Five minute hero
You see, the thing is, all I've ever wanted is a woman who, when I pick up the guitar, will exclaim, Oh, I could listen to you all day ... !
So, unbeknownst to Jean, I contacted Relate. I explained that her default response when I reach for the guitar is, Right, I'm away to Sprucefield, see you tomorrow ...
And I asked if they had any strategies I might employ to wean her off the negativity about my maladroit plinking and plonking.
Incremental steps, they advised.
So, here's the plan. I pick up the guitar, and before Jean can scramble like a Hurricane pilot in WWII, I say, Darling, please repeat after me, Oh, I could listen to you for 30 seconds ... !
Do you see what me and Relate are at here ... ? We repeat this over and over again until she can just about thole the racket for 30 seconds. You're way ahead of me. For yes, we then stretch it to one minute, one and a half minutes, two minutes ... and so on, all the way up to five minutes.
The Relate counsellor explained, much to my regret, that in this particular case it would be pointless to aim eventually for, Oh, I could listen to you to all day ... !
No, she advised, Jean's antipathy towards your playing, and the trauma it has inflicted, is so deeply engraved in her psyche, that she has concluded you're an absolute crap-artist.
This often occurs, she went on, when, in the initial stages of a relationship, one person endures and tolerates obnoxious behaviour on the part of the other, just to save the relationship ... So all those months at the start of your romance, when you thought she was delighted to listen to your scrapings and scratchings, you were actually inculcating, in her, a grievous sense of being abused, tortured even, by someone who was blithely incapable of feeling the slightest empathy, and oblivious to the pain he inflicted ...
Sort of like Bob Dylan must have done to his women in the early days ... ? I said, catching her drift, but a little flattered, despite it all, to be in the major league.
No, not quite, she replied, if you remember, he was talented ...
You’re gonna find me ... way out in the country
Wide open spaces, trees, hedges, sheep, cattle, foxes, hares, birds, rabbits, pheasants ... that's the life. But best of all, living in the country greatly increases your chances of avoiding other people.
It's sparsely populated out here. If you have stuff in the freezer you can go for days without having to talk to anyone else. All the existential nihilist boffins agree this is the way to remain sane. Hell is other people. Hell is in Hello.
But man is a social animal, it's said. People who assert this need to leave their desks and go outside. The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog, wrote Mark Twain.
And when you do have to stock up, it's all good. For now there are self-checkouts in many shops. So in you go, grab the victuals, flash the card at the machine, and hit the road. Without a word. Brilliant.
It was Gustave Flaubert who let me in on the secret, many years ago. I have tried, he said, to live my life in an ivory tower but its walls are being assailed by a tide of shit ...
When I read that I wondered, And where exactly does most of that shit come from ... ? Yes, that's right ...
When I explained this to Jean, she said, Honestly, the extremes some people reach, just to cover up the fact that nobody likes them.
Jean's a townie, of course.
Orange juice saga
I'm off ... ! I called to Jean this morning, as I donned helmet and gloves in the driveway.
Don't forget your bike this time ... ! she shouted back from the kitchen.
Very droll. Mind you, that has only ever happened once, so time to get over it, Jean.
Sunday morning. The back roads I cycle on are full of ingrates, retards and inbreds on their way to little tin hut meeting halls. Their driving is like their faith: unassailably moronic. Shaving past me waspishly, rather than miss a second of Jesus on the mainline. We must get there to tell Him what we want ... !!
Just outside of Tynan, near the brow of a hill, an old woman (even older than me, I mean) was sat at a table in her front garden, having a boiled egg and toast for breakfast.
Have you water with you in that heat ... ? she called.
I have, I replied.
You need some orange juice, she laughed.
So hot and tired was I that I stopped and said, I'd even go to church for a sip of orange juice ... !
She got up and went into the house. Just as I was starting off, she reappeared with a glass of orange juice and offered it to me.
Freshly squeezed that, she said.
I drained it in one go. Wonderful, thank you, I said.
Off to church now? she asked.
Well ... I began.
Me neither, she said.
Imagine living out there. In plain Protestant people of Ulster heartland. And not going to a tin shack with the blockheads. Potential Pensive Quill columnist, she is.
Bibliosatyrist
I think maybe it's time to cut Phillip Schofield some slack. The fact is we all have secrets, and often equally squalid ones.
I'm not proud of what I've been doing. Deceiving Jean is the least of it. But, like Phil, I must be brave, yet painstakingly humble, enough to confront it, and admit what I am.
I’ve been closet tsundoku for many years. And I'm finally coming out ... Yes, I have an unwavering compulsion to buy books, regardless of whether I’ll ever read them ... !
I'm helplessly in its grip. You see there only a fraction of my library (first photograph). From the essays of de Montaigne to The Lost Archaeology of the Soviet Union; from a beautifully bound and illustrated Folio edition of the South Polar Times to Bloch's The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges's Library of Babel. There they all sit, a silent testimony to beastliness; indicating the presence of disease and aberration.
It screws you up. (See second photograph.) In sober moments you say to yourself, Man dear, what is the bloody point of having two different editions of the same damned book ... ?!?
And when (lower right, 2nd photo) you even have two copies of the same edition, it's ground zero.
I am so very sorry to have deceived those closest to me. I accept full responsibility; I don't ask for, or expect, forgiveness. I'm finished. There is nothing ahead for me now but darkness, which will, of course, lessen even further my chances of getting the necessary reading done.
Most of all, I apologise to Jean. I’ve lied to her. Continually. Telling her those books are read. Then going behind her back, to order more from Abebooks and Amazon. Whereas she has this curious, but enviable, ability to buy a book just when she feels like reading it; and then she does, in fact, read it. Only when finished that one does she consider purchasing another.
Horse feathers
Late Spring. Sunny Sunday morning. And we bikers are back.
Before I set off, Jean came out and said to me, Notwithstanding that pot belly, you are sex on a bicycle ... !
Those weren't her exact words. Her exact words were, You're going to have a heart attack on that bloody thing one of these days ...
But a boulevardier like moi is hip enough to clock her real drift, boys.
Anyway, off I lashed, and soon reached Tynan. Union Jacks everywhere. There was a guy clipping his hedge with shears.
Put out more flags ... ! I called in happy greeting.
Fuck away off ... ! he shouted back.
Plain, no frills Ardmachians. I love them.
A couple of miles beyond Tynan I had to stop at a wee saved-type, tin hut kind of church. There were traffic lights and men working. An old guy from the church said to me, Worship's just about to begin; you're welcome to join us.
I declined.
Maybe being stopped here is an opportunity, offered by the Lord, he said.
Thanks, I said, but no ...
Have you something on your mind, perhaps ... ? he asked. Maybe something or someone we could pray for inside ... ?
Ivy, I replied.
Your wife ... ? he said.
Not so far, I answered, Ivy's a horse. She's spending summer in a wee field beside our house, and she ...
Are you being funny ... ? he interrupted sharply.
But the lights were changing, so I pedalled on, and waved goodbye.
It's a shame Jesus isn't interested in Ivy.
De Sade: my part in his triumph
You probably won't believe it, but I have, in fact, been offered a gong by the late Queen. Thanks to the Marquis de Sade.
When I worked in libraries I was The Bibliographer. My job was to make sure that even though most of our budget was spent on crap like Maeve Binchy and Catherine Cookson, the few pseuds in the SELB area got a look-in too.
There happened to be a reader in Portadown who, for whatever reason, wanted to read The 120 Days Of Sodom, by that rascal de Sade. No-one else would touch this request. Up to the plate stepped The Bibliographer. Buy it out of my budget ... ! I declared, more Voltaire-like than Voltaire himself
Boy, did we have a job getting it to that guy in Portadown, though. Every librarian in Library HQ, professionally sworn as they were to strict impartiality in the dissemination of legally published literature, turned out to be Mary Whitehouse. In the end I had to catalogue and add it to stock myself. Then take the damned thing over to Portadown branch, telephone the pseud or perv or whatever he was, wait until he showed up, and hand it over. My boss refused to sign my form claiming travelling expenses for the trip.
Job done? No. When he returned it I allocated it to the open shelves in Portadown branch, as you would do with any other legally published book. The staff closed the branch. A walk out. Praetorius may have a mind like a cesspit, said one, but we don't ... !
The boss brought me into his office, slammed the door, and shouted at me, What the Hell ... ?!?
Upshot was I had to go over and man the place myself, full-time, night and day. Meanwhile the staff told the whole of Portadown that there was a pornographer on the loose in their wee library. Soon a righteous mob assembled at the door, chanting, Perv out! No filth here! Lynch The Fenian Homo Bastard ... !
This was in the days before Miss Lotte Lenya, so I had no-one to talk to, or console me. I barricaded the door. A Bible, attached to a big brick, smashed through the window. I phoned the police. Ya dirty hoor, said the desk sergeant, we know all about you ...
The siege lasted nearly 48 hours. I felt like Brian Keenan and that other hostage guy whose girlfriend ditched him five minutes after her campaign got him out. I lived on the staff's Ryvita. Black's Medical Dictionary was my pillow, Marcus Aurelius and Richmal Crompton my spread.
Finally, the police escorted me and de Sade out, but not before one of them had lathered me about the head with it.
Years later, the tide turned a little (not in Portadown, mind you), and my ordeal was resurrected by some hip new library spin doctors, to show how libraries have always championed liberty and impartiality.
Anyway, somebody squealed, and next thing the OHMS envelope hits the mat. Offering an MBE for outstanding services to culture. No way. That’s the gong they offer to plebs.
Don’t get your ya-yas out
Oh, said Jean (after reading the previous item), I'm sure you rummaged thoroughly through the de Sade to get your kicks ...
No statement could better illustrate her myopic, Proddy misunderstanding of the lapsed Taig.
You can't flick randomly through de Sade and not alight on some ... er ... shall we say, dodgy episode. One that you definitely wouldn't want your maid or footman to read. Nothing beats him in the queasy department, other than the Bible of course.
Jean was right, though. I did, in fact, open the book. At a scene where a girl is told, as part of some sex orgy test marathon thingy, to 'feast' on her own, what my mother called, no. 2s. Well, to each his own, boys; just don’t do them in our front garden – Miss Lotte Lenya is forbidden to do so, and it will only confuse her if she sees you at it.
But consider a lapsed Taig reading stuff like that. Riddled with guilt, aware that everything bodily is putrid, and sex of any kind a cesspit, and Hell fire awaiting even though it doesn't exist ... We gotta get out of this place ... ! Hand me my P G Wodehouse ... !!
And as for sex itself. I always, beforehand, admit to women that I'm a lapsed Taig. That way they know there'll be nothing to get excited about.
World of Sport
When I walk Miss Lotte Lenya in the big field of a morning, I grapple like my boyhood hero, Billy Two Rivers; him in the Ring with Wild Bull Curry, me, in my pyjamas and wellingtons, with the everythingness of nothing.
I'm Philosophy's answer to Kent Walton, in fact. The Numero Uno commentator. In the same league as Jeremy Bowen on the BBC. Brought in to give the rounded, seasoned, insightful, gravitas-infused big picture that the common or garden thinkers haven't been around long enough to work out. Or, more likely, they're too stupid.
Which is better, I suppose, than being like Orla Guerin, who only turns up if the body count is guaranteed to be high.
But what is out there ... ? Is it really just a blizzard of eIectronic waves ... ? I ask Miss Lotte.
Yes, she replies, and dashes off after a rabbit innocently sunning itself.
Devastating news that. It sickened my happiness, the day we found that out. It's like something The Brother would have come up with in Crúiscín Lán ...
Do y'know what it is I'm going to tell you ... ? Sure it's all just mad bloody waves in the end. You and me and the whole bloody kit and caboodle. You can't see that crowd because you're not actually here at all, nobody knows where you are, but them's the men to mark your card all right. Your man above, with the club foot, was telling me he read all about it in the papers ...
Positively Jimmy McCarthy Street
The only differences between me and many another hugely talented Irish singer/songwriter are that I haven't, so far, recorded with Mary Bland or Sinéad Lousy or Christy Moron; and I haven’t been interviewed by that awful pockle Turbidy on the Late Late, bragging about my latest spastic album.
But I'm writing the 'correct' stuff: mature, adult, reflective songs of heartbreak and redemption.
Thing is though, like many other hugely talented Irish singer/songwriters - the philosophers, scientists, priests are queuing up to tell me what's going on. But me, I haven't a notion. I'm too richly intuitive, creative and sensitive to have to bother listening to philosophers or whatever. I've been to the University of Perceptions Are Facts. My doctorate is in Feelings Are Everything.
So I just walk on. Like a Romantic Troubadour. Hello, girls. I'm just concentrating on my next song. It’s not arid facts I’m after. It’s truth.
So cock an ear, professor, philosopher, and priest: the reality is that somewhere beyond here, there is a thin pink line between the sky and the land, around 4pm, November time ... in a temporary car park ... near Cromer, in Norfolk. And that's all there'll ever be, but it's enough for you and me, of The Truth.
Revenge of The Bogmen
Get a paper when you're out, I said to Jean.
Which one ... ? she asked.
Irish News, I replied.
Dear God, she said, but you're such a Fenian ...
It's actually the cryptic crossword I like.
As for the rest of it, though, there's a 'Faith' section, and an Irish language bit, and great glorification of all things GAA (God Awful Ayatollahs). Like, it's 2023, lads, and that kind of stuff is strictly for dumbo Donegal, not modern Ireland.
But then we must remember that over many years the far-sighted Stormont Unionist government suppressed this dreary codswallop, and now, for a generation or two, we'll have to endure, here in the Failed Statelet, a suffocating, domineering, profuse payback of all things 'gael' and Taig.
Gombeen vigilantes from the Éamon de Robespierre Committee of Public Safety will patrol every street corner. Just to make sure you don't ridicule street names in Irish, or children called Tadhg, Ailill, Aibreann, and Cú Chulainn ...
Poetry Corner
[Photo no 4 and photo no 5 here]
No-one ever asks me if I still write poems. Well, for your information - even though nobody wants to know - I do. I'm in my pastoral period, in fact:
See how the daisies in a clump do grow;
but over them I had to mow.
See how the lambs stick close to mummy;
consider that before you stuff your tummy ...
You see, the thing is, all I've ever wanted is a woman who, when I pick up the guitar, will exclaim, Oh, I could listen to you all day ... !
So, unbeknownst to Jean, I contacted Relate. I explained that her default response when I reach for the guitar is, Right, I'm away to Sprucefield, see you tomorrow ...
And I asked if they had any strategies I might employ to wean her off the negativity about my maladroit plinking and plonking.
Incremental steps, they advised.
So, here's the plan. I pick up the guitar, and before Jean can scramble like a Hurricane pilot in WWII, I say, Darling, please repeat after me, Oh, I could listen to you for 30 seconds ... !
Do you see what me and Relate are at here ... ? We repeat this over and over again until she can just about thole the racket for 30 seconds. You're way ahead of me. For yes, we then stretch it to one minute, one and a half minutes, two minutes ... and so on, all the way up to five minutes.
The Relate counsellor explained, much to my regret, that in this particular case it would be pointless to aim eventually for, Oh, I could listen to you to all day ... !
No, she advised, Jean's antipathy towards your playing, and the trauma it has inflicted, is so deeply engraved in her psyche, that she has concluded you're an absolute crap-artist.
This often occurs, she went on, when, in the initial stages of a relationship, one person endures and tolerates obnoxious behaviour on the part of the other, just to save the relationship ... So all those months at the start of your romance, when you thought she was delighted to listen to your scrapings and scratchings, you were actually inculcating, in her, a grievous sense of being abused, tortured even, by someone who was blithely incapable of feeling the slightest empathy, and oblivious to the pain he inflicted ...
Sort of like Bob Dylan must have done to his women in the early days ... ? I said, catching her drift, but a little flattered, despite it all, to be in the major league.
No, not quite, she replied, if you remember, he was talented ...
You’re gonna find me ... way out in the country
Wide open spaces, trees, hedges, sheep, cattle, foxes, hares, birds, rabbits, pheasants ... that's the life. But best of all, living in the country greatly increases your chances of avoiding other people.
It's sparsely populated out here. If you have stuff in the freezer you can go for days without having to talk to anyone else. All the existential nihilist boffins agree this is the way to remain sane. Hell is other people. Hell is in Hello.
But man is a social animal, it's said. People who assert this need to leave their desks and go outside. The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog, wrote Mark Twain.
And when you do have to stock up, it's all good. For now there are self-checkouts in many shops. So in you go, grab the victuals, flash the card at the machine, and hit the road. Without a word. Brilliant.
It was Gustave Flaubert who let me in on the secret, many years ago. I have tried, he said, to live my life in an ivory tower but its walls are being assailed by a tide of shit ...
When I read that I wondered, And where exactly does most of that shit come from ... ? Yes, that's right ...
When I explained this to Jean, she said, Honestly, the extremes some people reach, just to cover up the fact that nobody likes them.
Jean's a townie, of course.
Orange juice saga
I'm off ... ! I called to Jean this morning, as I donned helmet and gloves in the driveway.
Don't forget your bike this time ... ! she shouted back from the kitchen.
Very droll. Mind you, that has only ever happened once, so time to get over it, Jean.
Sunday morning. The back roads I cycle on are full of ingrates, retards and inbreds on their way to little tin hut meeting halls. Their driving is like their faith: unassailably moronic. Shaving past me waspishly, rather than miss a second of Jesus on the mainline. We must get there to tell Him what we want ... !!
Just outside of Tynan, near the brow of a hill, an old woman (even older than me, I mean) was sat at a table in her front garden, having a boiled egg and toast for breakfast.
Have you water with you in that heat ... ? she called.
I have, I replied.
You need some orange juice, she laughed.
So hot and tired was I that I stopped and said, I'd even go to church for a sip of orange juice ... !
She got up and went into the house. Just as I was starting off, she reappeared with a glass of orange juice and offered it to me.
Freshly squeezed that, she said.
I drained it in one go. Wonderful, thank you, I said.
Off to church now? she asked.
Well ... I began.
Me neither, she said.
Imagine living out there. In plain Protestant people of Ulster heartland. And not going to a tin shack with the blockheads. Potential Pensive Quill columnist, she is.
Bibliosatyrist
I'm not proud of what I've been doing. Deceiving Jean is the least of it. But, like Phil, I must be brave, yet painstakingly humble, enough to confront it, and admit what I am.
I’ve been closet tsundoku for many years. And I'm finally coming out ... Yes, I have an unwavering compulsion to buy books, regardless of whether I’ll ever read them ... !
I'm helplessly in its grip. You see there only a fraction of my library (first photograph). From the essays of de Montaigne to The Lost Archaeology of the Soviet Union; from a beautifully bound and illustrated Folio edition of the South Polar Times to Bloch's The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges's Library of Babel. There they all sit, a silent testimony to beastliness; indicating the presence of disease and aberration.
It screws you up. (See second photograph.) In sober moments you say to yourself, Man dear, what is the bloody point of having two different editions of the same damned book ... ?!?
And when (lower right, 2nd photo) you even have two copies of the same edition, it's ground zero.
I am so very sorry to have deceived those closest to me. I accept full responsibility; I don't ask for, or expect, forgiveness. I'm finished. There is nothing ahead for me now but darkness, which will, of course, lessen even further my chances of getting the necessary reading done.
Most of all, I apologise to Jean. I’ve lied to her. Continually. Telling her those books are read. Then going behind her back, to order more from Abebooks and Amazon. Whereas she has this curious, but enviable, ability to buy a book just when she feels like reading it; and then she does, in fact, read it. Only when finished that one does she consider purchasing another.
Horse feathers
Late Spring. Sunny Sunday morning. And we bikers are back.
Before I set off, Jean came out and said to me, Notwithstanding that pot belly, you are sex on a bicycle ... !
Those weren't her exact words. Her exact words were, You're going to have a heart attack on that bloody thing one of these days ...
But a boulevardier like moi is hip enough to clock her real drift, boys.
Anyway, off I lashed, and soon reached Tynan. Union Jacks everywhere. There was a guy clipping his hedge with shears.
Put out more flags ... ! I called in happy greeting.
Fuck away off ... ! he shouted back.
Plain, no frills Ardmachians. I love them.
A couple of miles beyond Tynan I had to stop at a wee saved-type, tin hut kind of church. There were traffic lights and men working. An old guy from the church said to me, Worship's just about to begin; you're welcome to join us.
I declined.
Maybe being stopped here is an opportunity, offered by the Lord, he said.
Thanks, I said, but no ...
Have you something on your mind, perhaps ... ? he asked. Maybe something or someone we could pray for inside ... ?
Ivy, I replied.
Your wife ... ? he said.
Not so far, I answered, Ivy's a horse. She's spending summer in a wee field beside our house, and she ...
Are you being funny ... ? he interrupted sharply.
But the lights were changing, so I pedalled on, and waved goodbye.
It's a shame Jesus isn't interested in Ivy.
De Sade: my part in his triumph
You probably won't believe it, but I have, in fact, been offered a gong by the late Queen. Thanks to the Marquis de Sade.
When I worked in libraries I was The Bibliographer. My job was to make sure that even though most of our budget was spent on crap like Maeve Binchy and Catherine Cookson, the few pseuds in the SELB area got a look-in too.
There happened to be a reader in Portadown who, for whatever reason, wanted to read The 120 Days Of Sodom, by that rascal de Sade. No-one else would touch this request. Up to the plate stepped The Bibliographer. Buy it out of my budget ... ! I declared, more Voltaire-like than Voltaire himself
Boy, did we have a job getting it to that guy in Portadown, though. Every librarian in Library HQ, professionally sworn as they were to strict impartiality in the dissemination of legally published literature, turned out to be Mary Whitehouse. In the end I had to catalogue and add it to stock myself. Then take the damned thing over to Portadown branch, telephone the pseud or perv or whatever he was, wait until he showed up, and hand it over. My boss refused to sign my form claiming travelling expenses for the trip.
Job done? No. When he returned it I allocated it to the open shelves in Portadown branch, as you would do with any other legally published book. The staff closed the branch. A walk out. Praetorius may have a mind like a cesspit, said one, but we don't ... !
The boss brought me into his office, slammed the door, and shouted at me, What the Hell ... ?!?
Upshot was I had to go over and man the place myself, full-time, night and day. Meanwhile the staff told the whole of Portadown that there was a pornographer on the loose in their wee library. Soon a righteous mob assembled at the door, chanting, Perv out! No filth here! Lynch The Fenian Homo Bastard ... !
This was in the days before Miss Lotte Lenya, so I had no-one to talk to, or console me. I barricaded the door. A Bible, attached to a big brick, smashed through the window. I phoned the police. Ya dirty hoor, said the desk sergeant, we know all about you ...
The siege lasted nearly 48 hours. I felt like Brian Keenan and that other hostage guy whose girlfriend ditched him five minutes after her campaign got him out. I lived on the staff's Ryvita. Black's Medical Dictionary was my pillow, Marcus Aurelius and Richmal Crompton my spread.
Finally, the police escorted me and de Sade out, but not before one of them had lathered me about the head with it.
Years later, the tide turned a little (not in Portadown, mind you), and my ordeal was resurrected by some hip new library spin doctors, to show how libraries have always championed liberty and impartiality.
Anyway, somebody squealed, and next thing the OHMS envelope hits the mat. Offering an MBE for outstanding services to culture. No way. That’s the gong they offer to plebs.
Don’t get your ya-yas out
Oh, said Jean (after reading the previous item), I'm sure you rummaged thoroughly through the de Sade to get your kicks ...
No statement could better illustrate her myopic, Proddy misunderstanding of the lapsed Taig.
You can't flick randomly through de Sade and not alight on some ... er ... shall we say, dodgy episode. One that you definitely wouldn't want your maid or footman to read. Nothing beats him in the queasy department, other than the Bible of course.
Jean was right, though. I did, in fact, open the book. At a scene where a girl is told, as part of some sex orgy test marathon thingy, to 'feast' on her own, what my mother called, no. 2s. Well, to each his own, boys; just don’t do them in our front garden – Miss Lotte Lenya is forbidden to do so, and it will only confuse her if she sees you at it.
But consider a lapsed Taig reading stuff like that. Riddled with guilt, aware that everything bodily is putrid, and sex of any kind a cesspit, and Hell fire awaiting even though it doesn't exist ... We gotta get out of this place ... ! Hand me my P G Wodehouse ... !!
And as for sex itself. I always, beforehand, admit to women that I'm a lapsed Taig. That way they know there'll be nothing to get excited about.
World of Sport
When I walk Miss Lotte Lenya in the big field of a morning, I grapple like my boyhood hero, Billy Two Rivers; him in the Ring with Wild Bull Curry, me, in my pyjamas and wellingtons, with the everythingness of nothing.
I'm Philosophy's answer to Kent Walton, in fact. The Numero Uno commentator. In the same league as Jeremy Bowen on the BBC. Brought in to give the rounded, seasoned, insightful, gravitas-infused big picture that the common or garden thinkers haven't been around long enough to work out. Or, more likely, they're too stupid.
Which is better, I suppose, than being like Orla Guerin, who only turns up if the body count is guaranteed to be high.
But what is out there ... ? Is it really just a blizzard of eIectronic waves ... ? I ask Miss Lotte.
Yes, she replies, and dashes off after a rabbit innocently sunning itself.
Devastating news that. It sickened my happiness, the day we found that out. It's like something The Brother would have come up with in Crúiscín Lán ...
Do y'know what it is I'm going to tell you ... ? Sure it's all just mad bloody waves in the end. You and me and the whole bloody kit and caboodle. You can't see that crowd because you're not actually here at all, nobody knows where you are, but them's the men to mark your card all right. Your man above, with the club foot, was telling me he read all about it in the papers ...
Positively Jimmy McCarthy Street
The only differences between me and many another hugely talented Irish singer/songwriter are that I haven't, so far, recorded with Mary Bland or Sinéad Lousy or Christy Moron; and I haven’t been interviewed by that awful pockle Turbidy on the Late Late, bragging about my latest spastic album.
But I'm writing the 'correct' stuff: mature, adult, reflective songs of heartbreak and redemption.
Thing is though, like many other hugely talented Irish singer/songwriters - the philosophers, scientists, priests are queuing up to tell me what's going on. But me, I haven't a notion. I'm too richly intuitive, creative and sensitive to have to bother listening to philosophers or whatever. I've been to the University of Perceptions Are Facts. My doctorate is in Feelings Are Everything.
So I just walk on. Like a Romantic Troubadour. Hello, girls. I'm just concentrating on my next song. It’s not arid facts I’m after. It’s truth.
So cock an ear, professor, philosopher, and priest: the reality is that somewhere beyond here, there is a thin pink line between the sky and the land, around 4pm, November time ... in a temporary car park ... near Cromer, in Norfolk. And that's all there'll ever be, but it's enough for you and me, of The Truth.
Revenge of The Bogmen
Get a paper when you're out, I said to Jean.
Which one ... ? she asked.
Irish News, I replied.
Dear God, she said, but you're such a Fenian ...
It's actually the cryptic crossword I like.
As for the rest of it, though, there's a 'Faith' section, and an Irish language bit, and great glorification of all things GAA (God Awful Ayatollahs). Like, it's 2023, lads, and that kind of stuff is strictly for dumbo Donegal, not modern Ireland.
But then we must remember that over many years the far-sighted Stormont Unionist government suppressed this dreary codswallop, and now, for a generation or two, we'll have to endure, here in the Failed Statelet, a suffocating, domineering, profuse payback of all things 'gael' and Taig.
Gombeen vigilantes from the Éamon de Robespierre Committee of Public Safety will patrol every street corner. Just to make sure you don't ridicule street names in Irish, or children called Tadhg, Ailill, Aibreann, and Cú Chulainn ...
Poetry Corner
[Photo no 4 and photo no 5 here]
No-one ever asks me if I still write poems. Well, for your information - even though nobody wants to know - I do. I'm in my pastoral period, in fact:
See how the daisies in a clump do grow;
but over them I had to mow.
See how the lambs stick close to mummy;
consider that before you stuff your tummy ...
⏩Michael Praetorius spent his working life in education and libraries. Now retired, he does a little busking in Belfast . . . when he can get a pitch. He is TPQ's fortnightly Wednesday columnist.
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