Metropolis
Armagh ... it's great. It's a city, you see. Of Saints and Scholars. Buzzing, connected, cosmopolitan, diverse, inclusive, dynamic.
So you go into the big tile shop to choose some tiles. No matter which ones you choose, the obliging answer is always the same: Oh, they have to be ordered in, it'll be at least a month ...
Your tiler's coming next week.
Or you go into the newsagent's. And ask for Private Eye. Oh, we'll have to order that in, is the cheery reply ...
Well, have you got today's i newspaper then ... ?
Sorry, we only get one copy, and it's away already.
Maybe you'll telephone someone. Have a yarn. But the screen says Emergency Calls Only. No signal. This is Armagh, after all.
And Armagh people love their little town and its standards of service and supply. Only blow-in churls would complain. The main thing is you're very lucky to live here. And there's some 'big' match or other coming up ...
The John Hewitt Annual Armagh Summer School ... my role
Robustly good humoured Ardmachians say to me, How's the oul pomes goin' then, Michael ... ?
Fair enough, their exact words are more like, We see your posts mocking Armagh, and you're cruisin' for a bruisin', yuh oul wanker ... !
Wanker ... ?!? I reply in kind, at my age ... ? I should be so lucky ... !
It's all just banter though. Chummy badinage with a bunch of rough diamonds who never got the breaks, although they're very deserving of the neck variety.
But non-joking aside, the poetry is actually going very well. For instance, when I was a Co Down nipper, there was a lad in our village who never had a job, or any money, but wouldn't take benefits. I was thinking about him the other day, still wondering how on earth he got along. I came up with this:
Conor Hughes,
he had no shoes,
and he had no money too.
He robbed a bank
with an army tank,
rather than sign the broo ...
Good morning, Mishal; good morning, Nick; good morning, listeners ...
There must be many here among us Today Programme listeners who feel serious loathing at Thought For The Day. The very idea that 'faith' bestows some kind of privileged insight is positively mediaeval. And, even more ludicrously, the contributors are clearly under the impression that belief in Santa Claus gives their fantastical deliberations a double side order of insight and profundity. ...
Consider. This morning I watched, from the kitchen window, a little yacht with orange sails glide slowly down Strangford Lough towards the Irish Sea. Tiny little thing. (How do they get people small enough to fit in there ... ?)
Meanwhile, back in Armagh, Jean reported to me that yesterday evening she saw Ivy galloping and cavorting madly about the field. And galloping and cavorting madly behind were a cow and its calf ...
Both scenes are in the family way, as it were, expecting gravely significant interpretation and divination, in the hands of an inspired midwife and soothsayer. Thus the contortions of faith-based wisdom must blithely confront the blurred shapes of imposed meaning.
The little yacht came back up the Lough. Ivy is actually pregnant.
Portent, testimony, attestation ... What may we seers assign and deduce... ?
A gull squawks, yet gulls squawk ...
Thank you, Vicar.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned ...
On the way home today I noticed a big gap in the clouds. As a fanatical lapsed Catholic I seldom encounter a sight like that without sinking into the shallow end of the, as it were, theological and metaphysical lido.
I was on the train. Miss Lotte Lenya fast asleep. When I was young you went to Confession on Saturday evening. In preparation for Holy Communion next morning. Man, it was great walking home after Confession ... you didn't want to be hit by a lorry, but it was brilliant knowing that if you were, you'd head straight to heaven, soul a pure, unblemished, white miracle, and the Blessed Virgin waiting there, like your own mammy, to hug you.
Fast forward to now, and you're lurching into a whiteout of senility, illness, disease, dilapidation, breakdown, and oblivion, with Love Island and a trip to Vietnam all that's left to take your mind off it.
And not even Holy Communion to look forward to, either ...
Armagh Geddon
BBC Radio 4 is preparing a new post apocalypse drama. Though not a direct adaptation of the 1962 film version of John Wyndham's classic SF novel The Day Of The Triffids, the radio series takes its starting point from the plot of that movie.
The world has been taken over by huge plants which kill humans with a single sting, then feed on their decomposing bodies. These deadly Triffids can, apparently, communicate with each other, and they have roots that are mobile.
Only water (in the film it was specifically salt water) can kill them and, in a world where water levels are falling, every household still has its own power washer with which to spray the murderous weeds should they approach.
First episode of this adventurous soap opera goes out on Radio 4 come autumn. It's called The Kärchers.
Americano
Because he ignored me at the Banbridge Buskfest, I may have given the impression that I believe BBC NI DJ and one-time connoisseur of Orange fest, Ralph McLean, to be a talentless, out of touch, middle aged, phoney has-been, waste of licence payers' money, whose taste in music is as risible as the notion that he has some idea as to what the nature of 'American Roots' music might be.
Furthermore, I may have given the impression that his radio 'shows' are of interest only to retarded, maladroit specimens of the following genus: clapped out, male, posing, hilariously vain, aging hipsters in the deep and lonesome valley of mid life crisis.
I now realise that nothing could be further from the truth, and that Ralph is, in fact, a colossus bestriding the media industry, whose every doing and utterance and music selection is on trend, on message and, as it were, on song, and whose ability to identify with, connect to, and speak for, all ages and classes is unparalleled in the history of mass communication.
In addition, I now recognise that Mr McLean is steeped musically, as his Web page asserts, in something called 'Americana',* which was invented, apparently, by Mr Bob Dylan when he got together in 1967 with a few chums at the basement of a big house in Woodstock, New York, where they all got stoned and had a ball recording whatever Bob was sober enough to giggle through. At some point Mr Van Morrison went to Woodstock, and Ralph has since spent many happy hours on air celebrating this curmudgeonly 'genius', whom everyone had previously perceived to be a numbskull.
I apologise for any misunderstanding I may have caused.
[* I am indebted to Mr Greil Marcus's powers of invention here, as is Ralph.]
Spit on a stranger
Miss Lotte Lenya’s water bottle has a cap which doubles as a drinking vessel. I poured some water in, offered it to Lotte. She only took a sip. When she's not thirsty, she's definitely not thirsty, in that way dogs have of always being, or doing, something entirely.
Without thinking, I tipped her bottle up and took a long drink.
Across the way sat a good middle class mother with three immaculate children. The look of horror on her face. Drinking from the dog's bottle ... ! What an example to set ... !!
It's all right, I said across to her, I’m her Daddy, so anything she's got ...
And I laughed, to confirm that I'm a regular guy. She got up, took the children, and went off.
If only she knew ... When I was a youngster, growing up in a Co Down mill village, we never had anything. So everything else was a luxury. Chewing gum, for instance. Some spoiled brat would chew for a while, then spit it out on the footpath. We pounced; still plenty of flavour ... ! When I told this to Jean, she fainted.
Same with discarded cigarette butts: the hard men among us would find a match, light up, and drag for all they were worth, with the butt nipped between thumb and middle finger, and face screwed up like your granda's when he smiled with his false teeth out.
When Michael met Jean
A classic opening conversational gambit on first dates is to ask, Does anybody really know what time it is ... ? This epistemological starter-for-ten serves to introduce me as someone who is still searching, but in the empirical sense.
(As opposed to the 'spiritual', that is. Quick heads-up: 'spiritual' is shorthand for lumpenly torpid in the head, untenably vain, tiresomely bumptious, utterly gormless.)
Sometimes I continue with, Where there is sadness, we rearrange the dream. This lyrical goujon cements the impression my prospective soul mate is forming of me, i.e. a man who wears his liberal university education lightly all year round but eschews socks in the summertime.
And forget about low self-esteem. It's simple. Remember: you are not what you think you are; you are not what I think you are; you are what you think that I think you are.
Glumley
Then there's Joanna Lumley. A national treasure. First The Avengers, then a long time of nothing much, and finally she puts her clothes back on and goes to Russia and India and wherever to make TV programmes. She was born in Moscow and Delhi, and maybe other places, because all her parents and ancestors come from exotic places, and there's been a great commingling of genes in her special DNA, but only ones from interesting places, not Wales or Canada.
She’s like Peter Ustinov in the enviable esoteric lineage department, but nobody remembers him either. She’s somewhere else at the minute. I’ve never watched any of them actually. Not even the Russian one. I preferred Russia when it was the Soviet Union, so for me all the glamour's gone. And the thought of India ... millions of cows you have to worship, and people hanging off the ram packed railway carriages, and that Vikram Seth novel which is 1000 pages long, I mean, who has time? So I didn't watch her in India either.
But the work Joanna's done on behalf of the little Gherkins ... Brilliant.
Respect
When in Belfast I often walk Miss Lotte Lenya in Botanic Gardens, Asians, on spotting her, always hurl themselves out of the way? Do they imagine she's out for revenge? This is remarkable, since, as you will have noticed, in no other circumstances will they give way on a footpath.
But, like the good social anthropologist and cultural relativist that I am, I ascribe all this kind of thing to mere differences of 'cultural' outlook.
So wherever you are from, if you want to come here and eat my dog, or set up your own little ghetto among the 'infidels', or walk unyieldingly ten abreast on a narrow footpath, or sequester 'your' women, or jump queues, or mutilate your daughter's genitals, or whatever, that's grand.
Ethnocentrism, thank God, is a thing of the past. Empire and exploitation have gone. And we no longer impose our culturally subjective notions of civilised behaviour and compassion on those whose cultures define these notions differently, particularly when such definitions are 'faith based'.
Yes, even when these definitions result in practices that would appear to the uneducated eye of the Western European culturally bigoted, white male (me, say), as spectacularly cruel, vile and inhuman.
Furthermore, when I go to your country, and unlike you in mine, I will adhere strictly to your cultural mores and respect your customs, for if I don't, and depending on where I am, and what I have or haven't done, may have the hands or head or dick cut off me.
Let's get one thing straight: there is no criminality involved here
In fact, if I hadn't lost most of my retirement lump sum in a Bulgarian land scam, and the rest of it to Jean's pyramid scheme, I would be online right now, offering people money in exchange for big nudey pics of themselves.
You could have had a bit more respect for Schofield if he'd been into that game, but oh no, he simply had to have a relationship with a consenting younger man. Scumbag.
One morning, about 45 years ago, I was hitching a ride to Lurgan. The guy who eventually gave me a lift leaned across and flipped open the glove compartment door.
Take a look at those, he said brightly.
They were photographs of his wife. In some she was naked, others were of him having sex with her, or of her, as the newspapers say, performing a sex act on him.
You'd be welcome to join us, he said.
I was taken aback. I hummed some and then hawed a little. Already a lapsed Catholic, it was too late for me.
As I got out, he gave me a piece of cigarette packet with their telephone number written on it.
Oh dear ... that's how it began. The first inkling in a long, slow realisation that life, as Milan Kundera reminds us, is elsewhere. Painstakingly, indifferently, relentlessly, irretrievably elsewhere.
But I still have that number. Maybe I'll give them a call ...
Hats off to Keir Mather ... !!
He is the future of the Labour Party. The 25-year-old won the Selby and Ainsty by-election after overturning a 20,137 majority and has been nicknamed the 'baby of the House'.
Despite his age, though, young Lochinvar is the epitome of the professional political class, with very little life experience and even less common sense. His only jobs have been in public relations and as an aide to Wes Streeting. His main contribution to public life, before becoming an MP, was to denounce the feminist Germaine Greer as a ‘dangerous and abhorrent transphobe’.
Wow ... ! No shades-of-grey complexity for Keir, just his black-and-white worthiness and elitist moral superiority. He knows what people should be made to think.
Triple Oxbridge champagne socialists all round ... !!
A breathtaking work of staggering hypocrisy
Part 1: by ex-BBC journalist and pal of Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel:
'This (the Huw Edwards debacle) is an awful and shocking episode, where there was no criminality, but perhaps a complicated private life. That doesn’t feel very private now. I hope that will give some cause to reflect. They really need to.'
Part 2:by John Simpson, BBC Universe and Environs Affairs Editor:
'I feel so sorry for everyone involved in this: for the Edwards family, for the complainants, and for Huw himself. No criminal offences were committed, so it’s a purely personal tragedy for everyone involved. Let’s hope the press leave them all alone now.'
I wonder why neither of these Holier Than Thou, mediocre hacks voiced similar solidarity with Philip Schofield a few weeks back. After all, there was no criminality in that case either ...
Heaven forbid, but could it be that Schofield was a - how shall we say it? - low class presenter working for an equally low class, commercial (how distasteful) station (ITV), and therefore wholly undeserving of, and unentitled to, the support and sympathy that goes automatically to a distinguished, mature, authoritative, commanding presenter from the national broadcaster, who is caught with his trousers down around his ankles ... ?
I think we should be told ...
⏩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.
No comments