Monthly Archives: October 2010

The Two-Taled Tea Test

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So there I was browsing in the Palais de thé of Wicklow Street wearing a chequered brown dress and carrying a bag made of recycled Rittersport chocolate wrappers (This to become important later). I was leaning over a pot to smell a blend of rooibis tea when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to face a girl: blonde, bright-eyed, curly-haired, affable, tall.  

‘HIIIII!! how ARE you? … good to see you!!’ she cried ,smiling effusively at me. I looked briefly, and with great intensity into her face. No, I did not know this girl.

I responded with alacrity, matching with exactitude her smile and demeanour: ’Hi there!! I’m doing well thanks!! how about yourself? I’m just browsing for tea – it’s a lovely shop here isn’t it?’

‘Oh, it’s gorgeous’ she said – ‘here, smell this one, it’s the most popular blend’.

‘Oh, that’s lovely actually’, I said, ‘though I really think I’m most tempted by the rooibus blend’

‘I love that one too’, she admitted, before asking ‘.. so what are you up to now?’

I paused. She’d hit upon a toughie. It all depended on from what context she knew, or thought she knew me.

I eliminated school, former workplaces, friend-of-a-friend and distant relative. I was left with college and in a flash there came an hypothesis. Could she be a version of a Mary Claire, who studied psychology with me in first year? She had had dark skin and brown hair then and we had barely spoken but there was a certain je ne sais quoi (quite literally) about her that seemed familiar.

Yes, I thought. This is Marie Claire. I sighed with relief as she prompted, ‘You must be finished now..?’

‘Yeah’, I agreed, ‘all done and out in the real world..’ sigh ‘What are you up to yourself?’

She was telling me all about her pastry internship when along trotted a shop assistant. He had an asymetrical haircut and selection of piercings. ‘I spotted you from afar’, he said to me. ‘I knew from your outfit when you came in that I wanted to talk to you’.

He continued, looking at my acquinatance ‘You know that I sing opera to Mary Claire  morning and night’.

The name was music to my ears. Suspending bewilderment, I pondered to him that Marie Claire was a lucky girl..

‘And she doesn’t know it’, he said wistfully before gliding away.

I recovered my equanimity. ‘Do you know him?’ I asked.

She laughed ‘Oh yeah, I used to work here’, I just came in for a chat today as I was passing.’

‘I see!’ And I did. She was, beyond all reasonable doubt, Mary Claire of first year of college who had since worked as tea mistress and pastry artist. She was the same Mary Claire who had been friends with a friend from college with whom I’m in regular contact.

Smug in my superior knowledge I asked ‘Do you see much of Alex still?’

Her face went blank. ‘Alex?….. em?’

I faltered a little. ‘Alex.. yeah he was in psychology with us..’ (you were considerably more acquainted with him than you have ever been with me, I thought)

‘hmmm, I’m sure he’ll come back to me’, she said cheerfully.

‘Oh, yeah he will, I’m sure. He’s actually written the first draft of a novel’, I added.

‘wow, impressive!’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’d know him to see’

A good fifteen minutes had passed and as well as being confused afresh, I was fearful I would be late for a coffee date.

I made my way to the till to pay for my rooibus tea. Asymetrical haircut guy threw in a dozen free tea bags and winked as he undercharged me.

I thanked him very much.

‘Don’t thank me; thank her’, he said, pointing at Mary Claire.

I flashed her a sheepish smile. ’Thanks Mary Claire’, I said as I rushed out to the sober, reassuringly familiar buzz of Wicklow Street. I vow to return, incognito in the same outfit, swinging by my side the recycled Rittersport wrapper bag.

****************************************************************

 (Paul Grice does a great job of explaining why most people don’t just blurt out: ‘I don’t know you’ and Stephen Pinker’s idea of ‘plausible deniability’ explains away my reluctance to use Mary Claire’s name before Asymetrical guy had confirmed my hunch)

The Which Blair Project

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 In matters of business and politics I share the bewilderment of E.M. Forster’s character Mrs Wilcox, who asks, “Why do people who have enough money try to get more money?” and claims that she is “sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.”

Mrs Wilcox’s desire to understand motivation and personal responsibility in business and politics is less naïve and unsophisticated than is suggested by the author of Howards End. As Tony Blair releases his aptly-named “A Journey”, the spotlight is cast firmly toward the mind and away from the body politic.

As if Tony Blair’s premiership has retrospectively been subjected to a magnifying glass of the mundane, the rubber gloves of the Queen and half bottle of wine before bed, as well as the bickering with Brown become intimately linked to revelations about WMD, sexed up dossiers and the ban on fox hunting.  

The documentation of conflict between the public and private self has existed for centuries if not millennia and semblance of their successful co-existence remains the hallmark of a media savvy politician. President Obama courted the idea of a blurred distinction between public and private as he invited the world to accompany him in his choice of the perfect puppy to install in the White House and his wife as she watered the patches of her organic vegetable garden. The habit of familiarity backfired however when he referred in an interview to his bowling skills as akin to those of competitors in the Special Olympics. It was a particularly poignant moment for those of us who had believed that Obama struck a rare balance between the public and the private. But oh how we relish the untoward entry of private mumblings into the public sphere! When a stressed Gordan Brown entered into his car during the election trail and muttered that a supporter he had just encountered was a “bigoted woman”, reporters on the scene became breathless with excitement.

While Blair succeeds in couching his public performance in a language of (albeit formal) familiarity, Brown, whom Blair accuses of having “zero” emotional intelligence does not. Emotional intelligence should not however be mistaken for empathy; particularly not in a political context. One suspects that when David Cameron lost a child, Brown’s move to cancel Prime Minister’s Questions  was motivated by no more than the indiscriminate sympathy of one who has endured a tragedy for another that now encounters it. Empathy is unbridled; emotional intelligence stores up for release the cleverly latent bi-product of self-preservation. Blair’s memoirs are an expression of emotional intelligence. Battling against his branding as war criminal, he fights for his name by supplying details of intimate conversations and personal weaknesses. 

Curiosity has got the better of me and though I share Mrs Wilcox’s self-consciously confused conclusions about the world, I should not mind taking a gander to Easons with her this Saturday to catch a single glimpse of the man’s many faces.

The Tree of Life: at the Root of it All

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At the top of Bray Head last Saturday, while tucking in to an exquisite quorn chicken baguette of his making, my boyfriend explained to me E=MC². He did a really good job; there was a lot of imaginary rock throwing into the water and the thermos flask of mocha doubled up as a handy representation of the speed of light squared. He told me about nuclear fusion and fission – about subatomic structures and the search for the “god” particle. Absent mindedly I munched my pringles and watched the sea, trying to fathom it all. It began to rain.

Our descent proved phsyic(s)ally yet more intense. I had nerd questions to ask and gnarly roots to stumble over. I sort of wish I hadn’t let my apprehension of mirrors, electricity and maths prevent me from studying physics for the Leaving Certificate. An in-depth knowledge of the stuff is probably the closest you are going to get to the meaning of life.

In the second episode of Channel 4’s programme about Amish teenagers during their “Rumspringa” phase, a pure-faced, bonneted Amish girl points to a tree and asks the artist in Kent whom she is visiting how it could possibly have come from “nothing”; by which she means ‘no God’. She is incredulous at the idea of evolution. Her alternative narrative of aboresque origin; the biblical creation story –  in spite of its obvious falsity – suddenly appears to me strangely, ironically sophisticated. God, as existing outside of time makes redundant the need to explain relativity and progress: the hallmarks of evolution. While Amish girl looks at a tree and classes it begotten not made, scientists dig deeper and deeper and deeper to identify subatomic structures … until they arrive at: Nothingness; the “god” particle; claritas?

It is simply impossible for me to understand this until there evolves in my brain a further imaginative and existential dimension – as King Lear said –  surely “nothing can come from nothing”?

We reach the foot of the hill: the inside of our heads beating to the buzz of billions of neurons. The view up is tree-lined and the magnificent cross at the peak bears its arms like branches. I need to pee.

“Dad, Can I be a Liberal with a Conservative Mindset?”

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When my dad is reclining, he is usually in an armchair with half an eye on the television or slouched at the kitchen table nibbling lidl cream crackers. At these times, I fire questions at him to which he responds, occasionally and with delay. Sometimes they seek shamelessly his affirmation and affection: “Liebst du mich noch, als Mensch und als Katzi?” (Do you still love me, as a Person and as a Katzi? – a strange interrogative habit I developed as a child) and at other times they take the form “Dad, explain NAMA to me in simple terms” or “How could a cloned cow’s milk be harmful when it’s genetically identical to the healthily lactating beast, whence it came?” In matters political we disagree almost as a rule but there is a certain reserved pride in the unreasonable poetry of his Burkean perspective that appeals privately to me in spite of my liberal tendencies. In May I spent a week in London gaining work experience with the “comment is free” website of the Guardian. In an endless, gleaming open-plan newsroom with TV screens hanging at every corner and Skynews always on silent, the images of pomp and ceremony accompanying the Queen on her errands were unanimously ridiculed. A young editor came in bleary-eyed one morning to exclaim that the previous night, she had met with “Cambridge” graduates and it was “intolerable”. Newsroom talk was in the vein of “crazy anti abortionists” and “religious fanatics”. It was very coffee machines and carrot cake – a happening, progressive place. Now don’t get me wrong. In broad terms, I stand for pretty much everything the Guardian does. Gay rights, social justice, religious freedom, the right to non- belief and women’s freedom of choice. But in that small section of the newsroom, I sensed a scorn for those of a different perspective or vintage, which made me quite uncomfortable. Perhaps the assumption of an egalitarian sensitivity in my idea of ‘liberalism’ is flawed and has little or nothing to do with its politics. Perhaps the build-up of resentment at being treated with less than indifference by my ‘boss’ fuelled in me an empathy for those flawed institutions of antiquity that were at one time well-intended. Maybe I was a bit bitter that nobody ever told me I could take a lunch break or asked me whether I’d like to join them, or asked me where I was from, or how the hostel I was staying at down the road was treating me. Maybe it made me worry that common courtesy has become conservative. Maybe I’ll ask my dad.

Bertie Bowls and World Cups

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Bertie Ahern is grinning up at me with scrunched up nose and open-topped shirt. I find him perched comfortably at the top of page 70 of the July 4 edition of the Irish News of the World, where he has conceded that “there are questions to be answered and issues to be resolved” and that “all of the players should realise that it is time to hold their hands up and then move on.” In his capacity as sports columnist for the aforementioned publication, he is of course referring to England’s dismal performance in the world cup. His blend of endearing naivety and wily opportunism is representative of a peculiarly Irish mindset, which has dominated the body politic for at least the last decade.

As its most successful exponent, Bertie Ahern stood smiling over the country throughout its period of extraordinary prosperity and glided to a swift resignation conveniently in advance of its crippling economic demise. At the launch of his autobiography last year, he told David Frost that accusations that he had received bribes from property developers were unfounded and based on nothing more than that ‘one guy said that the other fellow told him he did’. A polished Cleggeron he may not be, but his colloquial circumlocution renders him a similarly slick smooth – speaker.

The Irish gift of the gab is not just about sliding through the nets though. Our eager benevolence and uncomplicated approachability represent the ideal of a mobilised community spirit. When Joe Duffy spoke recently to a woman living in the west of Ireland who confessed to feeling lonely and depressed in her surroundings, within minutes calls flooded in from strangers offering chats over cups of tea and spare rooms in Dublin, where she was on a housing waiting list. With similar vehemence, homeless charities have launched an impressive campaign against the demolition of empty houses in the outskirts, suggesting instead that they be made available to shelter the homeless.   

I was born an invincible Celtic tiger cub and have developed lately into a scavenging graduate, competing to take on unpaid work so that some day a philanthropist will discover an archive of my eclectic and unpublished scribblings and plead with me if they may not immortalise them in serialisation  – at any price. Like Ireland’s dream of winning the world cup, it is a goal worth striving towards in the strangely reassuring certainty that it will never be achieved. It is this paradoxical conviction of both success and failure, which makes possible the symbiotic relationship between self-deprecation and delusion, which has contributed to Ireland’s staggering economic rise and fall.

Bertie Ahern’s curious decision to keep his money under his mattress rather than in a bank account is the mark of both madman and genius, each masquerading as the quietly quotidian everyman, drinking still as Taoiseach in his local pub and insisting on going to Mass every week in spite of his cohabiting relationship with a woman not his wife. Paradox and irony thrive in a culture where emotion is self-consciously privileged over intellect. When Ireland rejected the Lisbon treaty, it did so with an impish ‘let’s see what happens’ attitude. The ‘No’ vote was not an indictment of Europe, but rather a concentrated attempt to get on the government’s nerves. After all, they had burst our bubble. Having wedged ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis, we grinned and voted ourselves out second-time round, much to the annoyance of the UKIP.  

In a televised debate about head shops, it was claimed by a frustrated liberal that Ireland is a country where laws are set “not by experts but by Joe Duffy”. Indeed, when our former Taoiseach concludes as sports expert from the pages of a tabloid that “no one person should be made to be the scapegoat for what was a collective failure” one can only smile at the audacious success of his opportunism and shake one’s head at the grave irony of his accompanying naivety.

Pigeons, Sweets and Epiphanies

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It’s Bloom’s Day eve. Two aged Dubliners are sitting on a bench in Stephen’s Green park with a thermos flask of tea. A pigeon waddles over. Its body is unusually slender. Says one lady to the other: “Isn’t he lovely! Look at the green on his neck”. I recognise the speaker. I saw her yesterday at the hairdresser’s. She has black and grey hair that twines its way halfway down her back. “I’m terrified”, she had told the receptionist. “I haven’t had it cut in years”. The receptionist checks her book. “We’ll put you with somebody soft … wait till I see now, with Sandy. She’s a lovely, soft girl. She’ll look after you”. Her hair doesn’t look any shorter today.

“The best place to buy sweets” she continues, “is the pound shop”. She pauses. “Do you not like sweets, Geraldine?”.  (Geraldine does not) “I love sweets. I’d go to the press now and then when I stick on the telly and get a packet”. Geraldine doesn’t think they’re healthy for your teeth. She shrugs. “It wouldn’t bother me ..  You’d get three bags there for two euro; it’s very good… ”. Geraldine throws a whole slice of bread to the pigeon.

“Who wrote Ulysses? They did say this morning on fm104 that it was the gay fellow … that went to prison but it wasn’t him. I knew it wasn’t him. “Do you know why it’s called ‘Bloom’s Day?’ It’s cause of a woman. She was Bloom. She was a bit of a princess”. Maybe it was the other fellow, Geraldine thinks: William Butler Yeats.  She gasps: “Aw, he was lovely looking. I have a picture of him, a black and white one.” “Oh, do you?” says Geraldine. “I do, I’ve had it for years. Where did I get it from now? That’s it. I done a course once. The teacher gave it to me. He’s stunning in black and white. I still have it. Maybe he was the one that wrote Ulysses”  

 She looks down. “He’s not going to eat all that, Geraldine, that’s too much for him”. Geraldine nods but suggests that it may be eaten by the others. She is quick to agree. “That’s right. It will. It will. Will you have another drop, Geraldine? The sun crawls away and leaves behind it the Dublin that gleams beyond the pages of Ulysses.

Tough Shit

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It is bitterly cold. I am six and my mother has made me wear a rabbit on my head. I peel it off in embarrassment in the schoolyard but a pidgeon deposits a spoldge of excrement upon me. I suspect it to have been a well-intended, though grossly mistimed act of solidarity. Years later I pass a girl on Mount Pleasant Avenue  who is scrunching solicitously into a plastic bag the brownish mush of waste her dog has achieved. Thoughts of good citizenship and excrement have been my occupation ever since. 

Erwin James, who spent 20 years in prison in England wrote in the Guardian in March that while visiting Mountjoy, he was engulfed by “a powerful whiff of prison years I thought had long since been abandoned”. Each day prisoners in Mountjoy form a queue to empty, one by one their ‘slop’ into a large porcelain sink. The indignity of the task may not be criminal: after all, have not they wavered the right to the privileges associated with law-abiding citizenship? 

It would appear that Irish society considers private urination not only a privilege but also a mandate. Public urination carries a fine and, famously the alternative punishment of holding an apologetic sign of atonement at the scene of offence. Pet owners are inticed by products like the “canine clean-up claw” (http://www.canineclaw.co.uk/) and those that don’t “poop and scoop” are maligned by upstanding citizens.

Yesterday I helped a very sick old lady make her way from bed to toilet. She had on an enormous nappy and packets of pills to control her diarrhoea lay beside her bed. I sat her down and called in every few minutes to make sure she was alright. There is shame in the indignity of our prison service and tragedy in the human condition.

 

Holy Smoke

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An automatic door slides me into the entrance lobby of the Carmelite Church on Whitefriar Street. The Virgin Mary greets me, enormous and plastic. To my right there is a blue tank. A sign stuck on it with sellotape reads ‘Holy Water’. On the walls, behind grubby plastic covers are newspaper cuttings: the round wrinkled face and soft eyes of Mother Teresa, who visited the Church in 1993 and the story of the statue of Mary, which a priest salvaged from a local second hand store in the 1880s. I follow the arrows (they are blue-tacked to the walls) and find St Valentine’s heart, encased in a carved golden box. I wonder who the last person to look inside of it was and at the logistics of its sacred transport.

Inside the Church a hundred candles glisten. An old man shuffles to light one and in a far corner a foreign girl reads quietly to herself a biblical text in a language I don’t understand. Dotted among the pews, the backs of old women are bent in prayer.

 Outside on the street are mothers with cigarettes clasped between their lips pushing babies in pre Celtic tiger buggies. Shops that sell envelopes and fairy liquid, plastic toys and wall clocks are squeezed between modest coffee shops. Red meat hangs unceremoniously in the windows of the butchers. A man turns into a dimly lit bookie, where scrunched up scraps of paper lie discarded on the floor.

It is 11 May 2010, a Tuesday afternoon. Cameron crafts Clegg’s concessions while Brown tells his little sons that they are moving house.  Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said last night that there are still those in the Church who would rather not see the truth emerge. The cloud of volcanic ash lifts its way beyond Irish airspace. Gum decorates the dusty street. The automatic door slides closed, aloof from it all.

Asylum in Ireland: The Ins and Outs

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I have learnt about ice cream made from snow gathered in the Afghan mountains. A graduate of nutrition has regarded my nails and accused me of a deficiency in calcium. I have seen images of bombings transmitted through a mobile phone and I have sung the English alphabet with two Ghanaian men. Hatch Hall, just off Harcourt Street is Victorian redbrick and full of stories. Until 2004 it provided Jesuit residence for male students of UCD and it is now a centre for asylum seekers. I know it only on a Wednesday night but each week it is a new place.

There assembles at the entrance to the Trinity College Arts Block each week (as part of the Suas mentoring programme) a group that makes its way to Hatch Hall. A security guard buzzes us in and we make the walk through the entrance hall across the lawn and into the dining hall where there lingers in the air canteen curry and orange squash. There is a shuffling buzz as soon as the door is opened. Some familiar with the programme are seated already at a table waiting to be assigned a teacher and others, new stand alone at the periphery or chat in small groups. There are snippets of French but otherwise I recognise in the surrounding languages only sounds.

At present, an asylum seeker in Ireland receives €19.10 a week and €9.60 for their children. The system of direct provision, which has been in place since 1999, assigns the asylum seeker to specified accommodation on a full board basis rather than providing them with an allowance to live independently. In October 2009, when I first visited Hatch Hall and for which the statistics are now available, there were 54 direct provision centres in Ireland. The centres with the highest capacity are hostels, hotels and former colleges or nursing homes though a mobile home park is also in operation with a capacity of 350. In October there were 6650 people being accommodated under direct provision, which represented almost 85% of the maximum capacity of 7779. The publication of the Free Legal Advice Centre (FLAC) report on 18 February revealed that many asylum seekers are spending over three years in direct provision centres waiting for their cases to be processed. In fact the largest proportion of residents (32%) have spent over three years in these facilities. That’s 2156 people. It’s the length of our Undergraduate college years and contrary to the Government’s vision of residence in these centres occurring on “a short-term basis (not more than six months)”. Those in the legal profession are aware that asylum cases represent a lucrative business. A barrister is likely to earn €1000 per tribunal ruling on asylum. The nickname Mr Njet has been given to one barrister notorious for his refusal of asylum. Word outside the chamber is that he has a few politician friends in high places. Undisputed is that he earns per ruling 50 times more than what those, whose fate he decides have to spend each week.

The moment you sit down opposite one of these 6650 people, their facts and figures evaporate into the curry sauce and orange squash air. They look you in the eye, they shake your hand, they smile: they are human. They’re no longer seeking asylum but a conversation. Some time ago a bright-eyed Afghan man with a killer white smile produced for me a photo of a gleaming red sports car and a bright-eyed Afghan man with a killer white a smile. I looked at it, then at him. ‘Is this your car?’ I asked. ‘Are you a model?’ I thought. He grinned. ‘I do photoshop’ he replied impishly. He used to work in software.    

Each week a sheet is passed from table to table where pupils and teachers sign their names. The first day I meet Mark he takes the pen and while he signs it I talk to his friend Dag. I am talking a long time and I sneak a glance over. He is forming the ‘A’ of M –A-R-K. We spend the next half hour singing and writing the alphabet and the following week he connects letters to sounds and a world begins to open up before him. Sometimes I’m asked if I believe in God and other times I have been told that Allah created everything. Quite often I’ve been asked to explain why the Irish drink so much and why so many young girls smoke. I’m still working on an answer. There are compliments too. Nowhere are the people so kind and friendly as in Ireland. Nowhere do they care so much.

Rafiq graduated with a degree in nutrition in Pakistan and speaks impeccable English. He suffers however from ‘hesitancy’. He had some difficulties in the Ilac Library last week because he came 5 minutes too late for the internet time he had booked on the computer. All he needed, he tells me were 15 minutes, but the computer had been given away by the time he arrived. To overcome his shyness we practise some role- plays and I do my best to inspire confidence with my outrageous rudeness. He notices that I don’t take sugar in my tea and asks if I have a general aversion to sweetness. I certainly do not. Next week, he promises to bring me some Pakistani treats, which he is ‘sure’ I will like. 

Before Christmas an Iranian polyglot came to the class simply to socialise. He learnt his French from time spent in prison in France and picked up Italian, German and Spanish somewhere along the way. With fluent English under his belt, and TG4 available in Hatch Hall it seems natural that he wants to learn Irish also. In three minutes he has learnt the personal pronouns and is eager to begin the pronominal declensions. He makes etymological connections at alarming speeds and smiles with glee while he does it. In another world he is working in translation for the EU or in the department of Linguistics at Harvard. The class is over and he bids me ‘Slán leat’. He could have said ‘Au Revoir’ but I have not seen him since.

Belgrade

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Belgrade’s car horns sound full-blast amidst interminable cheering. Outside: the vast cityscape of black and grey and gleaming white and inside: a hostel with a loose interpretation of ‘en suite’. I lie in bed and let an unknown bug buzz in my ear. Lights flick as I surf the TV channels. Kylie curves her way to me on VH1 and the Discovery Channel is looking at where meat comes from. I’m grateful for the scraps of globalization in this city of cyrillic. Here Costa Coffee sells giant cups of hot chocolate orange at small amounts of dinar and a Happy meal comes at a Happy price.

The Lonely Planet Guidebook declares it the newest party hub and the group of French and American backpackers on the playstation that I pass and hop over by day, I do not see at night. I buy Ian McEwan’s For You in a bookshop that’s open at midnight and use my last dinar to purchase the hand-crafted, recycled jewelry of a street vendor, who scolds me for wearing flip flops on a cold night. I wander around the main square and can’t identify the mounted statue in its centre nor the colourful graffitied  messages that decorate the sides of its buildings. All around are young people hanging out of honking cars.

The buzzing creature retreats and I change the channel. I am startled when an image of Belgrade flashes behind the newsreader. We’re back in the main square with the horse and the graffiti nearby. The subject of the report is the Gay Pride Parade scheduled to take place the following Sunday. The Government has cancelled it following extreme and widespread threats of violence. Translated into the Latin alphabet the graffiti reads “Death to Homosexuals” and “we are waiting for you”. 1389 , the ultra nationalist Serb Popular Movement declared the cancellation “a great victory for normal Serbia”. There are reports that claim that organizers of the parade were asked by Prime Minister  Mirko Cvetkovic to relocate the rally from the centre of Belgrade to a field but that organizers rejected this as a symbolic marginalization that defeated the purpose of the march.

It is three in the morning and still the car horns screech with joy. Google reveals that Serbia has beaten Russia in the semi-final of the Basketball World Championships. This is a country where topless teenage boys cry for balls shot through hoops and not through nets. It’s a place where if you’re young and gay, you get your hot chocolate orange from Costa Coffee ‘to go’.       

Unlike last year, this year's Gay Pride went ahead amid violent protests