Happy Christmas

I don't expect I'll be posting again until the New Year, so let me wish a very happy Christmas to everyone who reads this blog.

I'm hugely thankful to everybody who reads, comments, contacts me privately, prays for me, and so on.

People keep saying to me this year: "It's going to be very hard without your father at Christmas". It certainly adds a tinge of melancholy to all the Christmas rituals. But it's not as bitter as I feared. In fact, it gives me some comfort to include him. We said a prayer for him as we decorated the tree this year, so that he remained a part of it.

The prose-poem "Death is Nothing At All" by Henry Scott Holland (actually a passage from a sermon), which is often read at funerals, includes these lines which always bring a tear to my eye, and which I enthusiastically affirm with my own heart: Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

My father loved Christmas traditions, and this blog has its own; my favourite Christmas poem, "The Burning Babe" by the Jesuit poet and martyr Robert Southwell, who was executed in 1595.
 
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 calléd unto mind that it was Christmas day.

I wrote at length about the poem here. (I must admit the metrically awkward sixth line still makes me wince.)

There is an excellent reading of the poem in this YouTube video.

 Nollaigh shona daoibh go léir!

On The Spaciousness of Life

So Harold Wilson Day comes round again, now the fiftieth anniversary of Mr Wilson’s appointment by Her Majesty as Prime Minister. I can remember the day, and this is odd because 16th October 1964 is as distant in time from me (as I now am) as 16th October 1914 was from me (as I then was). Even then, the first year of the Great War seemed impossibly distant, a separate age in which men and customs were hardly recognizable. Half a century was far wider than the widest ocean. I could not have begun, as a 12-year-old boy at a boarding prep school on the edge of Dartmoor, to imagine my present self, the country and the world I live in or the things I would have done and seen. The distance is vast in both directions. Life is not short at all. It is astonishingly long.

Peter Hitchens's Blog, 16th October 2014

The above quotation, merely a passing remark by Peter Hitchens, is perhaps the only reference I've ever encountered to something that has struck me for as long as I can remember-- the extraordinary spaciousness and the sheer length of life.

It's true that some lives, tragically, are very short. None of my own five children ever saw the light of day. Untold millions have died in infancy, and in early childhood.

But even as soon as a person emerges from early childhood, life has already spanned an extraordinary number of days, hours, moments, experiences.

It's a commonplace that, when a person looks back at their childhood, it often seems like one never-ending summer's day. I remember, when I was a child, my own past seemed to stretch behind me like a glimmering landscape. Nor can I smile indulgently at this thought, from my perspective today. A child has already lived a long time.

And I had a lively sense of this even as a child. It's hard to put into words, but I can remember frequently being surprised by the thought: "What? There's more?". Life felt like a bag which magically had no bottom.

What else did I expect? Obviously, I knew that the average lifespan extended way beyond what I had already experienced. It's not that I expected to die in my sleep before I reached my teens. It was more a surprise at the abundance of life than the length of it.

One memory in particular occurs to me, in this regard. I could have been anything from three to seven years old, I guess. It was a Saturday morning-- at least, it was a morning with no school.

There was some kind of cartoon on the television which was rather exotic or unusual. Perhaps it was a foreign cartoon, or one based on some work of literature of folklore. It seemed to go on and on, and it jarred me out of my sense of routine. I was sitting on the backboard of the couch, and people were coming and going. Nobody was in a hurry and the morning, just like the cartoon, seemed to stretch on endlessly.

I had a very strong sense, at that moment, of the indeterminacy of family life. What is the purpose of a family? Well, just to be, it seemed. School was for learning, and the hospital was where you went when you were sick, and buses were for getting somewhere, but home-- home was just home.

New stuff kept happening-- stuff that was not expected, or scheduled, or similar to what had happened in the past. Life continued to overflow, to cascade over my existing categories.

This sense of the abundance of life, its overflow, is captured with uncanny accuracy in Louis MacNeice's famous poem, "Snow", especially the middle verse:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

"More of it than we think". Indeed! It's the unthinkability of life that intrigues me and captivates me. It's impossible to survey it, or to get it into one mental frame. Indeed, only a vanishingly tiny fraction of it can be fitted into one's mind at any given time.

I wrote this blog post, many years ago, in an effort to convey something of this sense-- I simply listed many of my own experiences, big and small. It was one of my more well-received posts, in the early years of this blog. (Even my wife liked it, and she can be an exacting critic of my writing.)

I think television and advertising are particularly effective at conveying this sense. One of the reasons I love situation comedies is because they make hay out of life's variety-- especially its mundane variety. (The first example that occurs to me is an episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads in which the two title characters are trying to avoid hearing the result of an England football game, before they watch it on the television.)

But I still feel like I haven't expressed the wonder and strangeness of the thing. Like all great themes, it is impossible to exhaust it.

I like to think of everything that an ordinary human life encompasses. We have all been sick; we have all gone through fads and phases; we have all built model airplanes, or model towns, or model something-or-others; we have all jumped in puddles as children; we have all experienced infatuations; we have all had to wait unreasonable amounts of time in airports, or government offices, or hospitals; we have all woken up from bad dreams; we have all had tricks played on us; we have all been down dark alleys; and so on, and so on, for this list could be extended forever...

And what is true of an individual life is even more true of human life, seen as a whole. The famous motto of the News of the World, "All human life is there", has always thrilled me. So have the oft-quoted words of John Dryden, on The Canterbury Tales: "Here is God's plenty."

Perhaps the best way to experience "God's plenty" is to browse a bookshelf, especially in  a second-hand bookshop. Here is a book about stamp collecting, here, an anthology of amusing epitaphs; here, a critical work on the plays of Samuel Beckett; here, The Book of Mormon; here, a collection of political cartoons from the nineteen-eighties; here, a book of golfing anecdotes.

This rejoicing in the abundance of life is one of the reasons I am a traditionalist, and a nationalist, and a social conservative. Life is bewitchingly diverse even at its most monotonous. But why should we let it become more monotonous? Why should we not strive to preserve the differences?

National differences, for instance. National differences give rise to an endless range of other differences; national cuisine, national humour, national literature, national sports, national habits, national politics, and (once again) so on, and so on, and so on. What beautiful words, "and so on!" Eroding national differences made be done in the name of greater diversity within that nation-- but, as many people have pointed out, the diversity between nations, which seems a more meaningful diversity, is reduced.

Fifty million people, when divided into a multiplicity of languages and cultures and political systems, enrich the world more than fifty million people living the same way of life. A house is made bigger, more spacious, by being broken into rooms.

Then there is the difference between men and women. How many poems, songs stories, jokes, dances, customs, and so on, have been generated by this difference? Given this, how can anyone wish to diminish the difference between men and women? Even when it is a matter of correcting an inequity, is it so unreasonable to ask whether the correction might bring more loss than gain into the world-- into the drama and colour and variety of life?

Then there are traditions; Christmas, Halloween, sporting events, general elections, April Fool's Day, Guy Fawkes Day, Thanksgiving-- these also throw additional flavour into the mix of life, creating associations and atmospheres all their own. This is why I am such a fervent advocate of traditions. I think they make life bigger, wider, more spacious.

But enough. My theme has defeated me. The spaciousness of life is a subject too spacious for my keyboard.

Advent and Excitement

Christmas is a time of excitement. 

In my late teens, I felt rather ashamed to be so excited about Christmas. I thought It was time to grow up, to become blasé about a season that was really meant for kids, after all.

Thankfully, I'm long past that. I realize now that the excitement of Christmas always went deeper than Santa Claus and gifts and holidays.

Excitement seems to be intrinsic to the season. The very air seems shivery and tingly. The glow of lights against the darkness seem to be announcing something, promising something.

The world honours Advent even without using the name. This is a time of anticipation, of joyful waiting, of vigil.

I've known sad and lonely Christmases-- or, at least, Christmases where I felt sad and lonely. This sense of excitement is still there. It's something outside ourselves and our particular situation in any given year.

This sense is most palpable in Advent, but I think it's always there in human life-- that it underlies the human condition itself.

Human beings seem to be oriented towards something wonderful, something beyond wonderful. I think this is at the root of all utopianism and all revolutionary ardour. It is a misdirection of a cosmic longing towards the realm of the merely political.

Tennyson wrote of: "That far-off, divine event to which the whole creation moves". I'm not sure this sense has ever been better described.

Pope Benedict wrote: "Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched…"

Perhaps C.S. Lewis had the greatest success in trying to convey this excitement, especially in his celebrated homily "The Weight of Glory". Elsewhere, Lewis evoked it thus: "The longing for that unnameable something, the desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of, The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves."

We find a refraction of this yearning in romantic love, and the desire for romantic love. Don't most people yearn to give themselves utterly to some other human being? But, even when we attain this, we realize it is beckoning us on to something even greater.

We find it in art, and patriotism, and our life's work, and in a multitude of other things. But always it seems to be pointing onwards, ever onwards.

The Old Testament is a book full of breathless excitement and extravagant imagery, especially in the readings from Isaiah that we hear at Advent. It all ends in the Nativity scene-- a climax that seems disappointing, in human terms, but that actually exceeds all that was promised by the prophets.

And here, too, the excitement is not once-for-all but expanding, deepening, promising ever more.

Back From Tunbridge Wells

I've recently returned from a Thanksgiving holiday spent in Tunbridge Wells, England. It may seem eccentric to go to Tunbridge Wells at all (never mind for Thanksgiving) but I had a good reason for it... my wife was visiting an American friend who lives there. 

We arrived the day before Thanksgiving (Wednesday the 27th) and left the next Monday (December the 2nd). It was my first time outside of Ireland in a long time.

A highlight of the trip, on the very last day, was meeting my friend and fellow blogger Dominic, who writes the Some Definite Service blog. Although we've corresponded for years, we've never actually met face-to-face, and I was delighted to have the opportunity on this visit. Dominic has written an account of our get-together on his blog, which is a great honour, and which I can't hope to improve upon. And his blog is always worth reading-- especially for the original poetry.

Other highlights of the trip included visits to Bateman's, the home of Rudyard Kipling, and to the town of Battle, the actual site of the Battle of Hastings (eight miles away from Hastings itself).

As I've said in previous posts, I'm a lifelong anglophile, so it was nice to be back in England. And rather reassuring. When I go to England-- at least, outside of London-- I realize that England is still England. I visited a village Christmas fair (in a Church of England church), patronised several pubs, and was driven around the Tunbridge Wells area (which is still fairly rural, due to development laws). It is still recognisably the England of P.G. Wodehouse and George Orwell-- more so than the England you see in movies and on television.

I've always found the English landscape to be more cheerful than the Irish landscape. It's hard to explain why. In fact, there is a melancholy underlying both English and Irish culture, but they have a different flavour. English melancholy is stoic and even rather cheerful, while Irish melancholy is lyrical and somewhat extravagant. This, to me, is symbolised in the contrast between the long, dolorous ballads that are the Irish commemoration of war, and the grim and lapidary inscription on English war monuments (which are everywhere, in England).

I was enormously pleased to hear about a newly-founded local debating society for elderly people in the area where we were staying. (I happened to be in the company of a retired person at the time, that's how it came up in conversation.) Two ladies had just come from the latest debate, which was on the topic of the sixties. The next debate would be on political correctness. I think I would have liked to sit in for that one.

Visiting Kipling's home and the Battle of Hastings visitor centre left me feeling a bit dejected about my own general knowledge. Kipling is an author who has interested me all my life (although I realized, rather to my surprise, that I've never read his prose, only his poetry-- just the opposite is true of Michelle). And I've actively studied English history, off my own bat, down through the years. But how little I actually remembered, when it came to it!

There was a particularly magical moment, in Battle, when me and Michelle had climbed to the roof of the Abbey, up a series of exciting stone spiral staircases. From the top, one could view the undulating hills of Sussex and Kent (I presume), and the town centre directly below.  A Christmas fair was in progress in the High Street, and recorded Christmas carols were playing on a loop. The sense of place, of time, and of perspective was delicious.

("Distance lends enchantment to the view" is a phrase usually used negatively, as a reproach to nostalgia. However, I've found it to be true in a very literal sense.)

Here I was, I thought, looking down on a pretty scene of English life. At Christmas, or near it. In the dying days of the 2010's, twenty years after the ushering in of the Millennium. Not very far from a place where a nation's history had been changed forever, in one bloody day.

I remembered the times I had visited England in my twenties. Since then, I had gained Faith, and a wife. On the other hand, I had lost a father-- and I had one particularly sad moment, a little later, when I found myself looking forward to telling him about the trip. But the sadness was not oppressive.

History, memories, hopes, dreams, ideals-- all of them hung around me in the crisp December air, with the landscape of England spread gently all around me, and the fatherly tones of Bing Crosby mingling with the excited squeals of children in the street below.

Fr. Paul Stenhouse RIP

I got some sad news the other day-- Fr. Paul Stenhouse, the editor of Annals Australasia magazine, has passed away. He had edited the magazine (whose long existence, sadly, ends this very year) since 1966.

Annals published a good few of my articles over the last few years-- perhaps ten or so.

I'd never heard of Annals until I got an email from Fr. Stenhouse, asking me if he could reprint one of my blog posts. I gladly gave permission, of course. He invited me to send him more articles after that.

Many of the articles I had published in the magazine were poetry criticism-- something I appreciated, since most editors won't touch anything to do with poetry.

Fr. Stenhouse was obviously a cultured man-- Annals was full of stand-alone quotations from all sorts of books and authors, many of them old and obscure. He seemed especially keen on G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Christopher Hollis.

When my book was being published, I asked Fr. Stenhouse to contribute a "blurb". Not only did he read the book, but he sub-edited the entire thing, without being asked. He asked me to give him a call about it-- something I did with great reluctance, since my dislike for the telephone cannot be overstated. But now I'm grateful I got to have a conversation with him, and to hear his voice. He had many useful suggestions to make, and his editorial eye also caught a few howlers. It's thanks to Fr. Stenhouse that I didn't have King Henry XVIII dissolving the English monasteries!

There is also rather a poignant connection with my own father (whose eightieth birthday would have been tomorrow). My father would read the copies of Annals Australasia that I was sent, and he had a high opinion of them, especially the articles on the history of Islam. I would pass this praise onto Fr. Stenhouse, who in turn took to regularly asking after my father. I don't think I ever mentioned his passing to him, though.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. 
 

Thoughts on Pope Francis

I rarely write about Pope Francis on this blog. His pontificate has become an explosive subject among many Catholics and I hesitate to venture into any discussion about him.

However, I thought I would risk a few remarks today. I'm going to write this blog post in the form of a numbered list, which might be appropriate to the subject-- since my thoughts, feeling and ideas about Pope Francis are often conflicted and confused.

1) Pope Francis is the Pope, the legitimate successor of St. Peter.

2) The role of the Pope, and the deference due to him, is defined thus in Lumen Gentium, the Constitution of the Church promulgated at Vatican II: "Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking."

3) Much that Pope Francis has said and done during his pontificate has caused me considerable alarm, distress, upset, and anxiety. I know I'm not alone in this. In fact, it's probably true to say that many Catholics now feel an habitual sense of apprehension about the Holy Father's next pronouncement or action.

The apparent compromise on the sanctity of marriage in Amoris Laetita is the chief of these, but there have been others. The change in the text of the Catechism regarding capital punishment also bothered me-- not because I am a fan of execution, but purely because it seemed like a contradiction of previously-held doctrine. The Holy Father's denunciation of "proselytism" is also confusing-- what is the difference between proselytism and evangelization? We should "use words when necessary", but when is it necessary, or even permissible?

4) Many conservative critics of Pope Francis say they acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope, but only when he acts in accordance with Catholic doctrine. This, however, seems like an empty formula, as well as a recipe for chaos. If every Catholic could be his or her own judge of doctrine, what would we need a Pope for? Isn't this like saying that you acknowledge a judge as long as he gives the right verdict?

5) Pope Francis often denounces "rigidity" in his homilies. This has become a sort of running joke among conservative Catholics, and we often ironically refer to ourselves as "Neo-Pelagians" and so forth. We also argue that laxity has caused far more damage to the Church than rigidity, in recent decades-- and this seems obviously true to us. Just look at the exodus of priests and the decline of congregations after Vatican II!

And yet, we have to admit...the danger of legalism (and of a complacent piety) is a dominant theme in the Gospels. Since the Scriptures are a living word, can we really write this off as purely historical, referring to the Pharisees and the Sadducees rather than to ourselves? Isn't it fair to say that, on paper, the scribes and priests often seem to have a slam-dunk case against Jesus? Why would this be such a central theme of the Gospels if it was not a continuing danger, relevant after the coming of Jesus as well as before?

6) The lack of charity among both defenders and critics of Pope Francis is lamentable. I have more exposure to his critics, since I am a conservative Catholic myself, and spend much more time listening to conservative Catholics than liberal Catholics. To hear the Pope described as "Bergoglio", mocked, sneered at, parodied, dismissed out of hand whenever he opens his mouth... this is a horrible spectacle.

A conservative priest I much esteem once said to me: "A Catholic should never publicly criticize the Pope." I think that's going too far, but I am more linclined to that priest's attitude than to that of the "Bergoglio bashers".

On the other hand, the defenders of Pope Francis often show a signal lack of charity themselves. They seem to desire "dialogue" and "encounter" with people of all faiths and none... except when it comes to conservative Catholics, who they often treat with a contempt they would never dream of showing to a Muslim, Hindu, atheist, gay rights activist, or pro-abortion feminist.

7) At Corpus Christi this year, I was very moved by a story I heard during a priest's homily, in Dublin's Pro-Cathedral. It concerned a Eucharist miracle which occurred in Buenos Aires in 1996-- a desecrated Eucharist was put into a dish of water and stored in the tabernacle. Upon the tabernacle being opened, it was seen to have become "bloodied flesh". When the bishop was informed, he immediately had the Eucharist photographed and investigated. That bishop is now Pope Francis.

I can't find that this Eucharistic miracle has been officially approved, but it seems convincing. Is it significant that it occurred in the diocese of the future Pope? At any rate, the future Pope's actions in this case certainly show no lack of conviction in the Real Presence.

8) Will Pope Francis's pontificate be looked back upon as a "blip" in Catholic history, a temporary wrong turning? Perhaps. But the current Pope has now appointed many cardinals to the College of Cardinals, and it seems highly unlikely that the next man to walk out on the balcony of St. Peter's will be a much more traditionally-minded Pope. (Unlikely, but not impossible.)

As well as this, when one reads the actual texts of the Pope's documents, homilies, etc. the differences between his pontificate and that of previous popes seem rather less pronounced. And the differences have surely been exaggerated. Pope Benedict and Pope John Paul II also had much to say about environmental responsibility, fulfillment of the vision of Vatican II, and dialogue with other religions. Indeed, Pope John Paul II notoriously kissed a copy of the Koran. How does this compare to the presence of Pachama statues at the Amazonian synod?

Let us not forget, either, that the Pope emeritus has repeatedly thanked Pope Francis and affirmed that there is no contradiction between his own pontificate and that of the current Pope. 

9) Having said all this, I find myself somewhat disoriented in the pontificate of Pope Francis. I began to practice my faith during the pontificate of Pope Benedict. Much that I took for granted then now seems less straightforward-- especially, the manner in which we should evangelize and present the claims of the Church. I am more cautious of making a mistake in this regard than I used to be. This makes me less eager to write on explicitly religious or Catholic topics-- or, at least, to depart from the fundamentals.

I am somewhat more inclined, now, to be a Catholic writer on non-Catholic topics, than to write on specifically Catholic topics-- and least of all, controversial topics.

I think it is also true to say that my own faith, as a result of the recent controversies in the Church, has become somewhat more "mystical" and somewhat less doctrinal; more devotional and less intellectualised.

As ever, the thing I am sure of more than anything else in the world is the truth of the Catholic faith-- and, to use the words of the liberal Catholic Lord Acton, that Communion with Rome is "dearer than life".

A Farewell to English-- Well, Not Quite....

Recently I finished reading A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries by Thomas Mallon. I'm not going to write about it here; I've realized (from previous posts) that few people share my interest in diary-writing as a topic. However, I did throughly enjoy the book, which was a commentary on the whole phenomenon of diary-keeping, and which took a look at some famous (and, indeed, obscure) diaries from the time of Samuel Pepys onwards.

Afterwards, though, I regretted reading it, for a reason relevant to this post: I've resolved to stop reading books in English, in favour of reading books in Irish, for the foreseeable future.

I've written about the Irish language on this blog before. My feelings on this score are probably best expressed in this blog post.

I've been reading Irish language journals (An Sagart and Comhar mostly) on my tea-breaks and lunch-breaks, during working hours, for several years now.

The importance of reviving the Irish language-- not simply for its own sake, but as a habitat for a distinctive and traditional Irish culture-- seems more and more important all the time. I feel a deep sense of shame that I have reached my fifth decade without ever making a serious effort to master the Irish language. Indeed, it's a shameful failure on the part of almost all Irish people. You can't be Irish in English.

We shouldn't even speak of being Irish-- we should speak of being Gaelic. Ireland is just a physical territory, Gaelicism is an imaginative and spiritual world of its own.

The problem is, I'm terrible at Irish. Yes, I can have a halting conversation in broken Irish, but nothing more than that. I can barely write a sentence without a string of grammatical and spelling errors.

My reading comprehension has come a long way in the last few years, though. My strategy is to improve through intensive reading, before anything else. After all, that seems to be how I learned English (and English was by far my best subject in school). I never really had any abstract handle on grammar (I still don't), but I read and read and read.

So my resolution is that, for the foreseeable future (perhaps forever), my leisure reading will be entirely through the Irish language. 

I'm talking about print here, rather than online. There isn't really much of an Irish language internet-- and, since the Irish language subculture had become overwhelmingly left-liberal by the time the internet came along, it is quite uncongenial to someone of my views.

But, fortunately, I have access to thousands of Irish language books and magazines in the university library where I work. And they long predate the liberalization of Ireland (which was a fait accompli in Irish language circles long before its conquest of the whole nation).

I'm not putting an absolute ban on reading texts in English. However, I need a very good reason to do so-- for instance, research for something I'm writing. (And I mean necessary research, not just background reading-- I'm not giving myself that dodge.)

I'm continually tempted to return to reading in English, not because I don't actually enjoy reading in Irish-- I do-- but because I'm more likely to come upon a book I particularly want to read in English-- like the diary book.

But all the English reading in the world doesn't have the same value as any amount of Irish reading. (The same applies, even more, to speaking and writing in Irish-- though I wonder if I will ever be fluent in writing.)

Although I'm a galloping romantic, I also suffer from a strong streak of scepticism. So I don't make any claims for the Irish language except that it is my ancestral language and that it is lamentably neglected.

I don't believing there's any utilitarian case for reviving the Irish language, or any language. Daniel O'Connell, an nationalist leader of the nineteenth century, notoriously said that: "It would be of vast advantage to mankind if all the inhabitants of the earth spoke the same language." If you share that view, I don't know how to argue with you. (You also give me the creeps, like one of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)

Having paid my dues to scepticism, I must admit I often have very romantic reactions when reading Irish language texts; particular words and phrases make my blood stir. Is it a stir of ancestral recognition? No, I don't really believe that.

The feeling of warmth I experience when reading Irish language texts may have several explanations.

It might be pure nostalgia, pleasant associations from my school days. (My schooling was almost entirely through the Irish language, which makes my ignorance of it even more shameful.)

It might be (and actually, I know it is) a sense of cosiness from inhabiting, as long as I am reading, a smaller cultural universe. So many books have been published in English! It can be dizzying. Irish language culture is on a much, much smaller scale-- a more human scale, perhaps.

And then there is the warm glow that I always experience when I feel I am swimming against the tide.

I am only a nursling when it comes to the Irish language-- still-- but even that is no bad thing. It is like discovering the world afresh-- learning a new word for a familiar thing is, in a way, experiencing the familiar thing for the first time. It is rather like the section of The Magician's Nephew when the protagonists witness Narnia coming into existence.

But there's a long, long way to go, and I don't know if I'm ever going to get there.