Title: Alphabet Males
Topic: My favourite living Irish men according to 26 chronologically laid out letters.
Well, fuck that.
M and B were particularly challenging to narrow down.
There’s nothing worse than a half-told yarn, is there?
…opening conversations with our teenager.
“You know that Mumford and Son album your friend’s father let you borrow? I’m really sorry but I accidently spilt boiling marmalade all over it. Take that Bonnie “Prince” Billy album round as a sorry from us.”
“You do know a lot of our favourite friends are gay, don’t you?“
“When I was your age, studying wasn’t as important as it is now.”
“Irish? Well, it was heavy on the vowels. It used to be the language of poor people, then the up-and-coming people, and eventually the middle-class people. Like your cousin, Scéitímínníáthásényámáólséch. Every child was forced to learn it for 13 years and could barely say the Hail Mary when they came out. Sort of like religion, only in a different language.”
“Oh look there’s Gay Byrne with another new show. Are you gay? Cause we’re totally cool with it.”
“Happy 13th Birthday. Here’s some information on contraception and a few condoms. I hope I’m not too late”
“You know the birth control information I gave you for your birthday. Am I too late? I’m totally cool with it. Just asking. No biggie.”
“You know you can tell us anything. Like if you’re gay or whatever. No pressure”
“Have you read Love in the Time of Gonorrhoea? Sorry, I mean Cholera? What’s Gonorrhoea? Well…”
“Happy 16th Birthday. Here’s some brochures on Canada and a few quid towards your emigration fund?”
“Can I borrow some money off you? Need to make a mortgage repayment. What’s a mortgage? Well, it was heavy on the zeros. It used to be the preserve of middle class people, then up-and-coming people, and eventually poor people. Every adult was forced to get one for 93 years and could barely say the Hail Mary when they fell into arrears. Sort of like Irish, only in a different language.”
Let me guess. You’re reading this with a neutral accented low deep-sounding voice. Somewhere near a four on a scale from Barry White to Orville. You were once mistaken for an American and almost baulked at the notion. Am I right?
Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. It wouldn’t matter anyway because I’ve already, unconsciously, assigned you a tone. Refined. Never whiney. The more austere your blog page, the more quietly spoken you are.
Do you hear the voices of other bloggers? Fonts become accents, themes become tones. Excessive use of capital letters are the leaned-on shift buttons that spell emphatic feelings. Family photos the itallics of your happiness.
Your About page is spoken in your best phone-voice you don’t know you have. Yes! That really is you. It’s like reading a post back weeks after publishing and not recognising it. Is that me? No way. I DO NOT sound like that. Do I?
Swearing always sounds better in American. Though not as good as Canadian. I can tell the subtle difference. The Canadian bloggers I read usually combine it with a fuck off point on something tremendously socially serious. All feminists, and the me during work meetings, should sound Canadian; then everyone would take us seriously. Ballsy English women all sound like Sally Phillips’s sweary mate in Bridget Jones. They make beautiful profanity from the sacred.
The speed of the clicks on the keyboard mirrors the rattle of chat on the screen. But time to retreat back down to the din.
Oh I wish I could fly.
Definition of feeling conflicted: itching to see a film that features an actor in the lead who gives you chronic reflux.
Begin Again is written and directed by John Carney of Bachelors Walk, On the Edge, and Once semi-fame (his work in my order of merit). Mark Ruffalo turns up looking the worse for wear from the set of The Kids Are All Right as the ramshackled down-on-his-luck A&R scout. Other cast members include iconic New York, Catherine Keener, and Stevie Wonder on the soundtrack. What’s not to love?
Keira Knightley. An acting ironing board or a poor woman’s Natalie Portman? Credit to Carney for making me care less with the naturalistic performances he woos from his cast, and all round charm of this unabashed love letter to music. Even James Corden is mildly bearable.
But the best lines are reserved for the perenially watchable Ruffalo. “Even the most benign scene is invested with meaning”. He is sitting on night-time steps of Downtown Manhattan listening to Stevie Wonder absorbing the urban streetcape details unfolding all around. Flickering neons, walkers-by making walk-on cameos unbeknownst to them, big yellow taxis floating past.
Any casual wearer of ear-phones will relate. Your heart might overheat from the overwhelming resonance of someone describing something in a THAT’S IT! kinda way. Mine did. Put me on a train with a Blue Nile album and I’m directing my own epic scene by the time it pulls away from the station. If the camera were to pan away it would reveal the Enterprise rolling through the blandlands of Louth. But it’s all “chimney tops, the trumpets, golden lights, the loving prayers” through an aural lens.
Carney is set to add a third installment to his loose musical trilogy. Once propelled him Glen Hansard onto the international scene but the director already had form in marrying the right tune with the emotion of a cinematic moment.
Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979 opens the overlooked ‘On the Edge’, introducing us to a troubled Cillian Murphy hovering over his Father’s coffin in a church before legging it on his bike to negotiate rushhour on South Circular Road; The Jam’s ‘Start’ zips alongside him through the neon lit streets in a stolen jamjar, before things slow down with The Frames’s Seven Day Mile when hope dances with possibility at a house party.
Still in the running for gong for best song in a closing scene is the finale of the first season of Bachelors Walk. The three flatmates are all out of luck. They gather on the sofa and sink into a silent sorrow to the best song on lost boyhood ever.
Next time on Striking the right note (part II) – best uses of music in non-John Carney films. And Morag will be here with embarrasing notes from my teenage crushes.
Clare. Just like I pictured it; skyscrapers and everything. Well, a supremely cool lighthouse in Loop Head, anyway. And, Gee, those Cliffs of Mo-hair sure are awesome. The place will always have a piece of my average-sized heart. And possibly some disturbing reverb from my occasional roars at Lucinda Creighton on the box.
Our visit last year coincided with the sleep-deprived government debates on the implementation of Ireland’s Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill. Based on the 1992 Supreme Court Ruling, it allows for limited rights to abortion on the grounds of the threat to the life of the woman, and the threat of suicide by the woman.
After months of protracted hearings and debate, and days of will she or won’t she, the Bill was finally passed and Lucinda was shown the door from her parliamentary party. The one she took great care to remind us, repeatedly, she was forced to prise open and slam shut with the might of her own unrivalled courage and conviction.
Two developments collided on the venn diagram of public opinion to produce her magical beatification.
Firstly, Creighton was upfront and unequivocal in her opposition to provision for the threat of suicide. A high profile junior minister challenging party directive. Her beliefs aired in adherence with the availability of free speech. But by the time the vote came round, Creighton was not the last opponent standing. Six of her colleagues were expelled from Fine Gael following their defiance of party policy by voting against it.
Secondly, the media, having cynically played Creighton’s resoluteness off against similar concerns from her female colleagues, soon forgot the other 24 Dáil members who voted against the Bill. Focus rapidly zoomed in on Michelle Mulherin’s U-turn as evidence of a lack of sufficient moral conviction and selfish careerist motives. In turn, the weight of Lucinda’s unyielding convictions won her the higher moral ground.
With the exception of Vincent Browne, this narrative appeared to go unchallenged by the mainstream media. Over the following days, Lucinda’s bravery frontloaded the headlines. By this stage, it was Lucinda who was providing most of the commentary from what appeared to be a temporary altar built on the shoulders of cameramen and microphones. A new secular saint was born.
Danish TV drama is not a clinically approved petri-dish for lab analysis of Irish politics, but like much of popular culture, it has its usefulness in showing us something about how the world works. Watching Borgen over the year since these queasy events has helped shaped a few questions that were achingly absent during the carnival.
Birgitte Nyborg is the impossibly charismatic leader of The Moderates, a centre-left party occupying the ruling seat in the governing coalition. As PM of Denmark, Nyborg presides over the usual dilemmas pertaining to a range of domestic (welfare reform, criminal justice, immigration) and international (rendition flights, international trade, war and humanitarian intervention) affairs. Negotiating policy is based on skilfully balancing trade-offs between those ideologies among her coalition partners and opposition, with the best possible outcome for the common good of the Country and its citizens. Or pragmatism, in short. Backed up by commendable communication skills. It is classically Danish in its centrist liberal leanings. To illustrate the complexity of fixed morals in the political bear pit of government, Nyborg emerges as an exemplar of a centrist idealist forced to surrender to seemingly unpalatable compromises.
Negative public opinion against her intensifies the longer she fails to bow to internal pressure to upgrade spend on military hardware in the wake of Danish peacekeeping casualties in Iraq. She caves in. Proposed early retirement age leaps up and down as the policy pieces are moved around the chess board. They settle on a half-way year. Business oligarchs are courted and double-bluffed. Everyone’s a winner. The cracks in capitalism are assumed, but the purest form of liberal policies prove an ineffective panacea alone.
More than once, Nyborg is accused of undermining her party’s ideals and the lines between political necessity and retention of power at all costs become blurred. Are the risks she takes to pitch for the role of mediator between two warring African countries indicative of the vanity and glory-seeking many accuse her of, or her fundamental humanitarian impulses she cannot ethically ignore? Probably both.
Was Michelle Mulherin’s U-turn a case of outright redundancy protection, a simple case of toeing the party-line, or surrendering to the will of the people?
Was Lucinda’s steely reserve in the face of party discipline purely a case of moral conviction at a heavy price, a self-serving move that elevated her public profile, or an exercise in placing personal conviction above consensus and the will of the electorate?
We’ll never really know. Partly because the prevailing responses to these questions came only from Lucinda.
Fine Gael was upfront in its coalition deal with its governing partners. The Bill was to be passed. It was informed by a Court ruling mandated by the electorate in a referendum 20 years previously. Time for a cabinet to do its work for the common good long built on electoral consensus. A no-brainer. The issue of conscience a moot point. As Vincent Browne emphatically pointed throughout – abortion is already available to Irish women if they have sufficient means, and an acceptable form of identification for Ryanair, to have one. Nyborg would credit the electorate and her cabinet with more cop than wilful border blindness and hypocrisy.
At no point during the media spectacle was Lucinda asked to consider the worth of the moral convictions of those who voted as a matter of conscience. Those ‘brave’ Dáil members who used their conscience as an instrument to balance personal and party ideologies with the best possible outcome for the country and its citizens. Pragmatism, in short. The stuff that progressive modern democratic politics is based on. Not parish pump politics in which progress is stifled or buoyed up by the mettle of individuals rarely tested. Nyborg hails from a tradition of the former; Ireland is built on the latter. The implementation of the Bill presented a break-away moment when fresh realities bubbling below the surface for two decades would finally flower. When notions of bravery and conviction would be re-defined.
As an individual who felt stifled by her party directive, Creighton was free to declare her position, bare her fangs, and bow out. As an accidental arbiter on standards of political conscientiousness, it was a role she cheerfully grabbed from a willing media. Nyborg would not have been arrogant enough to accept such a misplaced honour.
That any of these women share similar genitalia should be neither here nor there, but stories of halos and villains in battles involving wombs are always easier to write when women are the chief protagonists. As politicians, all of them, like their colleagues, and the parties to which they belong, are weak to overtures from compromise, party leaders, personal gain, and the will of the people.
Would the woman with the most courage of her moral convictions please stand up?
You can all sit down now.
I was pottering around earlier… No, wait, that line was done before. Let’s start again. I was skulking (that’s more like it) around my office today, straining to maintain indifference to the efficiency on display from my colleagues. The kind of multi-tasking that’s precipitated by lengthy arse-scratching; that precedes a mass exodus. The sickening type of conscientiousness used to flirt with interview panels combined with a frenzy of Holy Thursday intensity.
It’s the 12th week. No, I’m not up the duff. July 12th. You know..bowler hats and bonfires. Thunderbolts and lightning. Very, very, frightening. Galileo. Galileo. GAAALIIIILEEEEOOO. They’re just poor boys etc.
Ordinarily, I’d have legged it out of here five years ago by now, but since I can’t simultaneously make a phone-call, email, and doddle a drawing of the person I’m talking to on the phone in an unflattering position, I won’t be going anywhere till August. Which is a pity because I like nothing better than leaving a stress pit to migrate West to roar obscenities at Lucinda Creighton on the box (this time last year).
Emotions and blood pressure remain consistent with July 2013 levels however, as I’m nearing the end of the second series of Borgen. Nyborg v Creighton. There’s a debate I’d pay Vincent Browne to chair. Top five ways Birgitte would slaughter St. Lucinda. That’s another post. Fuck it, I might just do that after this one. My blog ‘n’ all.
Meanwhile, back in the daily dungeon, I’ll be fantasising as I gaze out the window at the fresh Ulster flag flapping in front of my face. Another year, another head bowed in disappointment. Not at the politicians, or the community leaders, or the manufacturers of Daz washing powder that keeps them sparkling, or the cherry-picker vans that run them up the poles, or the sun that shines down on the spectacle, although that in particular upsets me greatly.
No. I recline, and wonder to myself… where are the bloody artists? The subversive thought ticklers? The culture terrorists?
I’ve calculated there are at least 4 hours of darkness per night during which the guardians of the flegs are tucked up in their wee beds. This gives sufficient time to strike a la the characters in The Educkators who re-adjusted the furniture of the rich to spook them out of their complacency; the erection of police ‘Information Wanted’ signs around London, only the incidents included “two people hugging” and “someone seen smiling at 2:05pm”; or the landscape gardeners that produced glorious flowerbeds on urban roundabouts and desolated grounds overnight to the joy and bemusement of passers-by the following day.
Where is Banksy when ya need him? Let me guess. In a caravan in Bundoran?
Fucking knew it.
Image: The Telegraph
I’d been pottering around earlier scratching my head over the significance of today’s date. It kept staring back at me throughout the morning. Checking my phone, flicking through my diary, composing a letter. There’s something about today. It took till lunchtime to twig it.
I was in a similarly listless state that morning, landing in late to a Mexican heave of relief across speechless faces of colleagues. What? Surely being late isn’t a crisis that merits such a reaction.
The news was haemorrhaging across the city. Russell Square. Tavistock Square. Edgeware Road. They meant little to me before. Now they’re universally known place-names synonymous with death and destruction.
The eeriness trickled southwards over the bridge as the day wore on. Peckham. Camberwell. Brixton. All reverent wake houses with business not as usual, heads shaking in disbelief.
A few posts back I mourned my own wee corner of London. Friday evenings down The Hermit’s Cave where we convened for weekly secular mass. Here are another few aspects of London living I still miss by way of my salute to the great city.
London. Facking brilliant. Init.
Pride. A feeling I tend to view with some suspicion. “I’m very proud of you”, quarter-blubbed her Da to me after our daughter was born. You didn’t. Seriously. You didn’t just contaminate the moment with a half-assed attempt to reduce it to a cliché. The ignominy.
I did what any self-respecting post-labour woman in that situation would do. I obeyed one of the master cheese-makers, and left the tender moment alone before demanding the legendary tea and toast I’d heard so much about. I’m not even a tea-drinker. Thanks, Billy. I’d have had you for the requisite background music if we had been filming it for a dodgy rom-com. Set in the 80s. Before those slasher movies came along. Like Baby Led Weaning Part II, and When Gina Forde Attacks.
“You should be so proud of her”. I got that a lot over the days that followed. Proud of her for what? Winning a beauty contest with one contestant? Our unconditional love on the spot? Arriving on Women’s Christmas so my Mother could win a bet with herself to brag about?
Now she’s two, she’s notching up small but significant victories of her own that appear to fill her with immense pride. “Look at me!!” Taking her shoes off and getting into her Dad’s boots, unaided. Polishing off her dinner to get holding her plate aloft like a trophy. Hopping on one foot for five seconds (before falling on her arse). “Look at you”, I respond in a voice so saturated with exclamation marks it sounds unfamiliarly squeaky. Hark the sound of early parental pride.
Whatever kink of nature was to blame (paranoia/control freakery/pregnancy related cheese deprivation), I spent the first month of her life pre-occupied with those victories for which she will inevitably have to fight hard. Keeping her in milk and zeds will be the least of our worries. What about the battles we’ll be prevented from muscling in on to pin whatever fucker up against the wall of reason in all The Great Wars. Lasting self-confidence. Sufficient self-esteem. Getting out of hen parties. Independence. Immunity from protracted heartbreak. Body confidence. Healthy ideas on sex. Some fucker somewhere telling her she can’t do something. Her talents threatening to become her enemies. A decent taste in music. Resistance to snobbery, elitism and looking down on others. Except those with a shit taste in music. The Biggies.
I was reminded of those bizarre weeks during Caitlin Moran’s show last night at Vicar St.. A pick ‘n’ mix of readings and rants that addressed an array of trademark Moran topics. The absence of menstrual blood in popular culture. The crushing impact of the media’s obsession with bodily perfection on female self-worth. The lady boners from men who call themselves feminists. The dangers of Tweeting sexual conquest plans for Benedict Cumberbatch whilst drunk (“I’d let my face be a painter and decorator’s radio for him”). And plenty of fun-loving filth in-between.
A rallying call to arms around each other to call time on some bad shit. And get some other good shit started. Her typical good-humour the vehicle for driving home the basic tenets of contemporary feminism as the world should see them. 1. Women are equal to men; 2. Don’t be a dick; 3. Er, that’s it. A one-woman show reinforcing the right of feminism to belong to women in common, not the mortar-boarded few for relentless tug o’ warring. Get with it, girls. Feminism is a moving patchwork of issues that confer on women the right to move freely around it to take on their particular fight of choice.
Stand-out moments came courtesy of the feelings she had on the responses to her self-disclosure on having an abortion in How to Be A Woman. A poignant reading followed tracing the historical roots and rationale for the procedure from Greek times to the present day. Half the world’s women who have abortions will have them safely; the other half will have them anyway. All facts delivered matter-of-factly.
But it is her comedy-free commitment to laying bare the unvarnished realities of class and welfare where Moran truly comes into her own. Abortion is, and always will be, available to Irish women; provided they have the means to travel to the UK to buy one. Lamenting the robbing of middle-class treats by austerity cuts will always be worlds removed from the effort it takes to claw out of pre-determined debt, poverty, and a ‘dodgy’ postcode onto a rung more comfortable. Wipe hope from the lives of the poor and those smokes and fat foods so frowned upon become their only treats.
Scanning the audience, I spot a few other favourite women. There’s Roisin Ingle laughing her heart out. That’s my best mate over there with one of the Twitter famous “36 men” in the room. Here’s my Ma. Clapping and laughing wildly through it all. Like a woman who finally got out on her hen night 52 years after her wedding day. Her daughter to the right of her, grown-up granddaughters to the left. A woman who lived through the marriage bar, ‘churching’, and a thermometer for contraception. A woman who wasn’t able to open a Credit Union account, whose children received a state allowance that could only be paid into her husband’s account. A woman who couldn’t complete her secondary education because her family didn’t have the money and she was needed for “women’s work”. And then it clicks.
Pride: Sitting next your Ma at a Caitlin Moran show being reminded that the phrases you use to build your case for equality passed down from her lips originally. If I do half as good a job with my own daughter, I’ll have done OK. She’ll have her own ideas on what pieces of the patchwork she’s up for tackling and tickling.
Run with them, child.
Please, Pilcrow; just hear me out. I swear to you, it meant nothing. It’s just you weren’t here. I couldn’t get on-line. I had too much coffee to drink. And, well, one new Word document led to another. I was lonely.
But nothing happened. Honestly. I don’t remember anything after the fourth semi-colon. Next thing I knew I woke up with the mouse still in my hand for Chrissake so nothing could’ve happened. Except for that one paragraph. I can’t even remember the font’s name. Comic something or other. I recall thinking it was a bit too matey for a font I’d just met. A bit full-on.
It felt like my thoughts were being channelled through a children’s TV presenter to a two-year old. Or Scooby Doo. Not like your dulcet Frances McDormand-cum-Christopher Lee tones. I know that probably makes you sounds like Joan Burton on paper. But Joan’s words are dragged down a blackboard in Gothic size 80. They’re not deliberately small letters like yours, like my tight tiny handwriting that some say is proof of my secretive side.
My secrets have always felt safer with you. You get me. And no, this isn’t remotely like the one-night stands I had before we met. I’ve seen you eyeing up Twenty Twelve and Adelle, so you can’t really blame me for trying. Admittedly, Next Saturday was a mistake.
You’re my first serious theme and I really want us to give it a go. I can change. I can be better. I can make a better effort with visuals. I’ll throw in the odd quote, if you really want me to. Exclamation marks? I’m on them already!!!!!!!!
department of speculation 