The Tea Lady: A Self-Analysis

In May 2022, I wrote a poem entitled "The Tea Lady". I wrote it very slowly, on my morning tea-breaks, taking as much care as I reasonably could over every single line. I decided that, if I sat all through any given tea-break and never wrote a word, that was time well-spent.

This was a return to the compositional methods of my late teens, when I started writing poetry. I tried to make every single line as close to my ideal as possible. Later on, I started writing more quickly.

In the case of "The Tea Lady", I thought that this new-old approach paid off. It took several weeks, I seem to remember, but eventually the poem came together. As I wrote, I was sending drafts to a poet friend, who gave me a lot of good criticism, and was also enthusiastic about it.

Eventually, I decided to post it on Facebook, and...

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Deafening silence. I think a couple of people "liked" it, but that was about all. I even posted it a second time a good while later, but the result was the same.

Having my poetry routinely ignored on Facebook is one of several reasons I deactivated my account at the end of last year, and have no plans to reactivate it. I found it devastating, to be honest. Letting it be known how much my poetry meant to me made no difference. Nada. Rien. Tada. Zilch.

But what was I hoping for, you ask? Flattery and buttering up? Well, that's always nice, but any kind of engagement would have been very welcome. Even strident criticism. I've never been one of those people who write entirely for its own sake.

Yes, I know any particular person might be scrolling down their Facebook feed in an odd moment and have neither time nor inclination to read a poem. But when there is almost never any reaction, from anybody-- well, I wasn't happy about it.

My Facebook friends can claim to have been vindicated by the poem's reception elsewhere. I sent it to the few publications that accept verse submissions, including First Things. They all passed on it (if they replied at all). So maybe it was just bad.

The thing is, though, I don't think it was bad. I think it was at least accomplished. Writing traditional, formal poetry isn't easy. Just to rhyme, scan, and avoid bathos takes some effort.

It might have been the length that put people off, even though I don't think it's a long poem. It's fifty-five lines long, divided into eleven stanzas. Hardly an epic. But I'm pretty sure that people see a poem longer than a page and think: "I won't bother."

The sorts of poems I was emulating with "The Tea Lady" were poems such as "Church Going" and "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" by Philip Larkin, as well as "A Prayer for my Daughter" and "Among School Children" by W.B. Yeats. These are reflective poems that need room to "breathe". Of course, these are also classic poems, and mine isn't even comparable in terms of its quality. But this is the sort of poem I was going to write. (I won't throw in any more self-deprecating comments like that, as I think they quickly becom tiresome. You can take them as read.)

As my blog title declares, I'm going to analyse my own poem, but I'm going to analyse it before I post the text itself. For two reasons:

1) A well-founded fear that people just stop reading when they see poetry. So, if I leave the poem to the end, they'll at least have read the analysis.

2) My own experience, fairly frequent, of growing interested in something after I've read an analysis of it. I've had this experience with books, films, and music. So who knows? Someone might want to read the poem after reading my analysis.

In any case, sometimes literary criticism or analysis can be enjoyable even apart from the text it's analysing. I've also had that experience myself.

"The Tea Lady" is set in the lobby of a conference centre. This is partly a case of "author appeal". I love conference halls, conference centres, convention centres, conventions, trade fairs, expos, or anything of that nature. I love the atmosphere, the sense of event, the sense of a horizon. I also love the word "lobby".

The main character in the poem is the titular tea lady and the whole poem is about her thoughts and feelings. I like the term "tea lady", but she's not really a tea lady in the traditional sense of someone who serves tea in a school or office. She's a member of the conference centre's catering staff, and she's helping to put out the tea and coffee during a break in a political party's conference. (I don't explicitly say it's a party conference, but I think it's fairly clear.)

The main theme of the poem is belonging, the sense of a "we". I'm endlessly fascinated by this.

Who are "we"? That's a permanently vexed question, asked in all sorts of different contexts. Who are the people? Who are the Irish? Who are the left? Who are the right? Who is Christian? Who is liberal? And so on.

I've just finished reading an excellent history of East Germany called Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer. This eternal question "Who are we?" presented itself to East Germans (and West Germans) in a particularly powerful way after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Were "we" East Germans? Were "we" socialists? The German people overwhelmingly decided that they were one people, despite forty years of conflict between East and West. (It seems to be the case that sentimental ties, in the end, often turn out to be more powerful than any practical considerations.)

Another big theme of the poem is the difference between male and female attitudes to this idea of "we". Basically, my thesis is that men tend to have a wider interpretation of "we", while women have a narrower one. Men are more public, and women are more private. This is obviously a generalization, and doesn't apply in every case. I don't even insist that it's true, and I don't think it even has to be true for the poem to work. It's an idea to play with.

If you don't think this public-private dichotomy is really a male-female one, you can just accept it on its own terms. I think almost everybody feels this tension within themselves, to some extent. Patrick Pearse expressed it very powerfully: "Two things have constantly pulled at cross-purposes in me: one, a deep homing instinct, a desire beyond words to be at home always, with the same beloved faces, the same familiar shapes and sounds about me; the other, an impulse to seek hard things to do, to go on far quests and fight for lost causes."

In the poem, the feminine attitude is represented by my tea lady, while the masculine attitude is represented by her father, of whom she finds herself thinking while the attendees of the conference come out to have a tea-break.

The tea lady's father is based on my own father. Although he was a devoted family man, he was always very much focused on public affairs. In later life, he used to lament that he had paid so much attention to the public good, rather than his own good. I don't think he really regretted this, though. I think it was quite rhetorical. I think he would have made the same decisions if he could do it all again.

The tea lady in my poem thinks the attendees at the political conference (mostly men) are rather ridiculous, with all their high-flown rhetoric and social ideas. And they are! How much of male hunger for a crusade, a cause, is down to simple ego and the quest for excitement? Quite a lot of it, I'm guessing. ("Fierce in the fray like Arthur's knights" is supposed to be sardonic; I'm not sure this is clear, which is a weakness.)

But my tea lady won't let herself despise the attendees, because they remind her of her father, and her father's political idealism. She knows this was essential to his character.

The dichotomy between private and public is one of the eternal dichotimies that gives life much of its drama and flavour. Attempts to eliminate it (such as totalitarianism and anarchism) are not very convincing-- or even appealing, in my view.

My tea lady is inclined to favour private life entirely, but she knows in her heart that this isn't possible. Political, social, and other allegiances are natural to human beings; to seek to escape them is to reduce our humanity. The heart of the poem are the lines:

Nation and party and politics--
They all began in a baby's cry.

A baby is, of course, completely devoid of politics, partisanship, and ethnic allegiance. But all those things are latent within it, just as language and abstract thought are latent within it. There's nothing artificial about them.

I chose the coffee break of a political conference as my setting because I wanted to compare the heady atmosphere of ideas with the steam of tea and coffee in the air.

I aimed for a Yeatsian, Larkinesque clicher at the end, the sort of lines that might get quoted in books. I was quite pleased with it:

The tug-of-war of fidelity,
The ancient conundrum “Who are we?”,
The timeless task of togetherness.

Well, that's my analysis. I could, of course, go on and on-- but I won't.

Here is the poem, for anyone who still wants to read it. It seems inevitable there will be no comments.

The Tea Lady

The catering staff put out the tea
In the lobby outside the conference hall.
A voice from within, resoundingly,
Said something about diversity
And how inclusion would help us all.

There were cheers, and cheers, and then more cheers,
And the crowd streamed out in twos and threes.
One lady deep in her middle years
Poured tea and coffee and shut her ears
To the talk of polls and majorities.

She was thinking of somewhere long ago
And far away, on a winter’s night.
Her father walking her through the snow
His hand in her’s, and a secret glow
That filled her heart, as their hands squeezed tight.

She was thinking of how, down forty years,
That grip seemed stronger than time or space.
That voice, long silent, rang in her ears
Much louder than party conference cheers
Much louder than anything in this place.

But Da was a devil for politics.
He would have been right at home here now;
Right in the thick of it, getting his fix,
Calling out chancers and dirty tricks
Never a neutral any which how.

All this grand strategy, over tea–
She couldn’t despise it, for his sake.
Because the sacred syllable “we”
Meant more in his philosophy
Than the little world love makes.

“We” to him was the working class,
And Ireland, and people he’d never met,
“We” to him was as common as grass.
To her it was the Waterford glass
Kept in the china cabinet.

She looked around at the mostly men
All loudly setting the world to rights.
Doing today what Da did then
World without end, amen, amen,
Fierce in the fray like Arthur’s knights.

She had to bless them, even though
None of their slogans touched her heart.
But that night’s walk in the secret snow
And all of this braggadocio
Somehow couldn’t exist apart.

Nation and party and politics–
They all began in a baby’s cry.
Love meant taking the whole damn mix
The Christmas crib and the crucifix,
The marching song and the lullaby.

Here, with the steam from coffee and tea,
Hovered all history, more or less:
The tug-of-war of fidelity,
The ancient conundrum “Who are we?”,
The timeless task of togetherness.

Exceptionally Exciting

As I've mentioned before, I browse the website TV Tropes a lot. A lotta lot. It might be my favourite way of relaxing, decompressing, kicking back, and so forth. And it has been for at least a decade.

Today, I came across this sentence on TV Tropes: "A San Francisco youth made national news when saw the movie Rocky eighty-one times (and possibly more) during its first-run release in 1976 and 1977. After the twenty-seventh viewing, the theatre started letting him in for free."

I don't know why, but this sort of thing makes the Christmas tree of my imagination light up, flash, and play holiday tunes.

What sort of thing do I mean? Well, anything to do with an exception, an irregular situation, a freebie, an informal arrangement, or an anomaly.

For instance: I once read that the Abbey National Building Society, having a branch very close to the (only ever fictional) address of 221B Baker Street, employed a full-time secretary to answer Sherlock Holmes's mail. And this is true!

For instance: one year in secondary school, when I was about sixteen, a quirk of the timetable meant that we had an English class sandwiched between two physical education classes. So the teacher let us stay in our gym clothes for that class.

For instance: I once went to a takeaway and bought some garlic sauce. Just that. The guy behind the counter threw in a good amount of chips, free of charge and unasked.

For instance: on Liechtenstein's national day, all the citizens are invited to a party in the Prince's castle.

For instance: once, when I was a kid, my school organised a treasure hunt. I remember me and my brothers going into the vegetable shop in the shopping centre to ask about a particular clue. The shopkeeper gave us a mysterious, knowing look, reached under the counter, and handed us an envelope. This completely floored me.

For instance: in the film Wayne's World 2, the protagonist says: "Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive. If you lived in the suburbs, you were issued with it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

Please note, the appeal I'm talking about doesn't just apply to freebies or special privileges. It can go the opposite way, too. It pleases me when someone has a special power or obligation.

I've just discovered, from a quick internet search, that barmen don't really have the right to confiscate someone's car keys. But apparently, businesses did once have the right to cut up your declined credit card. Both ideas appeal to me.

When I was a kid, and I went a long time between haircuts (as I always did), I'd regularly get this taunt from other kids: "The barber has a warrant for your arrest." The idea always charmed me.

In 2003, Coke was banned from being sold in UCD Student's Union shops because of controversies about their operations in Colombia. That was lifted more recently, but now it's banned because the sugar content is too high. It's a bummer that you can't get a Coke in UCD when you want one, but I enjoy the anomaly.

Speaking of Coke, for many years it was forbidden to use the name Pepsi in their corporate headquarters in Atlanta. You had to say "the imitator" instead. (For real. Look it up, if you don't believe me.)

In New Jersey, you can't operate petrol pump yourself-- you have to get a petrol station attendant to do it.

And then there are the anomalies of convention. If children were to knock on your door and demand sweets on 364 days of the year, you'd send them packing. But on Halloween night, it's almost mandatory to indulge them. (Or, as the carol puts it about another season, "Once in a year it is not thought amiss to visit our neighbours and sing out like this...")

Then there are some interesting rules and arrangements in the history of cinema, often done as publicity stunts. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock's rule that nobody would be admitted into Psycho after the film had begun. (Back then, films played on a loop.)

Then there are William Castle's various gimmicks, such as "fright insurance" for the audience.

In the 1967 film Wait Until Dark, the gimmick was that cinemas turned off all their lights (except the EXIT signs) in the final scene, which is set in complete darkness.

Anyway, you either get what I mean now, or you don't. Does anyone share this fascination, or this pleasure? I'd be interested to know that.

Obviously, this goes a long way towards explaining this blog post!

Do you think this is a stupid blog post? It might be, but I bet there's none other like it out there...

Some Thoughts on the End of History

I'm currently reading The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It's one of those books that are frequently cited but (I imagine) much less frequently read. Certainly I've known about it for decades, and I've often name-dropped it. But I'd never actually picked it up and looked inside, until now.

The book became a standard reference because it captured a particular mood in a particular moment; that is, the end of the Cold War and the feeling that this was it, that history had more or less reached its natural stopping point. Of course, life would go on, and things would still happen, but the defeat of the Soviet Union and the triumph of liberal democracy was the end of serious competition between ideologies. Capitalism and liberal democracy would eventually triumph all over the world, even if it took a long time.

As with most famous books that come to stand for a particular argument, The End of History has been rather unfairly treated. It's not at all a triumphalist book. Fukuyama is very well aware of the drawbacks of liberal democracy and modern capitalism. Nor is it as strident or definitive as it's been portrayed. The author is quite tentative in his predictions. At least, that's my impression so far.

But I can understand why Fukuyama became a name to bandy about. Although I can just about remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was very conscious of "an "end of history" atmosphere when I was growing up. I didn't particularly think of it in terms of the end of the Cold War, but it was still an atmosphere I absorbed through my pores. It was best conveyed by a top ten hit in 1990 that I can remember very vividly, and whose lyrics seemed entirely accurate to me. The song was "Nothing Ever Happens" by Del Amitri, and its lyrics began thus:

Post office clerks put up signs saying "Position Closed"
And secretaries turn off typewriters and put on their coats
And janitors padlock the gates for security guards to patrol
And bachelors phone up their friends for a drink while the married ones turn on a chat show
And they'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow

"Gentlemen time please, you know we can't serve anymore".
Now the traffic lights change to stop, when there's nothing to go.
And by five o'clock everything's dead and every third car is a cab
And ignorant people sleep in their beds like the doped white mice in the college lab.

This is exactly what the eighties in Ireland felt like to me. (Yes, the song was released in 1990-- in between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union-- but I remembered it as an eighties song.) 

But what, in my young mind, was I comparing modern banality against? A few different things, I think. 

The Lord of the Rings was one of them. Tolkien captivated me with a vision of high romance, a pre-industrial idyll. I read the book at a very young age, and although I didn't quite understand everything that was happening in it, I certainly absorbed the atmosphere, the aesthetic.

Probably more importantly, I contrasted modern banality against the legacy of Irish cultural nationalism, which I imbibed through my family, my Irish language school, and various other sources. This offered me a whole different set of atmospheres and associations: the timeless world of mythology, thatched-roof cottages and rocky Western islands, country fairs and wandering bards and rollicking ceilidhs, and all that sort of thing. Very far from the society conjured by Del Amitri.

And this sense of banality wasn't confined to the eighties. All through my childhood, teens, and adulthood I was dogged by this sense of aftermath, or perhaps of anti-climax. In one poem, I complained that: "Time is an air-conditioned office now, and history an infinite replay." (The sense that cultural history has come to a standstill is now very common. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and plenty of other sources that you can discover with a quick internet search.)

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fukuyama's End of History wasn't just the victory of liberal democracy (which doesn't seem like a bad thing in itself). It was, rather, the victory of worldwide consumerism. And what's worse, consumerism itself seems to have stagnated at a certain point, regurgitating the styles and pop culture of the past.

Interestingly, Fukuyama doesn't think that consumerism (or a desire for a Western standard of living) is what drives the expansion of liberal democracy. A robust market economy, he argues, is perfectly compatible with authoritarian societies-- and this seems clear from the recent history of China.

No, Fukuyama argues that the rise of democracy relies on another motive, one which he draws from ancient Greek philosophy and calls "Thymos".

"Thymos" is often translated "spiritedness", and it encompasses various different emotions we can name in English: a sense of one's own dignity, or the dignity of one's own community; honour; a sense of outrage at injustices against oneself, one's community, or even other people; and so on. Thymos leads people to take risks and make sacrifices which would make no sense if we were entirely ruled by rational self-interest. "It is only thymotic man...who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers", says Fukuyama.

Fukuyama relates thymos to the desire for recognition-- the desire for recognition of oneself as a human being with rights and dignity, but also the desire for one's community to be recognized and respected.

And here I'll bring in a film that I watched recently-- I just finished watching it last night, actually.

The film is Hunger (2008). It's a dramatization of the 1981 hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, a strike that led to the death of ten hunger strikers. As a caption at the end of the film informs us, there were considerably more prison officers murdered by the IRA in the same time period. (I should mention here that I have absolutely no sympathy for the IRA terrorist campaign. In fact, I regard it with utter revulsion. But Hunger strives to concentrate on the human element of the hunger strikes, and to avoid taking sides.)

Hunger is a gruelling film to watch. Not only are we shown the main character's physical deterioration as he starves himself to death, but the movie lingers on the grim details of the prisoners' lives: excrement-smeared walls (as they refused to "slop out"), cavity searches, beatings, and other horrific spectacles. (Incidentally, I can't imagine Patrick Pearse or Eamon De Valera smearing excrement on their cell walls under any kind of provocation.)

The 1981 hunger strikes were a classic case of what Fukuyama calls thymos, and indeed a classic case of the struggle for recognition. The hunger strikers were seeking recognition as political prisoners, while the British insisted on treating them as ordinary criminals. This struggled centred on apparently trivial matters such as the right to wear civilian clothes (rather than prison clothes) and the right not to do prison work.

And this, to me, illustrates very well the futility and pointlessness of the Northern Irish "Troubles", and indeed the futility and pointlessness of identity politics in the West today.

At their heart, the Northern Irish Troubles seemed like a conflict between two tribes who were barely distinguishable, and who were becoming more like each other all the time. They looked the same, spoke the same, and (for the most part) had the same way of life.

Hunger tends to emphasize this sameness, especially since it mostly minimizes dialogue and concentrates on the nitty-gritty of bodies, spaces, and procedures. 

Catholicism is shown as a negligible factor in the life of the prisoners. One scene shows the celebration of Mass in the prison, but only one prisoner pays any attention to the priest-- the others are loudly chatting and fraternizing. 

The dramatic centre of the entire film is an extended debate between the protagonist and a visiting priest on the ethics of the hunger strike. But the debate is conducted in entirely secular terms, and any reference to religion are more or less ironic. As for the Irish language, we hear one prisoner try to speak to another in Gaelic, but his cell-mate has no idea what he's talking about.

All of this very much fits with my own impression of Sinn Féin supporters and Northern Irish republicans, growing up. For all they invoked the 1916 Rising, they were a million miles from the Irish nationalism of Pearse and De Valera. They seemed determinedly anti-romantic and hard-headed. They wore jeans, cursed, told smutty jokes, immersed themselves in pop culture, and basically lived like any other member of Western consumer society. If they spoke some Gaelic or sang Irish folk ballads, it was only as a tribal badge. Cultural revival wasn't even an aspiration; "Brits Out" was the aspiration-- apparently an end in itself.

The same applied to Catholicism-- that, too, was a tribal badge, and almost certainly didn't extend to going to Mass or listening to the Church about divorce, abortion, or artificial contraception.

And that logic seems to have worked itself out fully today. Sinn Féin now support the European Union and globalization, are gung-ho for secularization, and have leaders who hardly even pretend to speak Irish anymore. 

These days, Northern Ireland has signage in Gaelic and Ulster Scots-- the product of long and bitter political battles-- while everybody carries on speaking in English. (Arlene Foster once claimed that more people speak Polish than Irish in Northern Ireland. I'm sure she was right. It's true of the Republic, as well.)

I think this is typical of identity politics everywhere. We have ever more demands for recognition from "communities" of every sort, while the great blender of consumer culture keeps crushing us all into one homogenous mush.

This is why I think nationalists (and groups of every sort) should stop fretting about recognition and representation, and start fretting about reality. Does it really matter if some Hollywood romantic comedy indulges in Paddywhackery or "stage Irishness"? Does it really matter if somebody calls Bono British? Does it, ultimately, really matter whether there is a United Ireland, if there's no real difference between Ireland and the rest of the world anyway?

I don't care about a nationalism focused on national prestige, or the respect of other people, or even independence as an end in itself. To me, nationalism is mostly about the preservation of distinctiveness. Why? Because it makes the world richer and more interesting. One's nation doesn't have to be any better than any other nation, from this point of view. In fact, it could be the crummiest nation in the world and it would still be worth preserving.

If thymos has a role in Ireland today, perhaps we should use it to resist a much more insidious foe than the Black and Tans or the B-Specials: consumer culture, globalization, and the loss of anything that made Ireland (or anywhere else) worth fighting for in the first place.

(I also believe that nationalism and liberal democracy are perfectly compatible, and I'm in favour of both. Here is an excellent critique of Fukuyama's rather sniffy attitude towards any nationalism other than the anoydne civic nationalism that progressives love to imagine but that barely seems to exist in the real world.)

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.

A Hoary Christmas-Tide Tradition

Traditions! I never shut up about them, do I?

Indeed, I briefly had a blog called Traditions Traditions Traditions!, which lasted only four posts, but which I sometimes think of reviving.

Well, this blog has its own tradition of posting "The Burning Babe" by Robert Southwell at Christmas. I've just checked and I've done this every year since 2015!

I did a quick search for critical literature on the poem, and discovered that it's inspired a whole book, written by Anne Sweeney and published in 2006. It's titled Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia: Redrawing the English Landscape 1586-1595.

Here's how it begins:

‘The Burning Babe’ is probably the only poem most readers will know of Robert Southwell’s. I recall reading it as a child; it seemed pleasantly atmospheric to a childish imagination, the holy Babe appearing like a bright bauble against the dark of a snowy English Christmas evening. It is homely, yet cryptic in the Elizabethan style, and blessedly short, a silly sentimental thing that manages, apparently on these merits, to make its way into most anthologies of the English poetic canon. It came as something of a shock to me as an undergraduate to learn that Ben Jonson, with his reputation as a hard man of letters, had singled out this bagatelle for admiration – indeed, he wished he himself had written it; there can be no greater possible encomium from a great ego. What did he admire in it? There have been some fine commentaries on Robert Southwell’s life and work, but none of them has explained to my satisfaction why a man like Jonson would have admired this poem so. This book is an attempt to answer that question.

A "bagatelle", really? Presumably Sweeney is provocative in her choice of words, and she doubtless revised her estimation of "The Burning Babe" if she wrote an entire book on the subject. (I guess I'll find out, since I've put the book next on my reading list.)

Anyway, decide for yourself. Here it is:

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

And here is a fine spoken rendition of the poem, by a chap who modestly refrains from giving his name.

My Fifty Favourite Poems of All Time

I spent a sleepless hour or two after midnight, this weekend, coming up with this list. 

Why fifty? Well, it seems a manageable sort of number.

Despite the title of the post, I can't really claim this is my definitive fifty favourite poems. In another mood, at another time, it might have looked somewhat different. But these are all poems which have a huge personal significance to me, lines from which regularly come unbidden into my memory, and (most importantly) which move me immensely. Most of them are poems that I've loved for decades now. I can't even imagine my life without some of them.

I tried to put them in vague order of preference, but for the most part, this is very fuzzy. It's really the top ten or so where the order matters the most. I can pretty confidently assert that "Ulysses" by Tennyson is my single favourite poem of all time, and that "To Helen" by Edgar Allen Poe comes second. I'm not particularly confident of the placing after that-- is "The Burning of the Leaves" really more important to me than "Locksley Hall?"-- but I'm fairly sure that there's nothing in the top twenty that doesn't deserve to be there.

Beyond that, the placing of a poem is less important than its presence on the list.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, the first editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse, famously wrote that "the best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so". Well, this list makes no claim about what's best (these are my personal favourites, nothing more) but I share his general sentiment. Pretty much all of the poems here are standards of poetry anthologies, although many of the Irish choices would only be encountered in Irish poetry anthologies. Popular taste, over time, is a sure sign of greatness in poetry-- although my guess is that this requires a poetry-reading public, which today (for the first time ever?) doesn't exist. Hopefully this is just a hiatus.

Having said that, I've omitted a few of the most popular poems of all time. (You can compare my selection with the BBC's "favourite poems" poll of 1995.) There's no "Daffodils", no "Road Not Taken", no "Elegy in a Country Churchyard". It's not because I don't love those poems. I do, especially the first. I just couldn't put them above other poems on my list. Similarly, there's no John Betjeman on my list, even though I'm a huge admirer of Betjeman. There's just no stand-out poems among his works that appeal to me so much they would get in the top fifty.

On looking at this list, somebody said to me: "You like Yeats, don't you?". Yes, I like Yeats. In fact, I could easily have filled half of the places on this list with Yeats poems.

I think "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" by Philip Larkin might be the template for half the poems I've written. But don't hold that against it!

"Fanfare for the Makers" by Louis MacNeice is a poem (or excerpt from a poem) that had a massive influence on my as a teen, and indeed ever afterwards. But I don't like the last line. Life can't be confirmed by suicide. Suicide only confirms despair.

Anyway, I hope the list affords you some diversion, and perhaps introduces you to some new favourites of your own.

Ulysses by Tennyson

To Helen by Edgar Allen Poe

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats

“Our revels now are ended” by William Shakespeare

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon (only the first part)

Locksley Hall by Tennyson

Snow by Louis MacNeice

Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album by Philip Larkin

Easter 1916 by W.B.Yeats

Morte d’Arthur by Tennyson

“Fanfare for the Makers”, an excerpt from Canto VII of Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice

The Fisherman by W.B. Yeats

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" by William Shakespeare

Advent by Patrick Kavanagh

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

Death of an Irishwoman by Michael Hartnett

The Fool by Patrick Pearse

Psalm 23 of the King James Bible

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron

The Kraken by Lord Alfred Tennyson

MCMXIV by Philip Larkin

A Prayer for my Daughter by W.B. Yeats

And Then No More by James Clarence Mangan

A Birthday by Christina Rossetti

Aedh Sings of the Rose in His Heart by W.B. Yeats

If-- by Rudyard Kipling

Loveliest of Trees by A.E. Housman

Sad Steps by Philip Larkin

Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats

The Wayfarer by Patrick Pearse

Church Going by Philip Larkin

“Sirs, I am but a nameless man...” from The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

Ozymandias by Percy Shelley

When I Was One and Twenty by A.E. Housman

The Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats

The Toys by Coventry Patmore

Piano by D.H. Lawrence

Plurality by Louis MaNeice

To a Friend by Matthew Arnold

Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher by Walter Savage Landor

To Edmund Clerihew Bentley by G.K. Chesterton

The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

The Burning Babe by Robert Southwell

The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland by W.B. Yeats

To Althea from Prison by Richard Lovelace

Mine Own John Poinz by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Requiem by Robert Louis Stevenson

Unto Everything There is a Season from the Book of Eccleasiastes

The Poetry of Words and Phrases

The miracle of language never ceases to beguile me. With my tongue, lips and vocal chords, I can create vibrations in the air which, when they reach your ear, are decoded into ideas and pictures and emotions. This process, already magical and wondrous, can be captured by words on a page-- so that words can travel over continents and through the ages. Every now and again, the whole phenomenon strikes me with fresh wonder.

I've written a lot about poetry on this blog. People have given various definitions of poetry, but one of the more memorable ones is "the best words in the best order". In a way, though, I think words are a sort of poetry even before they're put into any order. You might even say that every word is a poem in itself, although "detergent" and "update" aren't particularly lyrical. (Ironically, the word "poetry" isn't inherently poetic, in my view.)

On the other hand, many words are inherently poetical. Others are  more subjectively appealing.

What sort of words are inherently appealing? Well, the example that comes to my mind most readily are the names of gemstones: sapphire, amethyst, aquamarine, chalcedony, emerald, obsidian, and so forth. Now, you might say these words are appealing because of their association with the gemstones they describe, but I think that's only part of it. And quite often I have no image or knowledge of a particular gemstone and I still find the word poetic.

Wilde's masterpiece of decadent poetry "The Sphinx" draws lavishly on these poetic names:

On pearl and porphyry pedestalled he was too bright to look upon:
For on his ivory breast there shone the wondrous ocean-emerald.

(There's a lot more where that comes from.)

This particular strain of poetry is also to be found in the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation's description of the walls of the New Jerusalem: "The first foundation was jasper. The second was sapphire. The third was chalcedony. The fourth was emerald. The fifth was sardonyx. The sixth was sardius. The seventh was chrysolite. The eighth was beryl. The ninth was topaz. The tenth was chrysoprasus. The eleventh was jacinth. The twelfth was amethyst."

I'm guessing that many of these terms come from Latin and Greek, which perhaps give them that flavour of the exotic, antique and classical from which much of the poetry derives.

Colours and hues often have very poetic names, as well: indigo, heliotrope, burgundy, onyx, cerulean, turquoise, aquamarine, magenta.

Funnily enough, I would make the argument that many diseases have perversely appealing names: gonorrhea, chlamydia, rubella, melanoma, meningitis, and so forth. (You may not agree on that, though).

Another class of words that seem to be inherently poetic, although I think this certainly has a lot to do with meaning as with sound, involve faintness or obscurity: silhouette, whisper, echo, shadow, ghostly, phantasmagoric, rumour, shimmer, flicker, and so forth.

I could go on with lists of word-groups that seem to be generally appealing, but I'll move on to words and phrases that appeal especially to me.

One of my very favourite words is "lobby", and another is "foyer". Of course, "foyer" has a bit of a French glamour to it, but I think the main reason I love both these words is because they describe liminal spaces. I also love (to varying degrees) corridor, plaza, mezzanine, mall, street, alleyway, and avenue. I feel I should include "attic" in this list, even though it's not a liminal space in the same sense as the others; it's not a "between" place like the others. But it's liminal in another way, although it's hard to put my finger on its liminality. (This article addresses this very subject, although it's a bit too woke for my taste.)

Why do I like terms for liminal spaces so much? It's hard to say. There's something very exciting about a liminal space, especially one that is a mixture of "inside" and "outside". All life, all drama is lived in the space between me and you, us and them. Public or semi-public places seem ripe for this drama.

A final place-word which appeals to me enormously, even though it's not really liminal, except insofar as every place could be liminal in some way: canteen (as in, a cafeteria). I love the word canteen. It's so cheerful, down-to-earth, unpretentious, and redolent of a collective life of some kind. I like restaurants which are more like canteens, such as the restaurant in IKEA.

Here's a round-up of some other words I especially love: kaleidoscope, sepia, merry-go-round, horizon, gossamer, alabaster, brandy. I could add many, many more, and I probably will.

Poetry has already begun, in the more conventional sense, when we put words together. So perhaps it's legitimate to say that phrases are already poems, ready-made poems, as it were.

Finally, a list of phrases that excite me (mostly quarried from a previous post):

Softly-falling snow.

The cold light of day (which is supposed to be sobering, but which I find reassuring).

Deep waters.

Dizzy heights.

The morning after the night before.

Down memory lane.

The silver screen.

Till the cows come home.

All human life is there.

Blue moon. (I'm told the song of this title was my mother's party piece.)

The dead of night (also the title of one of my favourite films, Dead of Night from 1945).

The middle of nowhere.

The back of beyond.

In at the deep end.

Burning the midnight oil.

The last bus home.

Night train. (There was a radio show with this title in my childhood, which was broadcast all night long-- or at least, that's the impression I got.)

The graveyard shift.

The old, old story.

The small hours.

The wee hours.

Any phrase involving "country", in this sense: bandit country, cowboy country, gator country, Brontë country, Kavanagh country, etc.

What are some of your favourite words and phrases? No, really, tell me!