietly.”

The Death scowled, as though wishing she had some cappuccino left to splash in his face.

............

Visitors

When Suzie had first seen the wreath, she’d been curious, but nothing more.

She didn’t think her father’s grave would have many visitors. He’d had friends, but really, who came back to a grave except family? Of course, it had occurred to her that her father might have had a lover of some kind. But why would he had kept it secret? He’d had a few brief affairs after Suzie’s mother died, and he’d never been at all reticent about them.

She’d knelt to examine the wreath. There were roses and lilies and chrysanthemums. It was a full, handsome wreath that looked expensive. And there was a card, but it didn’t tell her anything. There was a picture of what looked like flames printed on it. No caption, no name, no telephone number.

It was some kind of charitable society, she’d decided. Do-gooders who went around graveyards leaving flowers on graves that had none. The thought irritated and shamed her at once. It had been a long time since the funeral. The grave had been unattended for more than a year.

But really, so what? You remembered the dead in your heart, not by keeping florists in business, didn’t you?

All the same, she didn’t leave it so long to come back.

This time, there were three wreaths. One of them was enormous, composed entirely of red roses.

And every one of them had the same card attached. They all looked as though they had been printed separately—one used gold ink—but the image was exactly the same in each one. Five flames, one large one in the centre and four in each corner. Suzie was sure she had never seen it before.

She tore one of them off, and walked out of the cemetery.

* * *
“Doesn’t mean anything to me”, said Jude, after a full minute staring at the picture.

Suzie gave an exasperated sigh. “How did I know you’d say that?”, she asked. “I’ve spent hours looking through reference books...heraldic symbols, hallmarks, alchemical and occult signs. Plenty of flames, of course, but none just like that.”

Jude shrugged and took another bite of his doughnut. He was looking back towards the counter, to the butter-haired cashier who had caught his eye. “Maybe they got the wrong grave”, he said.

“How could they do that?”, asked Suzie, striving to hold onto her patience. “It has a name, dates….they’d need to be prize nincompoops. Doesn’t this creep you out? People leaving flowers on your own father’s grave, and you have no idea who they are or why they’re doing it?”

Jude shrugged again. The way he did that had always annoyed Suzie. “Of course I’m curious”, he said. “But what can we do? Unless we kept a non-stop watch at the grave. And that’s impossible. Besides, maybe they wouldn’t come if they saw anybody there, or even in the cemetery.”

“Haven’t you got any theories?”

Jude didn’t answer for a while. He just stared into his coffee, vacantly. Then he looked up and said: “Not really. I mean, what could it be? Some kind of cult? Some kind of…secret society? Dad? I mean, he was always at home. No mysterious phone-calls or letters or assignations. He only read the newspapers for the funnies. Can you really imagine him having a secret life?”

That was the nub of it, thought Suzie, staring out the café window to the passers-by in the street outside. Her father might have been the original man in the street. She saw him now, mowing the lawn in a footbal jersey and pyjama bottoms, humming some seventies chart-topper. She had loved him, but she had never him say anything original or daring or impassioned. A man like that had no right to post-mortem mysteries.

The thought of those wreaths was beginning to torment her. She lay awake in bed, wondering whether a visitor was standing by her father’s grave at just that moment. Somehow, it felt as though an intruder had wandered into her own house. An intruder who could walk through walls, who could see her but could not be seen. An intruder who walked into her dreams.

* * *

It was perhaps a year after her café conversation with Jude. The wreaths kept appearing, one every couple of months or so. Her search for the symbol had continued. She had even searched the internet, despite her hatred of computers. But she found nothing.

She was visiting Jude, in the house that had passed to him when their father died, when the idea of searching its bookshelves occurred to her.

She didn’t know what she was expecting to find. Some quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore? The few books her father had owned were about football, dog-racing and World War Two. She ended up looking through her own old books. She despised nostalgia, so revisiting her childhood through its reading matter had the appeal of a forbidden pleasure.

She found it on the flyleaves of an Enid Blyton book. She had been an incorrigible scribbler. There was no doubt about it; it was her hand, and it had traced the five-flamed symbol over and over again. She found it scrawled on a dozen more of her books after that.

Someone was walking through her soul now, soundlessly, invisibly.

.........

A Fading Picture

“It has to exist”, said Erica, staring down into her coffee cup.

Dominic shook his head and laughed, still typing.

“You’ve been going on about this ever since I knew you”, he said. “When are you going to give up?”

Erica and Dominic were the editorial board—and the entire staff—of The Flickering Casement, the film magazine they had set up thirteen years before. The first issues had been photocopied and stapled together. Now it was entirely web-based. Neither of them had ever made a penny from it, but they did have a readership. They focused on the history of cinemas in Ireland— Seventy Years of the Lux, The Glory That was the Ganymede— and on features about forgotten or overlooked movies.

“Never”, said Erica. She smiled ruefully but there was no mirth in her voice, and her eyes glinted with determination. “Even you said you saw it, once.”

Dominic sighed and swiveled on his chair to face her. “That was fifteen years ago”, he said. “And I don’t even remember saying it.”

“That’s it!”, said Erica, pointing at him, almost accusingly. “I don’t remember saying it. What is it about this film? Why do people tell me they remember it, why do they give me detailed description of a scene, and then— when I ask them about it again- say I don’t remember telling you that?”

“Because they probably never did, that’s why”, said Dominic, with an exasperated grin. “And besides...make a name up and ask somebody if it rings a bell and, nine out of ten times, they’ll say it does. Everything rings a bell if you think about it long enough.” He fell quiet for a moment, looking at her curiously. “Why are you getting so keen on this all of a sudden, anyway? It’s been a recurring motif for years and years, why is it an obsession now?”

“Because I’m remembering more of it”, said Erica. For a moment, as she said it, Dominic thought she seemed drained. Then the fancy passed, and she was her usual spirited self. “Just the one scene, always.”

“A mad monk chasing a little girl through a crumbling mansion”, said Dominic, his voice almost singsong.

“That’s right”, said Erica. “And it’s so… freaking scary. I’m not surprised people remember it. I’m just surprised they ever forget it.”

“Maybe they forget it because it’s just too scary”, said Dominic, turning back to his computer screen.

He intended as a joke, something to round off the conversation, but when it drew no response from Erica— not even a grunt, or a polite laugh— he looked back over his shoulder at her.

Her features had frozen, and there was a faraway look in her eyes.

“Hey”, he said. “Hey. Are you OK?”

She came out of her trance, gave him a distant smile, and stood up.

“This is just going to torment me”, she said. “I have to follow it up. Now.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“There’s only one cinema ever mentioned, when people remember where they saw it”, said Erica. Suddenly, she seemed intensely excited. She was already reaching for her jacket. “The Aurora in Sandymount.”

“But that’s been closed twenty years”, said Dominic.

“I know”, said Erica. “I know. There’s a furniture shop there now. Maybe if I go inside...”

“It will jump start your memory?”, asked Dominic. “Worth a try, I guess. I still think you would have found it by now if it really existed. But what the hell? Let’s go.”

“You’re coming?”, asked Erica, raising a surprised eyebrow.

“I’ve been listening to you natter on about this for a decade and a half”, said Dominic, starting to close his computer down. “You bet I’m going.”

* * * *
“Is there anything I can help you with?”, asked a short, chubby girl with long sandy hair. The name-tag on her green sweater read Anna.

“Uh...we’re just looking”, said Dominic. “Actually...”

“Actually, we’re going”, said Erica. “We’re going now”.

Dominic glanced at her, and a jolt passed through him. Her face had gone tallow-pale, and a hunted light had come into her eyes. She clutched his arm.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice dropping.

Erica closed her eyes, as though she was trying not to get sick. “You were right”, she said, in a strained voice. “Everybody else tried to forget it. I wish...I wish...oh, it’s all coming back to me now! Except this time he’s...he’s...”

Her eyes widened, and she begun to scream hysterically.

To Live Overflowingly

In recent years, a particular ideal has seeped into my imagination-- gradually, but with ever more insistency.

I would call it "to live overflowingly."

I don't claim to embody this ideal, or even to approach this ideal. It's an ideal, something that captivates my imagination.

To put it simply (before I inevitably elaborate), it's to live with gusto, to cultivate a hearty appetite for life.

I love the line in Groundhog Day: "Well, sometimes I wish I had a thousand lifetimes." And the line in Tennyson's "Ulysses": "Life piled on life were all too little".

I think this ideal first took hold of me while reading about prolific authors. Prolific authors have always stirred my imagination. Authors such as Isaac Asimov or G.K. Chesterton or St. Augustine (five million words!) or Enid Blyton.

I love what Isaac Asimov said about himself: "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers."

(For about a year or two, around 2008/9, I did my utmost to imitate such literary workhorses. I wrote every spare moment I had-- mostly bad novels and short stories. Still, I hope all that writing did me some good. I remember that time fondly. I actually wrote a thousand words before breakfast once, quite deliberately. They were terrible words, but I still did it.)

Partly this ideal, like a lot of my ideals, is based on my father. I have so many memories of him filling page after page with his handwriting, half-listening to the radio, taking swigs from his cup of tea, a cigarette always in one hand, completely absorbed. Writing his magazine The Ballymun News, or letters to the newspapers, or letters to politicians, or a hundred other things. (I've never so much as taken a single puff on a cigarette in my life, and I rarely drink alcohol, but I like reading about chain-smoking, hard-drinking authors.)

I've always felt a certain disdain (undeserved, I'm sure) for the Proustian sensitivity which requires a cork-lined room, or some equivalent, in which to write. Real writers, it seems to me, write amidst the chaos of ordinary life. Perhaps this is the prejudice of someone who grew up in an overcrowded flat. I find silence a lot more difficult to endure than noise, and I always want to have something happening around me. (This, I think, has influenced many of my views-- for instance, my cultural nationalism and my love of holiday traditions, general elections, World Cups, etc. I love backrounds, atmospheres.)

The same gusto should apply to reading as applies to writing. Everybody loves (or should love) C.S. Lewis's famous words on this subject: "You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."

I wish fervently that I'd spent more time reading as a child, and as a teenager. I did read a fair amount, but how I wish I'd read more! There is so much to read. First of all, surely everybody should thoroughly know the Bible, even for purely cultural and secular reasons (so much more for religious reasons). I still wouldn't claim to have a thorough knowledge of the Bible. Then there are all the classics, not only of fiction but of non-fiction.

And poetry, of course. If you don't read poetry, as far as I'm concerned, you don't read. Try it, at least. Then try it again....

Without trying to take away anyone's intrinsic dignity as a human, I think we become more human the more cultured we are. We know more about the story in which we are characters.

But just sticking to the classics is tame, lame and a crying shame. The real joy of reading is to branch out on your own, to find neglected gems, or forgotten classics, or just that obscure volume you come across on a charity shop shelf. And, of course, to be willing to play the contrarian, and to proudly proclaim your love of some author or book everybody else sneers at. (I like the poetry of Rod McKuen. I really do, but I also enjoy like telling people that I do.)

And how can you just read books? There are old bound periodicals, big bulky film companions, self-published poetry pamphlets, comics, album liner notes...you get the picture...

And then there are films. How can you forget films?

One must not be the kind of person who watches films to pass the time, or to relax for a few hours, and who forgets about them as soon as the credits roll. This is monstrous, and reminds me of Oscar Wilde's words: "I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them."

One should watch every film anticipating a life-changing experience. Put down that phone. Stop talking. Behave as you would in a cinema. (It's a different matter if you have a film that you've seen a million times on in the background, as you do something else.)

And again-- you must watch bad films, too. If you only like good films, you don't like films. Bad films are essential, as are mediocre films.

There's television, of course. I'll let you off the hook with television-- it's probably better not to watch it at all. But if you do (and of course you do), once again, you have to take it seriously. As with films, it's not just the TV show itself that matters, but also its place in social and cultural history, what it tells us about the collective consciousness, and so forth.

To "live overflowingly" is to want to read all the books, see all the films, see all the shows. And, importantly, to talk about them, and to read about them, and to think about them.

Of course, you can't just read about life, or watch life. You have to live it, too-- partly so you can enjoy reading about it all the more.

To "live overflowingly" is to experience life with gusto, enthusiasm, and even a kind of rollicking hilarity. To be willing to make a fool of yourself-- something I've been very reluctant to do for most of my life, and that I regret almost more than anything.

It's to throw yourself into whatever work you have to do, even if that work is just scrubbing the floor. Go to it with a will, treat it almost like a party. Think how everything around you, everything you see and everything you use, is the product of somebody's work. Work is the service of God and also the service of country. But don't get sanctimonious about it, or forget to goof off every now and then. Try to find satisfaction in it.

To "live overflowingly" (I use the inverted commas to give the phrase more of a flourish) is to desire to experience everything life has to offer. Not in a demi-monde, bohemian, decadent kind of way, but with a Chestertonian, Bellocian, child-like eagerness.

And when I say "to experience everything life has to offer", I'm not talking about seeing Tibet or swimming with dolphins or anything like that. All that is good, if you can do it-- and if you don't become a bore about it, or a snob.

I'm thinking more of ordinary life-- simple things, humdrum things. Going on protest marches, or charity walks, or long walks just for the sake of it. Going to poetry readings. Playing card games. Telling ghost stories by candlelight. Playing pranks. Going to party conferences and book fairs and jumble sales. Sleeping in a haunted house or spending the night in a graveyard. Going blackberry-picking and carol-singing. Building snowmen and getting into snowball fights. Seeking out crowds, and lonely places. Hearing the chimes at midnight.

Or undertaking some record-breaking attempt for its own sake, like these guys.

Or seeking-out the least-visited train station in Britain, like this gentleman.

I spent all my youth as a homebody introvert, and I regret it bitterly.

As for making a fool of yourself, this is essential. Again, for the greatest part of my life, I was very concerned with preserving my own dignity. I've come to see this as anti-social, anti-life, anti-human. I've gradually come to realize how little I appreciated this trait in other people. I find it very hard to warm to such people-- especially people who won't give of themselves in conversation.

To "live overflowingly" is to be quick with a terrible joke, a raucous song, a pet theory, a spirited but good-humoured entry into a debate (is there any more misanthropic attitude than "live and let live?"), a madcap scheme, a flight into nostalgia, and so forth.

My ideal society is one where everybody is trying to (peacefully) convert everybody else to their religion, political beliefs, lifestyle, conspiracy theory, etc. etc. Not being insufferable about it, but joining in the great debate, the battle for the soul of society.

To "live overflowingly" should also involve a certain amount of hilarity.

I love this passage from Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis: "I fancy it was on a run with him in the sleet that I first discovered how bad weather is to be treated - as a rough joke, a romp."

But why stop at weather? Why not treat all life, where appropriate, as a "rough joke, a romp?" This seems a good way to encounter the inevitable inconveniences and indignities of life-- the broken-down car, the long queue, the manic day at work, the downpour, the bumpy hotel bed, the boring conversation, the eccentric who accosts who you in the supermarket, etc. etc. etc.

In this vein, I think some traditional Irish ballads strike the perfect note-- like The Rocky Road to Dublin, MacAlpine's Fusilier's, Finnegan's Wake, The Irish Rover, and any number of others.

A merry-go-round is a perfect visual representation of this whole view of life, especially those cartoon merry-go-rounds that show various famous or historical caricatures on the horses. For instance, the cover of One Spin on the Merry-Go-Round by Sean Duignan, a former Irish government press secretary.

To "live overflowingly" is to be the stereotypical embarrassing father, whether or not you are a father-- or even a man. Because embarrassing fathers make the world a better place.

My ultimate ambition, in this regard, is to become one of those mad people who carry around a placard with a Scripture quotation. I fantasize about carrying it the length and breadth of Ireland (or Dublin, at least), and bringing a moment of visual poetry into countless lives-- as well as evangelizing, of course.

I'm a long way from this, and I think it's most likely I'll never reach such giddy heights. 

I'm a long way from any of this, to be honest. But it's an ideal I feel compelled to share, to express.

Live overflowingly, friends!

Happy Ivy Day!

Regular readers (who, unaccountably, actually exist) will know that I have a fondness for neglected traditions.

Today used to be marked as Ivy Day, a day to remember the Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell.

You can read all about Parnell here, if you don't know about him already.

There's still a ceremony every year in Glasnevin cemetery. I've never made it myself.

Parnell has never been one of my heroes, particularly, but I do like Yeats's poem in tribute to him (the third verse is especially, which is perfection itself):

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
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.

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.

The famous Christmas dinner scene in Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce is also worth reading, but is too long to reproduce here. These days we don't argue about politics at the dinner table. We talk about house prices and Game of Thrones instead. I'm not sure it's an improvement.

The Harpenden Parish Magazine, from 2012

Today I continue my countdown to the 10-year anniversary of this blog, on the fifteenth of this month, by publishing my favourite of my blog posts in 2012. This one appealed to a few people. I no longer have this volume. When I moved out of the house where I had been living, I had to make very hard choices on what books to take, and I only took a very few volumes. They were mostly sentimental choices, old gifts.

I posted 218 times in 2012. Looking back, I prefer the more reflective posts to the "culture war" sort of posts.  

As soon as I saw her, I knew that I had to have her.

She was lying in a box on a bargain stall outside the UCD Campus Bookshop. The UCD Campus Bookshop is pretty much an exercise in daylight robbery, and even the books on their "bargain" stall can be fifteen euro or so. But the sweetheart who caught my eye was going for a mere three euro.

What was she? She was a bound volume of old Anglican parish magazines. To wit: The Harpenden Parish Magazine, running from August 1904 to February 1915. Really, what red-blooded book-lover could fail to have his pulses set racing by that?

It is possible, Dear Reader, that you don't know where Harpenden is. Wikipedia tells us: "Harpenden is a town in Hertfordshire, England. The town's population is just under 30,000." (It must have been significantly smaller at the beginning of the twentieth century, because the rector writing the Parish Notes in these magazines is very pleased to get an Easter service attendance of a hundred or so.)

 

There is no pleasure in the world like that of old books-- really old books, books with yellowed pages and a musty scent and the aroma of a vanished era hanging over them-- but old periodicals are better yet. An old book is a lone voice, coming to us across the ages; but an old periodical contains a whole medley of voices within its pages. It swarms with life. And in the case of the Harpenden Parish Magazine, it is the life of a single parish that survives within its crinkly pages. It is a round of births, marriages, and deaths, parish fundraisers, magic lantern shows, Lad's Brigade outings, lectures by foreign missionaries, all culminating in the cataclysm of the First World War, which throws a tinge of tragedy over the whole. These magazines have all the warm, poignant appeal of How Green was my Valley by Richard Llewellyn, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas or Thomas Gray's Lines Written in a Country Churchyard-- but with the added savour of reality.

As reading material, I find them utterly compelling, but also very sad. They make me sad because they remind me how today's Church of England has betrayed its forebears. One thing is obvious from reading these Harpenden Parish Magazines; these were serious Christians who attempted to live a life true to historical, orthodox Christianity. And they worked very hard at it. Again and again, the clerics of Harpenden Parish urge their parishioners to a serious reformation in Lent, or to more regular worship, or to support the parish charities or the adornment of their places of worship.

Who (aside from an ardent secularist) can see the wreck of English Christianity without feeling an icy grief? Think of how much effort went into the creation and preservation of a Christian England; not only the early missionaries and martyrs, but all the millions of nameless rectors and vicars, all the housewives and Sunday school teachers and unlettered peasants and fishermen and artisans, down all the generations, who strove to conform their lives to the Gospel, who squeezed out their meagre pennies to keep a roof above their local church, who kept the light of faith burning through plague and civil war and industrialisation and all the twists and turns of English history-- all to end in today's Church of England, which has flung orthodox Christianity to the wind and has all but passed into utter irrelevance.

As a Catholic, of course I believe that the greatest disaster to befall English Christianity was the Reformation. But the Church of England was a Church that once seriously claimed to retain the apostolic succession, to be a branch of the worldwide Catholic Church. How can we not be dismayed to see its degeneration? And because of my deep-seated anglophilia, I have a certain fondness for historical Anglicanism in itself; I cherish Orwell's image of "old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist". So reading these old issues of the Harpenden Parish Magazine fills me with a special wistfulness.

 

Perhaps I am the only person who now owns a copy of these magazines. (I did email the current Harpenden parish to see if they had any, but there was no reply; possibly they were all too busy attending gay rights marches or Transcendental Meditation classes.) It is a moving thought, that all that is left of this parish's life in those years might be between these salmon-coloured covers, sitting on my bookshelf. I regularly remember these long-deceased parishioners of Harpenden in my prayers.

So, what sort of thing might you come across in these magazines? Well, under the heading "Church Missionary Society", in the issue for April 1908, we find this:

"Dr. Tisdall gave a very interesting account of 'Mohammedanism', from his personal experience of Persia. He showed very clearly that though Mohammedans believed in only one god, their conception of that god is so debased that far from being a pure religion it is one of cruelty and sensuality, and one which degrades, particularly the position of women."

Now, it is a good thing that inter-faith relations have become more sensitive and diplomatic since that time. But I can't help feeling that the writer here takes Islam, and the differences between Islam and Christianity, more seriously than the multiculturalist of today.

In the issue for November 1904, we get this interesting description of a meeting for the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts:

"The speaker gave a most interesting account of his experiences during the late Boer War, he being one of only six resident English priests who were allowed to remain in the Transvaal after war was declared. They remained on condition that they signed an oath of neutrality, and refrained from using in Church the prayers for Queen Victoria and the Royal Family. In order to see that the condition was complied with, two Boer soldiers stood inside the church with loaded rifles. Mr. Vyvyan signed the oath, but told them he should break it when the English arrived; this the Boers took no exception to, telling him that the English would never come there. With regard to the other condition, a pause was made in the service when the forbidden prayers were reached, while the congregation could use them in silence....

"Another incident was the attempt on the part of some of the enemy, who were escaping with Kruger, to take the Missionary's kitchen stove. On their arrival they were told to call in the morning, meanwhile the native Kaffir servant worked hard all night keeping up a big fire, with which he made the stove so hot that when the Boers came for it they could not possibly move it. This state of affairs was kept up by the servant's industry for a whole week, till they gave it up as a bad job. This story was related as an example of what the native Christians will do for the English, who brought them Christianity, and to whom they are strongly attached."

The Temperance movement was influential at this time, and there are many references to Temperance events in the parish. In the issue for December 1905 we are told:

"On Wednesday we had the advantage of two very forcible addresses by the Rev. F. Swainson, in which he likened sin in general and intemperance in particular to the loathsome and almost incurable disease of leprosy. As the words of a man who had himself experienced fiery temptation, and is now working amongst a set of people to whom total abstinence is entirely advisable, his uncompromising utterances were duly appreciated."

A long way from 'Thought for the Day'!

Imperialism had not yet become a dirty word, and the people of Harpenden unabashedly celebrate Empire Day:

"At the County Council Schools, Colonel Durnford, the Chairman of the Managers, gave the young people an address on "The growth of Empire", and later, when all were assembled in the playground, an address on "The Flag" was given by the same gentleman. Patriotic songs were heartily sung, and the children afterwards dispersed to spend the rest of their holiday away from school." (July 1906.)

There is a sterling defence of denominational education in the September 1906 issue, which is very interesting (and perhaps, to us today, surprising) in its choice of arguments:

"The aim, therefore, of Churchmen should be to make clear their ideal of Christian Education. Just as in secular matters, the aim of schooling was to teach a child to think clearly and broadly, to express itself fully and clearly, and to train its character as a citizen, so the aim of religious education was to make the child think fearlessly and broadly on religious subjects, to teach it a dignified and adequate expression (in prayer and worship) of its religious life, and to train it to be a loyal member of Christ's kingdom on earth. Education of thought was secured not merely by learning facts: the child is encouraged to ask questions, to learn to get to the bottom of things, and in the variety of lessons the mind is expanded to wider interest. In the same way, in religious things the child learns to meet intellectual difficulties in after life. A full teaching of an unmutilated creed, and the laying before the child of a broad survey of Christian faith as mapped out in the Church year was not possible with undenominational education. Education in religious expression was taught by familiarizing with the Services of the Church and storing the memory with hymns and Psalms which would, in after years, become hallowed by association."

How interesting that denominational education is here defended as leading towards freedom and indpendence of mind, rather than away from it! But how insightful, too!

I could quote and quote and quote; and, indeed, I have every intention of blogging more selections from these magazines. But I think it is inevitable that I should finish on a grimmer note; I think that anybody, turning the pages of this magazine, would turn to the War numbers with a morbid compulsion, curious to see how the shadow of World War fell upon the quiet life of Harpenden.

It is sobering indeed to read how the very real virtues of these people-- their sense of duty, patriotism and nobility-- impelled them, along with their countrymen, to rush to the support of the flag in this most questionable of causes. In the February 1915 issue, Reverend Kean M. Pitt writes:

"I am glad that the list of those who have joined the Army from Harpenden still swells. Though at present the crucial question "Why did you not join?" may possibly be evaded or ignored, it must surely be realised that it is no light matter thus to be interrogated; nor is it a question that will die out with the coming of peace. As long as the young man lives the question will present itself directly and indirectly, it will ever be sounding in the inner consciousness of the man, "Why did you not join?" Good for that man, if he is of suitable age, if he is able to give to himself and his countrymen a real honest and valid reason. If not, I do not envy the life of the man who without real tangible reason, evaded the present call upon his manhood".

Oh Lord, may the good Christian people of Harpenden, every one of the names mentioned in the pages of these magazines, find their way to the eternal banquet!