Category Archives: Columns

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.

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

Still Lives

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Abbey street is busy on a chilly autumn afternoon and the two euro shop is selling its last pair of fairy wings. A little girl waits for a luas. She is standing alone and dressed in a wine-coloured pinafore. She has an enormous pair of hazel eyes and a face entirely covered with freckles. There’s an incongruence in her features that is really beautiful. I’m thinking that she should play the lead role in a French art-house movie, when she sees me looking and says ‘What the fuck are you looking at you fucking bitch?’

I am so taken aback that I turn and walk away but I sense her youthful venom following me. She’s about eight.

A few weeks later I’m at the bus stop opposite my house when the hooded figure of a man pulling a bin bag shuffles towards me. It’s dark and the street is quiet. Instinct prevails. I move away to the corner of the road pretending I am looking out for taxis. His eyes are fixed on me. I can feel it. The two pedestrians I was counting on have passed on by. I fumble for my keys. He’s on to me. I make to cross the road and he erupts, calling after me in language he learnt from the lead role in an art house movie. I don’t excuse his French. I rush up my steps and let myself in, missing the bus that he is too drunk to hail.

I wasn’t always like this. Once I was walking along the canal coming up to Ranelagh and four cider-drinking, tracky-clad boys were having a laugh. Few cans, a bit of banter – a little mock fighting: nothing serious. I forced myself not to cross the road. After all, it was a summer’s afternoon in a leafy suburb and I was at one with the world. I strolled by, listening happily to my sunny- day music when two of them pounced out at me, blocking my way and pulling at the cord of my earphones  ‘Oy gissus yer oipod will ya?’, they laughed as I dodged under their arms. They released the earphones and guffawed at my reaction. Scurrying away sheepishly, I conceded that I almost deserved their farcical affront. Almost. They had smelt out my political correctness.

Sensory perception is an enormous area of research in psychology. They’ve labelled the occipital lobe, explored haptic contact, identified the primary auditory cortex, stimulated the taste buds and developed expensive machinery to produce odours. When it comes to how we see into ourselves, smell out dangerous people, touch on a delicate issue and describe those around us as having ‘taste’ however, the issue becomes blurred and resistant to empirical research.

Social perceptions are in the way we speak, look, move, socialise, perceive and educate. It’s hoopy earrings, whether your money comes from your builder dad or your doctor mum, luminous boob tubes, gym membership, your use of the habitual present tense and whether Lillie’s Bordello makes you puke before or after your visit. It is so blatant that it achieves subtlety in mature discourse. It is ingrained and chemically mapped. It is a system of immediate classification that occurs largely unconsciously. It’s what conjured up images of an abusive family life in a small and dirty flat when the little angel girl spat venom. It’s what makes me want and not want to cross roads.

Lawyers can become experts in questions of boundaries, engineers can construct bridges and teachers can convey principles of respect. Neuroscientists can breed impulsive rodents, geneticists can link genes to personality traits and social psychologists can construct an ABC model of attitude. Somewhere along the way we all know to learn or learn to know not to look everybody in the eye.

The Art of Patronage

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It takes but a single person. Next thing your stickman sketch is profound, your missing cat’s a celebrity and your last name’s being used in literary circles. Most people wish at some point in their life to ‘make it’. What they mean, is that they are waiting patiently to be discovered. It’s one, wonderful thing to have talent. With it, you can complete tasks with easy pleasure and float about in the knowledge that you are innately brilliant. “Making it” is different. Making it is about being recognized.

I had an incredible English teacher at school.            He made words do things that they don’t do when you read them by yourself. He just had this unbounded, raw love of language and literature and transmitted it with a humour and tenderness that inspired. And then it occurred to me. He was more brilliant than his subject.

It came in a flash and I was reminded of my introduction, in Junior Cert. History to the Renaissance and the concept of a patron of the arts. It’s not the artist or the piece of art that has that certain je ne sais quoi – it’s the guy that encounters it and shivers. It’s in the way he says to his friends: “You HAVE to read this line”, “Wow! Look at that single, tiny bit of blue in the top left-hand corner” and “Oh my God the sustained violin in the bridge passage makes me cry”.

Some call it a response to beauty. I call it a beautiful response. There is an immense selflessness in patronage of the arts that goes oft unnoticed – we buy the picture, admire the artist and ignore whoever encouraged it to be framed. The pretentious and the sublime are two such antagonistic concepts that a university education must necessarily merge them into common ground. In general if you’ve become conscious of the latter you’re more likely to practice discourse than to discuss practically. 

It’s not enough to be told that you are unique. As the t-shirts say, so is everybody else. Making it is when somebody reveals to the world why you are more distinctive than most. It’s when people begin to argue about your influences and your direction. It’s when you become an object. It’s when you make money.

Real patronage runs outside of literary circles and arty cliques. It’s as much inside each one of us as is the emerging artist. It’s in the sublime quotidian: it’s taking a walk. It’s the chemistry of a smile. It’s when you make eye contact with a stranger on the luas and realize that you are not alone. It’s receiving a hand-made card from the least artistic person you know. It’s when the sky is that beautiful pale blue and the sun blinds you and you’re with somebody you love. It’s when you have good enough friends to help you put up missing cat posters.

First-time Buyers

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When 22-year-old Natalie Dylan who is auctioning her virginity on the internet appeared on the Adrian Kennedy phone show recently, she was unperturbed by the outraged callers that labelled her as “cheap” and “immoral”. She took it all in the stride of an enlightened feminist and responded with the confident ease of the pseudo-intellectual American. A graduate of Women’s Studies at Sacramento State University, Dylan’s aim is to use the money to further her education and to pursue a Masters degree in psychology with the ultimate intention of becoming a family and marriage therapist. Despite receiving in excess of 10,000 bids, and an offer of $3.7 million, Dylan is keen to stress that she will not necessarily offer her services to the highest bidder: “It’s not like an eBay auction…I don’t have to take the highest bidder. I’m taking time to get to know the guys.” Bids for Dylan’s virginity are being laid on www.bunnyranch.com and should a suitable buyer be found the service will be provided at the famous Nevada brothel, the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. To guarantee the authenticity of her claim, Dylan has taken two polygraph tests and is willing to undergo a gynaecological examination. Dylan cites not only her economic opportunism but also her charged intellectual drive as her inspiration. Speaking on the Tyra Banks show, she explained that she “wanted to study the dichotomous nature between virginity and prostitution. There’s (sic) really been so few case studies of it…I stumbled upon this article of a Peruvian woman who wanted to sell her virginity and she was offered an exorbitant amount of cash…$1.5 million.” In years to come, Natalie’s contribution to the intellectual world may be marked by the confirmation that our society has put money before all else: Brian Cowen and his social partners can relate. It will all be worth it however, when those privileged enough to study the dichotomous nature of virginity and prostitution are blessed with one extra case study to peruse. Feminism lives.   

Natalie Dylan is open to offers

A Last Resort

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“Maybe we are snobbish and judgemental”, I say to my boyfriend as we walk into the foyer of our apart-hotel in Salou in the northeast of Spain. It is the last night of our weeklong package holiday and we have spent a considerable portion of it complaining. I wasn’t impressed with the puddle of hair that greeted us on opening the door of our apartment, and even less so with the used tissue we found behind the bed. He became fixated one evening by a quest to procure a plunger to unblock our onion skin-filled sink and I refused to take off my flip-flops in case I was infected by the maladies of the previous occupants.

We agreed: Salou is a place characterised by an unforgivable tackiness. ‘Locals’ do not exist there. It is a town dedicated to the English-speaking world – a culture of drinking and cheap entertainment.

Dotted by the seafront are identical shops selling playboy beach towels and offering hair-braiding services. Restaurants advertise ‘real’ fish and chips and Yorkshire pudding while the supermarkets are painted with the colours of the British flag, luring customers in with their sign-posted promise of ‘REAL BRITISH FOOD’.

On our way home one night we stroll into a dingy market stall posing as a tattoo parlour. There an English woman leafs absent-mindedly through the design catalogue picking out a tattoo while a little boy swings around her leg as if attached to a totem pole. Continuing home, we become distracted by a disturbance on the side of the road. In the exposed entrance area of an apartment block, two women are attacking each other in the lift. We arrive as the doors open and the scene explodes out onto the reception, where the rhythmic beating of the hands that accompanies the terrible screaming of their children sends a chill down my spine. Eventually, the two are separated and sent off with their respective set of children in tow.

Looking beyond the pile of vomit on the pavement, the incessant hum of a bad Kylie interpreter and the call for audience participation in singing The Fields of Athenry however, Salou has something to offer. Clean, golden beaches. Proximity to Barcelona. A fantastic theme park within walking distance. Cheap accommodation.

Perhaps our oh-so-middle-class attitude represents no more than an unpleasant and bitter superiority complex. While other people enjoy themselves, we spend our time cringing and as they dance the night away- intoxicated by their home beverages at discount, ‘international’ prices, we stay in and talk about literature.

So, on this our last night, we think ‘Let’s give this place and its people the benefit of the doubt’.

We walk into the foyer and past the reception desk, freezing at the scene before us. At the top of a crowded bar, a loud lady with a microphone faces a captivated audience. Four men stand in a row: they are rivals. ‘WHICH OF THESE MEN IS THE FI-EST, MOST MANLY FELLOW HERE TONIGHT?’, she bellows. This is to be determined by a series of ‘rounds’. Round one sees the four desperate men rush around the room kissing strange women for points. We hold our breath for round two. She pauses and then asks  ‘WHICH MAN CAN COLLECT THE MOST BRAS FROM THE LADIES IN THE AUDIENCE?’.A group of grannies shields their chests in girlish delight as around them, women rip off their undergarments and hand them to their candidate of choice. At the top of the room, as the candidates are lining up to be counted, a little boy plays with the bras his father has collected.

Before round three, I turn to my boyfriend.  “Maybe we are snobbish and judgemental”, I say as we walk away to pack our bags.

Our Apart-Hotel in Salou