Tag Archives: Culture

On pens and penises

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Meet Gilbert and Gubar; two ladies whose collaborative feminist treatise The Madwoman in the Attic opens with the question “Is the pen a metaphorical penis?”

I’ve had a long look at my black felt tip. It doesn’t appear virile- though of course that ejaculation might be premature.

For decades, academics and journalists have been considering women’s place in the world. They have been characterised as angels, whores, monsters and mothers. In the name of progress, their gift in writing has been likened to a product of the male reproductive organ.

In western society, traditional notions of a woman’s place in the home have become taboo. Of late, the idea that a woman might choose to become a fulltime mother rather than a professional has been rendered unthinkable.

The reluctance to accept that a woman may decide on motherhood over career advancement was exemplified by a New York Times article by Jack Ewing published last week, which meditated on the surprisingly small number of German women who return to fulltime work after availing of the government-paid 12-month parental leave.

The writer laments the fact that “Despite a battery of government measures … only about 14 percent of German mothers with one child resume full-time work, and only 6 percent of those with two”. He goes on to cite example after example of corporate bodies where only a tiny proportion of women have ended up at the top. Part of the problem, he muses is that “most schools still end at lunchtime, which has sustained the stay-at-home-mother image of German lore”.

While it’s worthwhile to draw attention to gender disparities in top corporate positions, the discourse that surrounds it – while well-intentioned – does a good job of enforcing the idea that women remain passive beings with little control over the course of their lives.

Ewing expresses the misgiving that “when it comes to empowering women, no Teutonic drive or deference seems to work”. Far from promoting any egalitarian cause, such speculation denies women the right to make life choices outside of a socio-political narrative, which subtly yet forcefully dictates that having a career is more worthy than caring for a child and that empowerment can only be measured in economic terms.

Germany is a good example to focus on to illustrate the point. Government measures strongly support the mother in the workplace – she is allowed 12 months parental leave with pay and is guaranteed her job back at the end of it. Although it’s probable that a larger proportion of mothers return to part-time work, the fact that only 14% go back to a fulltime career is indeed surprising.

In the absence of financial and political disincentives however, the fact that is continuously over-looked, is that women are opting not to return to work. Instead of being respected as free agents, those that make this choice are treated as victims of a social order which is portrayed as significantly less than the sum of its egalitarian parts.

For true parity to exist, the Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus mantra must be debunked. Ewing describes Germany as “one of the countries in most need of female talent” (my italics) but doesn’t define what he means by the term. If male and female talent aren’t viewed with equality, the prospect of a roughly 50:50 breakdown of gender in all sectors of professional life is unrealisable.

Furthermore, unless it’s accepted as equally scandalous that the proportion of male nurses is equivalent to that of female corporate executives, a discussion of gender can never be detached from a social weighting in favour of money.

Were society’s priorities reversed, public discussion might centre around the outrage that a man’s right to parental leave is considerably more restricted than a woman’s, that a boy’s emotional development is stunted by the expectation that he will advance up a corporate ladder and that the male body is no more than a military tool.

While you can’t spell “metaphorical penis” without pen, as I look again at my black felt tip I begin to think that Gilbert and Gubar might have been feminists equipped with rather (pardon me) fertile imaginations.

Why Philosophy is best on the bus

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I never thought I would be reading Bertrand Russell on the bus. Having endured a term of Critical Theory at college and made an ill-conceived investment in the accompanying reader (I was a Fresher; young and naive), I came to the conclusion that part of a Philosopher’s delight lies in deliberately employing obscure words and a surplus of relative clauses and that the general intention is to make oneself incomprehensible.

Not so with Bertrand Russell. You can read his prose while listening to snippets of conversations from the St Mary’s boys, the hum of the engine and the relentless beat of rain against the window pane.

As I was reading his essay On Being Modern Minded last week, I was struck by how much I could relate what he was saying to my own relationship to the world around me. Russell’s main argument is that the modern (post first world war) mind is stifled by an ever-increasing reliance on trends in thinking and that as a result people are scared to form their own judgements; held back by the belief that a more ‘contemporarary’ (and accepted) view will appear before they have had the chance to formulate their own.

Russell’s observations were rooted in the growing popularity of new philosophies and the tendency to impose them retrospectively on texts. Russell writes: “I read some years ago a contemptuous review of a book by Santayana, mentioning an essay on Hamlet ‘dated, in every sense, 1908’- as if what has been discovered since then made any earlier appreciation of Shakespeare irrelevant and comparatively superficial. It did not occur to the reviewer that his review was ‘dated, in every sense, 1936′”.

Russell was writing pre-Internet of course but in his world, ideas were moving more quickly than they had ever done before and at a speed that meant they were evolving before they could be fully digested. That may be why the behaviourism of the 1960’s led to some dubious parenting practices and why literary texts developed Marxist, then Freudian undertones overnight.

Our generation has the great advantage of easy access to a vast quantity of information so that any new tenet may at the click of a button be analysed in relation to the belief that preceded it. However, with such a vast amount of information available, it has become easier and easier to quit thinking for yourself.

I’m definitely guilty of this. Look at this blog post for instance: it’s Bertrand’s, not my own. Sure, we’re supposed to learn from each other but the amount of times I encounter something that seems at first glance incomprehensible and resolve to “google it” makes me uncomfortable. Am I incapable of assessing the importance of a news story myself? Can I not figure out what Joyce was about by reading his words alone? Have I lost my originality? (Can I google it?..)

Skimming is a skill I’m now supposed to teach and it’s something I’m not quite comfortable with. Sure, it’s practically important to teach students to find relevant information at speed but doesn’t that take the joy away from the ultimately satifying slog of analysing a text to death identify grammatical structures and unusual vocabulary? Would we be as well as to teach them to use google translate to extract the main points of a text?

I love the internet. It’s enabling, democratic and wonderful. Without a lot of self discipline though, it can also be disabling and anti-democratic, with messages being spread and consumned at a rate the human brain is incapable of keeping track of. If BR thought in 1950 that “The emotional tone of the world changes with equal rapidity, as wars, depressions, and revolutions chase each other across the stage. And public events impinge upon private lives more forcibly than in former days”, I don’t know what he’d think of the world as it is today. One to google ponder.

Reflections on the mirrors in Bewleys

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Saturday was a day I’d like to bottle for future swigs when things are not so rosy. Like all great days, it began with a marvelous breakfast in bed, which my LSB prepared while I dozed. After that we ventured out to the Phoenix Park to visit the Bloom Garden Festival. The park was cloaked in intermittent sunshine and the people were out in their drones to soak it up. Even the deer seemed unusually contented; regarding the topless men passing by with their 99 cones with the graceful bemusement of which their species is only capable. Inside the Bloom exhibition, I divided my time between admiring the delightful lambs on “display”, lazing in the (promotional) hammock area and loitering by the vegy burger stand. In the evening, LSB and I spent a few hours in Bewleys, finalising our (provisional) life plans (more of which in future posts).

Having finished my hot chocolate orange and gobbled up the amaretto biscuit that had accompanied LSB’s mocha, the evening was drawing to a close and it was time to go home to announce details of my (now revised provisional) life plan to my parents. On our way out, we took a trip to the toilets.

While I was in the cubicle (third up), I heard somebody exclaim, “I know you from somewhere”. The voice was middle-aged; soft but firm. There was a pause and I was imagining a reunion between two ladies who had attended the same embroidery evening class some months ago. But the second voice said “No, I don’t think so”. Hers was a more confident, even voice.
There was another pause which I didn’t want to interrupt so I delayed flushing the toilet. The lighter voice spoke again “you must take great care of yourself”. At this point I flushed and made my exit. In the mirrors were two faces. One lady had sunken, hollow eyes and wispy grey hair. She was applying mascara. The other had carefully shaped eyebrows and a heap of dyed red hair, which sat on her head like Marge Simpson’s, minus the length.
I was washing my hands very thoroughly and casting my gaze into the two mirrors next to mine. It was the red lady’s turn to speak: “I do indeed. I take great care of myself. I go salsa dancing three times a week”.
“Do you?” the lady in grey exclaimed. “I love salsa dancing. I have done that myself”.
“Have you?” the red lady replied, looking at her now.
“It looks as if you take great care of yourself”, the grey lady repeated.
“Ha”, said the red lady, laughing now, “I have to match the young men I partner in my dancing”
“I’d say you do”, said the grey lady very seriously, turning to look at her from the side.
“Well, my husband says I look great”, said the Red Lady.
The grey lady stared at her. “Oh! Are you married?”
“I am”, said the red lady, suspiciously.
“Well you must take great care of yourself” said the lady in grey, replacing the cap of her mascara and zipping up her bag.
“Bye”, she said.
“Bye now” said the Lady in Red,turning to me as I was looking busy waving my hands beneath the hand dryer. She made a face as if to say “WEIRDO”.
“I’d take it as a compliment”, I said.
“I certainly will”, she retorted, “I think we’d both had a glass of wine”
“Maybe” I agreed, finally making my way out to LSB, who had been waiting patiently the whole time. “Keep up the salsa dancing”, I called back as we left and LSB asked sourly “so you’ve a new best friend then?”
“I do .. and she takes great care of herself” I tell him as we go our separate ways after a wonderful day out.

On books, buyers and balloons

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It’s a wet and windy Saturday afternoon. The Spanish protestors gathered at the Spire have painted balloons with slogans forecasting a Revolution. Moore Street is quiet but for a vendor who’s shouting “umbrellas aunl’ a foiva” again and again and again. Inside the Ilac centre, broadband salesmen and the pumping beats from cheap clothes stores are competing for shoppers’ attention. A little boy pressed into a communion suit is dragging his parents into Game. Then, as you go up the stairs and the automatic gate pulls you in: silence.

Seated at one of the desks is a man who has taken off his brown leather watch and propped it up against an empty bottle of peach ice tea. If you are close enough, you can hear the swish of his highlighter pen over a paragraph about marketing strategy. The air is musty and the carpet tattered. A security guard moves suddenly and the keys attached to his belt jingle to the background hum of a hoover, which has just come on.

The faces are either young and foreign or Irish and old. There’s a special table reserved for the elderly and at it spindly fingers are crinkling the pages of newspapers. Blu-tac-ed to one of the shelves is a laminated poster, which reads “Books can help”. There’s a single title lying on that shelf. It’s called When Parents separate- helping your children cope.

A girl drops a pile of books on the counter and asks whether she can return them. The librarian, a lady with a wispy brown bun and rosy cheeks looks carefully at the screen: “Now, I have to tell you, there’s a bit of a fine on your account”. The girl’s eyes flash briefly, “ Yeah, I paid that in Pearse Street last Monday..” The lady’s nose scrunches up a little. “Em.. These are the titles we have here as overdue: With My Lazy Eye, The Colloquial Guide to Arabic and Homecoming. Is that right?” “That’s right”, the girl replies. “But I paid €4.50 for those in Pearse. It’s all cleared on my online account.” The lady pauses. ”hmm”, she says. Her lips curl into a smile. “Alright, I’ll take you at your word”. “Thanks”, the girl mutters awkwardly. “I wouldn’t l..”

The stench of a tweed suit comes and goes. For a split second, it’s silent again. Then the bounce of a book spine as it’s returned to the shelf: Closing time. Outside, it’s cleared up. Yer man is selling fake Adidas tracksuit tops now. The protestors are gone from the Spire but there’s a single black balloon bopping about in the breeze.

The Wild West or just a quiet town?

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A boy of 15 is standing still; thigh-deep in muggy river water. His pomona green Wellington boots are just visible beneath the surface. It’s about six in the evening. He is alone, and the town about him sleeps. He is fishing.

“That’s a lonely image”, I say as we watch him from a distance.

We are leaning against a stony wall by the riverbank. I am unzipping my camera case gingerly because I want to remember the stillness and his solitude when a blonde-haired man of about thirty staggers, stony-eyed towards us.

“Don’t you dare take my picture”, he yells. “You’ve no right, you sons of bitches. You’ve no fucking right at all”.

Startled, I glide the camera down and wait for him to pass. He is still ranting as he shuffles away. He is alone and mad maybe, if mad is a thing.

This was our first of impression of Sligo and the scene I have just described took place just metres away from the impressive glass structure of our hotel, which is shaped like an enormous boat, and obscures the little twist of the river as it stretches itself into an estuary.

The Glass hotel, Sligo

Later that night, after a walk through the town, Andrew asked, “so what do you think of it?” I paused, because this was our special break away and you’re not really supposed to acknowledge that it’s not perfect until months later, when you joke about it and realise that the other thought it was a bit shit too.

“It’s a bit dead”, I said. That was indisputable. As dusk settled, the town was lifeless but for a line of three drunken old men, smoking outside their local.

You’d have to move, if you were our age, we agreed, unless you were a farmer or wanted to work in a tattoo parlour, of which there were a disproportionate amount in the town.

We spent only three days in Sligo but it was long enough to perceive how fuzzy a boundary divides what is still and unspoilt from what has been forgotten.

One of the first things we noticed in Sligo town, was a page stuck with blu-tac to the door of a bank (of all places!). It was a reminder of what’s been forgotten. A man, a poet, had penned some verses, on the subject of the queen’s visit. In the penultimate verse, he asked simply “Why won’t they let her visit the west?” And indeed the following day, as we climbed Knocknaree and observed the beautiful, rocky wilderness that surrounded us, it was hard to believe that this wild, unspoilt landscape wouldn’t be to Her Majesty’s taste. And yet, the way I had described Sligo town the night before as “dead”, was as if stillness were a sin.

And when on our last day we visited the majestic lake at Glencare (strictly in Leitrim, but whatever) and the waterfall that inspired Yeats in his poetry we were cast under a spell. Beneath gleaming sunshine, the lake water lapped with low sounds by the shore and there was not a soul to be seen. It was beauty unbridled. It didn’t need the Queen’s visit to make it so. It was too beautiful for words or tourist brochures.
And looking back, I am glad that I never did take the fisher boy’s picture. Without that angry, lonely interruption to the peace, his stillness wouldn’t have resonated into prose.

The lake at Glencare

O’Connell Street: Was it for this?

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On cold, wet days I really feel for them; O’Connell, Larkin and the other lads, condemned – on account of their noble achievements- to a life of stony immobility rooted to the grey, chewing gum-smeared concrete of our main thoroughfare. I scurry by them in the mornings and wonder whether the tick-tock of Clery’s clock imposes order to their lives and whether they ever sigh to themselves “I’d fecking kill for a drink in The Grand Central” or “I’d risk my bronze plating for a win at the slot machine in Dr Quirkeys”.

The tiny Mary Mediatrix shop, which blasts out religious tunes from a battered speaker and which claimed on hand-made posters in advance of the general election that “a vote for the Labour party is a vote for abortion” is an historical artefact made charming by the implausibility of its continued existence. The Spire too – the triumphant baby claw that remains of the Celtic Tiger – speaks of time passed.

Image courtesy of Flickr

The news stands selling the Herald, as well as some specialist magazine titles survive against the odds to compete with the similarly-priced and far more extensive range in Eason’s. Those that man them are industrious and tough and their presence often masks the groups of three or four addicts slumped against the walls outside of shops with cans of Dutch gold at their feet and expressions that flicker from vacant to murderous.

The beggars too are early risers. I admire their flowing gypsy skirts and the sleepy faces of the babies they cradle in their free arm. I watch in the afternoon as tipsy old men respond to flirtations, addressed to them in wide-eyed, broken English. There is always a moment when the few coins that these men have paid for their flattery are rejected for being too paltry and it is at that moment that the expressions of the men change for it is then they know that they have been had and that the price of their time was an extra portion of curry chips at Londis.

The top of O’Connell Street is a blend of Belvedere boys and foreign children in wine-coloured pinafores making their way to school. There is a grotesque butcher’s shop on Parnell Street just at the junction with North Great George’s Street. All sorts of fleshy entrails dot the grubby countertops and I see a pair of Chinese hands skilfully tidy them into rows and columns.

Families in tracksuits queue for social welfare in a little newsagent which doubles up as a post office. Once I saw a father assault his three-year-old son on Marlborough Street. The most brutal and disgusting face I have ever seen; there is a sharp knot of disgust in my stomach as I type and the memory floods back. I didn’t intervene and it fills me with some shame. What would have been the point though? I had seen the violent force the man was capable of and the little boy’s mother was with him, watching it all with the ennui of perpetual deprivation.

There are moments of relief though. Daffodil Day coloured the street golden and pinned to bopping buttonholes an image of energy and hope and growth. The man who hops about on O’Connell Bridge each morning, wearing a gigantic grin on his face as he hands out a complimentary copy of MetroHerald to groggy commuters on their way to work makes me smile every day. And in spite of the indignity of public urination, unsolicited mounting and discarded beer cans, perhaps Larkin, O’Connell and the lads do stand proud as they watch over the city and the people they helped to forge. After all, it is their city, as it is mine and for every loss at Dr Quirkey’s there is the possibility of redemption across the road at Mary Mediatrix.

Confessions of a Teacher: Part 3

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“Face of Ireland” Contest makes Farce of Ireland

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Today Waterstone’s Bookshop announced the closure of its two Dublin branches and the Sunday Tribune newspaper went into receivership. I spent the day in my bear onesie; having spent an unfortunate night vomiting. The news about the Waterstone’s closure reached me via text message from my dismayed, book-selling LSB who had just finished work. Nursing a saline medicinal solution and rather cosy in bed, at the moment my phone beeped, I had just finished reading Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl; a story of cultural and ideological tragedy that depicts the epic and transformative power of money.

With these thoughts at the back of my mind, I got around to researching the “Face of Ireland” beauty competition, which a friend of mine told me that she had entered last week. The contest, which I had not heard of before is now in its fourth year and promises the successful candidate “a year of glitz and glamour”.

But both come at a price. If I have understood the terms and conditions of this dubious divafest correctly, I calculate that all candidates that reach the grand finalé will have forked out €750 for the privilege. The website stipulates that: All candidates who are selected for interview will have to pay a small fee for the upkeep of the competition. I know from my friend that this “small fee” happens to be €150, a sum with which you could procure at least ten great works of literature from Waterstone’s bookshop. In an uncanny commercial coincidence it just happened that every girl selected for interview also got through to the next round. My friend opted out at this point and in an indignant text message which I sent her from Penneys in O’Connell Street I ensured her that she had done the right thing.

Should she have progressed further through the competition, she would have been required, in accordance with the terms and conditions, to sell at least 10 Tickets at a costing of €60 each for the semifinal show. This year’s Face of Ireland, Louise from Donegal blogged happily of the night of the grand finalé that Between cat walking, interesting questions and a few unexpected party pieces an entertaining night seemed to be over in a blink! I know it’s a cliché but to have made it that far, every single one of us was a winner!.

I suppose with a loose interpretation of winner, any achievement is possible. In a society which has lost its money, its bookshops and its most educated people the success of this kind of vacuous endeavour makes a farce of us all. I have a lovely memory of sitting upstairs in the coffee shop of Waterstone’s on a spring afternoon during my first year of university. Our tutor had taken us there to discuss Structuralism over a cup of hot chocolate. Soon enough the Deconstruction will begin at that site and the future Faces of Ireland and their fans will stand proud, pouting over it all.

Sunday Miscellany or “My Week in Review”

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Monday: 8.45 pm Anticipating Fade Street

There have been no new Vatican scandals to report this week, and so the crusade against my mother, who likes to watch Would You Believe instead of Fade Street needs not be fought. I am walking home from Harcourt Street, where I have been instructing a group of fourteen foreign aupairs on the Third, (and hopefully ultimate) Conditional of the English language. Having survived another session, it is always a treat for me on the way home at this time to direct my thoughts from lesson planning to game theory as I analyse Louise’s next career move, due to be revealed at the later time tonight of 22.50.

Tuesday: 6.10 pm Yoga in Rathmines Town Hall

There are bits of mashed potato on my handtowel and so I lay it out near the back of this expansive yet unassuming space, just beneath the Rathmines clock tower. Around me the shapes of sleepless breathers are stretched in voiceless vertical lines. Their soft mats outlie with intuitive grace the length of their bodies. I curse my loose interpretation of BYOM (Bring Your Own Mat) and hope that my LSB enjoyed his surprise meal of potato mash during my lunchtime visit to Dundrum, from where I have come. In spite of the five layers of tinfoil which I wrapped around the bowl, some sneaky particles have managed to slither their way up toward my towel where they rest, content to be squashed but not devoured. As I inhale into my yoga cat pose, I resolve that by week two, she will have a Davina McCall mat, just like her feline contemporaries. I meeow mentally and exhale.

Tuesday: 8.05 pm Start Your Own Business in Rathmines Town Hall

“Does anybody need the terms ‘Sole Trader’ and ‘Limited Company’ explained?” the teacher; a banker with fourteen years of managerial experience across the road in Bank of Ireland asks.
A tired arm at the back creeps up; my left.

Thursday: 9.15 am “Chat about my CV” at a language school

I call in at reception and am greeted by an amiable country man in his sixties. “Just a minute”, he smiles after I have told him who I am.
Several minutes pass and finally I am escorted upstairs to a little office.
Inside a lady is sitting on a gym ball. There are scrunched up balls of paper scattered all over the floor.
“Do take a seat”, she says, “sorry about the mess, I was just tidying actually”
I recline.
“So…” she rummages on her desk. “I have just printed out your CV”
It is fresh off the presses, indeed.
She skims it and pauses.
“This is an informal chat”, she says. I sigh in relief, having interpreted the scrunched up bits of paper and the gym ball as cognitive obstacles designed to weed out the weaker candidates. We have a lovely chat and she vows to keep my details on file should a vacancy arise. I thank her and leave, relieved that I considered only for a few seconds the night before whether I should wear slacks and a jacket for the occasion.

Thursday 9.45 am: St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre

The Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is empty, except for a few old men, who have arrived early to rest on its benches with the morning Metro. Shop shutters are beginning to lift open as bleary eyed staffmembers clock in. I rush in the direction of Argos, which beams at me with the catalogued promise of fulfilment. I leaf through its yoga mats and alight on the second cheapest one. The cheapest, at €7.00 did not advertise its potential to be rolled up and carried and as I learnt earlier this week, I am in no position to make assumptions on these matters. I am flooded with dopamine after my purchase and decide to browse the clothes section of Dunnes Stores. My beahviour becomes increasingly impulsive: I purchase a piece of rowing apparatus and a pair of grey tights.

Blue Yoga Mat with guaranteed roll-up mechanism

Friday 7.15 pm Faire le babysitting

I am waiting outside the door of the house where I babysit and so is the economics editor of The Irish Times. I am vaguely tempted to tell him who he is, but restrain myself and beam instead, announcing that I am the babysitter and so we are probably both in the right place. The door opens and we are greeted by a mad labrador and an adorable red haired and precoscious little girl. The dog makes a run for me and I grab reflexively her front paws and we dance, wildly. “Don’t mind her”, the little girl tells me, “she is pubescent”.

Saturday 10.45 pm: Fade Street

“Fuck your Honda Civic, I’ve a Horse Outside” is blaring through the bar of the Mercantile hotel. I am imagining tourists leafing wildly through their pocket dictionaries, wondering whether things really are so bad and whether this is what the commentators mean when they talk of “Irish resilience”. We end up in the Market Bar of Fade Street and as I nurse my Paulaner, I think of the pleasure that awaits me, 48 hours from now.

All that glistens is not Gold

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Dún Laoghaire bay glistened pale blue and brilliant white. On my way there, on board the 46A bus, a schoolgirl sat next to me eating salt and vinegar crisps for breakfast. She was small enough, with wavy brown hair and a chequered uniform. When the bus pulled into Dún Laoghaire, I avoided gripping the point on the pole where she had smeared her greasy fingers. I was early for my appointment in the yacht club so I found a café and bought myself a hot chocolate. I felt as if I were back in London being an early-riser cosmopolitan-type enjoying the sunshine with strict purpose. I took out some books and a notepad with the intention of planning the class I was to teach later on.

Next to me two ladies sat down opposite each other. Fortyish – the two of them – I would say. The one I had a good view of was blackish-grey-haired and had that bowl-cut hairstyle known from childhood. She had an intense look on her face and told her friend and confidante that she needed to use the bathroom. Off she went. I read some more about the Third Conditional and took some notes. The lady came back and the coffees they had ordered arrived. They began to stir their drinks and what they talked about was crying. The blackish-grey-haired lady has spent her life not allowing anybody see her cry and this had to stop. She resolved to cry in front of friends and family. Her friend, or therapist nodded and added “You need to change, Margaret”.

Time up and I had to tear myself away from the scene. All kinds of backgrounds to it had danced around my head- was this an exposure session for a patient suffering from OCD who had a fear of drinking from dirty vessels shared by the general public? Or perhaps the dialogue represented no more than an unbalanced friendship. Or perhaps a marital crisis.

I came out of the yacht cub two hours later the honorary editor of a new website called http://www.writing.ie and smiled when I realised that there may be a genetic component to holding such a title: my father has been honorary editor of the historical journal, The Irish Sword, for years.

I was too timid to ask to use the facilities in the yacht club and so I went in search of a bathroom in the village. I was striding down the main street in the hope of finding a MacDonalds when an elderly man startled me. He came from nowhere and barred my path. I swerved apprehensively.
“Excuse me, love”, he said. “Do you know where I can get a box of sweets around here?”
An extraordinary request, I thought and all that popped into my head was: “I don’t know. I’m sorry, but I am new to the area”.

My mind was still bouncing with ideas from my meeting in the yacht club but my bladder was speaking with a singular urgency. I conquered a cubicle in the Bloomfield shopping centre and emerged, relieved.

On my way out, I passed a gaudy ‘Cash for Gold’ store. Inside, the salesperson was sniffing and mauling a golden chain. Before him was parked a large wheelchair where a young man lay on his side, paralysed. His father hovered above, observing with shifting resignation the sniffing Shylock.