Saturday, March 26, 2011

Ikea. Heaven or.....?

As a nation we Irish had developed certain routines that were followed for generations - particularly on a Sunday. Mass was a big one, over 90% of us attending almost every Sunday until very recent years. Sunday dinner another biggie, families sitting down together around a joint of meat or a roast chicken. Some of us even got dessert on Sundays.Ice-cream and jelly or home-made apple tart with a taste of whipped cream or even better a pouring of thick yellow custard. Yum.

The GAA since its inception has been a huge part of most Irish Sundays. As time rolled on and we became a little more prosperous the Sunday drive or spin became a form of torture that I don't think was peculiar only to Irish children. All jammed (without seat belts) in the back seat, younger siblings on older siblings' laps; the 'baby' sitting on the mother's lap in the front passenger seat as the father drove his squad to some freezing beach or alleged beauty spot to admire the scenery. Constant fighting, World War 3 in the back seats of Ford Cortinas all over the country.

Then came a rash of DIY and gardening centres that spread like a contagion all over the country. Sunday shopping was introduced and the desires of the home and garden enthusiast were whetted or sated by a ramble around Woodies or Atlantic wher one could debate the merits of vinyl silk over satin finish. Cash became flash for a brief but glorious period and that's when life became about 'want' not 'need' and shopping centres all over the country were thronged with people spending, spending, -spending - all day Sunday. We worshipped at the altar of shopping for non-essentials. It became a national pasttime.

Well, the mad excesses of cash have been swallowed into the black and bottomless pit that is our banking crisis. So Sundays - what now to do? I'll tell ye where I think everyone goes on a Sunday now. At least most Sundays. Ikea in Ballymun is swarming with bodies.Surging. Filled to bursting by shoppers in every age-group wandering around, coming in to pick up a picture frame and maybe treat the kids to some Swedish meatballs and going home with two new duvet covers, some decking, loose covers for the sofa, throws, rugs, glasses, a new cuddly toy, a fabulous lamp, a few plants, the cheapest coffee table in Ireland and shite! did we leave enough space in the car for the kids?

I love Ikea, love all their nice bright funky practical designs in both furniture and soft furnishings, love all their little nik-naks too. But on Sundays in Dublin Ikea is sheer bloody Hell.HELL!!And Hell is packed. One may well have to circumnavigate the carparks three or four times before one battles with another car for that coveted space. Once inside you just have to go with the flow of the crowds. You invariably spend far too much time and money in the store and then you have to queue for ages to pay despite over thirty paypoints all being manned. So I'm never, ever, ever EVER going to Ikea on a Sunday again. I'll go some nice quiet evening or afternoon Monday to Wednesday when everyone within a hundred mile radius of Ballymun is somewhere else.

I am a marketing man's dream. I fall for all their ploys; prove all their statistics. So I think I'll send Jemser next time I want something from Ikea. He is the only person I know who can go in to that heavenly of hellish place and only buy what he went in to buy. I'll save a fortune. But my house will be a little duller. I wonder what my imagined great-grandchildren will be doing with their Sundays in the future? Food for another blog methinks..........

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Another bit of an aul' rant...........

I’m fed up. I’m fed up with providing solutions to people who –for whatever reason- refuse to even consider same solutions. Of people who will always think the negative ALWAYS outweighs every positive in anything one tries to do. Of people who will not change the status quo or even attempt to move on, at an imperceptible two tiny steps at a time; those who declare ‘it will not work’ before thinking about it. I’m fed up of people who are Doom-Sayers, Nay-Sayers and who quite simply would rather have the bloody grievance than consider doing something about it. I’m fed up of people who refuse to think for themselves – not out of any intellectual incapacity but out of fear or sheer bloody laziness. The mind is a muscle, use it or…

So. After considering what might possibly go wrong, DO NOT use said possibility as a reason why not to do something. Weigh it up against the positive, think it out; follow the thought. We’d all still be grunting at each other if Homo Sapiens had decided not to bother inventing society or the wheel or electricity or pasteurization or hammers, nails, clothing, language, etcetera etcetera - just in case something might go wrong. So will all the grievance bearers who won’t think around daily problems please head for the nearest cave and sit there moaning to the other grievance bearers until death us all do part.

Now for ye.

Phew – I feel so much better, all the tension in my shoulders is gone – pounded into my keyboard. Isn’t this blogging a great yoke altogether!

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

A Letter to St Patrick

Well Pa,


Here we are again. It hardly seems a year since we celebrated you last. But the sun comes up and goes down and the days pass no matter who is in charge - or not.

Remember you banished the snakes for us once - back in the day? I suppose you heard about the feckers getting back in? Wormed their way right up to the shoulders of the gatekeepers, dripped poison into gullible ears as golfclubs were swung and champagne quaffed. I suppose that’s snake nature. Bit disappointed in the gatekeepers though.
But ‘twasn’t only the gatekeepers were taken in, we all were - thought we deserved … stuff…. possessions – you know yourself. Built D’Arbey’s Castles - all over the blasted country. Of course the whole shebang – never anything but smoke and mirrors- came tumblin’ down and down we all slithered – right down to zero. Beyond zero actually - into the dark side – a scary place, I can tell you.

Mebbe you could pay us a visit soon Pa, do a sweep through the long grass with your upturned scepter, to check the snakes are well gone – or at least de-fanged to prevent the same sorry mess re-occurring. We’re awful sorry we lost the run of ourselves. Honest. We’ll try our best to learn from this debacle. I’m sure yourself and the other saints get pissed off with us feckin’ things up all the time. You’re really very forgiving, I suppose that’s what makes you all saints.

I think this time we might get it right. Y’heard about the horror in Japan? The earthquake and tsunami were horrendous – but Christ, the radiation contamination danger on top of that. They say nuclear power is the cheapest form of energy. But at what price one life? Or one sick child?

I have a dream Pa. An army of windmills marching off our west coast harnessing wind and waves, feeding all of Ireland’s energy needs. Mebbe we’d even have energy over for export! Wouldn’t that be a turn up for the books Pa– exporting electricity instead of our kids!. Ah Pa, won’t it be great, row upon row of beautiful steel giants majestically harnessing Nature’s power, like an army of Fir Bolg protecting our green and much loved shores.

Just as well the world has dreamers Pa, for where would we be without them?

Yours forever

Evelyn

Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Sound of Silence

I started to suffer from insomnia when I was pregnant with son#2. It went away when he was born but returned in recent years. I have been doing everything in my power to banish it but still it insists. It was only last night I realised why. It is for the silence. My inner writer calls to me in the middle of the night and up I must get and sit at the laptop and wait. I need the night. Because the night brings me silence.

The silence brings it to me, that feeling, the feeling that I am on the cusp of all understanding. I listen through the silence hurting and on the other side of that note (they say it’s B #) lies the truth. And this truth is what I have been afraid of for years, for I may well not like that truth. I must be prepared for that. I will continue to disappoint myself. Truth sets us free, and this is the lesson my father tried to teach me, the lesson I would not listen to. Tell the truth, boy. He meant your inner truth. I thought it merely a phrase, a cliché badly used. But his truth is not my tuth. My truth is not your truth. This is the only tenet by which we all should live our lives. Truthfulness.

I’m not talking venial sins here, venial sins are a necessary part of life but truth with ourselves vital. If we are not truthful with ourselves we are committing mortallers, fatal blows to our inner selves, killing our inner Gods, our conscience. I suppose that’s why they are called mortal sins for they are a sin against ourselves, our bodies, our beings, demeaning us in our own eyes, not some celestial God’s, for we are truly God. Each one of us. This is what Christ and all the great writers and philosophers since time began have tried to tell us, I think. Life has whatever meaning we give it. Random stuff will happen and our lives will go astray from time to time, we will lose loved ones- bad shit happens and we will turn to drink and drugs and shopping (particularly shoes!) to block the pain. But we have to feel the pain, let it in, let the anger out. And forgive ourselves. Above all –forgive ourselves.

When I was fifteen I started to understand this but couldn’t articulate it I didn’t have the language. I tried to put it in an English essay. I remember sitting at a table writing an essay on ‘Silence’ for Beatrice Ryan, my English teacher – a woman who loved words – I couldn’t describe silence because I never heard it. I was a teenager but had never learned to like myself, I sat outside of everyone else, earnest intense – a bit bloody scary actually!. I saw a society that judged one on how one looked or dressed or spoke or on wher one lived or on the car ones father did or didn’t have and I couldn’t relate to that. So I built up walls and hid behind bookshelves. Disappeared into the worlds of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, of William Shakespeare. Of storytellers. I was happy in these worlds.

There were nine people in our house growing up. Nine different egos. Nine different sets of needs. Not all of them could be met and the noise was bloody awful. So I wrote in this essay for Beatrice all this stuff. And Beatrice read it and recognised it as truth. But perhaps it frightened her too- for when she was returning our marked essays to us she said, ‘They were very good, but some of them were too personal.’ I was mortified. I immediately assumed she was referring to me because I knew I felt uneasy handing up the essay wondering had I overstepped the mark. That mark that everyone else seems instinctively to know but I for some reason don’t see. Or maybe I see it and say, hang that I’m telling my truth whether they like it or not.

Once I wrote a story that upset a family member – not deliberately, I knew they wouldn’t like it because it came too near the bone but it was never intended for this person’s eyes. It was an expurgation from my soul - something written to make sense of what I saw, to try to understand. Anyway, another family member said ‘you shouldn’t have written that’. I was stunned. Censorship. At my own door. Is that not what has been wrong with this benighted little country of ours? Don’t tell. Don’t tell. Keep quiet, it’ll all be the same in a hundred years. Yes, it will be the same – if we don’t speak out and stop it. I have to write it. You can choose not to read it.

So sit back, close your eyes and listen through the silence hurting to find that inner core you know is there. And accept that nastiness also dwells in your soul side by side with goodness, matter and anti-matter if you like. In order to move forward you must acknowledge the badness and vow to try to overcome it. For we are all human and everyday we must battle against our selfishness, our envies, our petty grievances. And it is only in accepting all these things and vowing to try to forgive ourselves we can

And I’m not drunk. Or drugged. Or insane. Or ‘special’. I’m Irish!

And Etty Basgetti….don’t be crying!

The Sound of Silence

I started to suffer from insomnia when I was pregnant with son#2. It went away when he was born but returned in recent years. I have been doing everything in my power to banish it but still it insists. It was only last night I realised why. It is for the silence. My inner writer calls to me in the middle of the night and up I must get and sit at the laptop and wait. I need the night. Because the night brings me silence.

The silence brings it to me, that feeling, the feeling that I am on the cusp of all understanding. I listen through the silence hurting and on the other side of that note (they say it’s B #) lies the truth. And this truth is what I have been afraid of for years, for I may well not like that truth. I must be prepared for that. I will continue to disappoint myself. Truth sets us free, and this is the lesson my father tried to teach me, the lesson I would not listen to. Tell the truth, boy. He meant your inner truth. I thought it merely a phrase, a cliché badly used. But his truth is not my tuth. My truth is not your truth. This is the only tenet by which we all should live our lives. Truthfulness.

I’m not talking venial sins here, venial sins are a necessary part of life but truth with ourselves vital. If we are not truthful with ourselves we are committing mortallers, fatal blows to our inner selves, killing our inner Gods, our conscience. I suppose that’s why they are called mortal sins for they are a sin against ourselves, our bodies, our beings, demeaning us in our own eyes, not some celestial God’s, for we are truly God. Each one of us. This is what Christ and all the great writers and philosophers since time began have tried to tell us, I think. Life has whatever meaning we give it. Random stuff will happen and our lives will go astray from time to time, we will lose loved ones- bad shit happens and we will turn to drink and drugs and shopping (particularly shoes!) to block the pain. But we have to feel the pain, let it in, let the anger out. And forgive ourselves. Above all –forgive ourselves.

When I was fifteen I started to understand this but couldn’t articulate it I didn’t have the language. I tried to put it in an English essay. I remember sitting at a table writing an essay on ‘Silence’ for Beatrice Ryan, my English teacher – a woman who loved words – I couldn’t describe silence because I never heard it. I was a teenager but had never learned to like myself, I sat outside of everyone else, earnest intense – a bit bloody scary actually!. I saw a society that judged one on how one looked or dressed or spoke or on wher one lived or on the car ones father did or didn’t have and I couldn’t relate to that. So I built up walls and hid behind bookshelves. Disappeared into the worlds of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, of William Shakespeare. Of storytellers. I was happy in these worlds.

There were nine people in our house growing up. Nine different egos. Nine different sets of needs. Not all of them could be met and the noise was bloody awful. So I wrote in this essay for Beatrice all this stuff. And Beatrice read it and recognised it as truth. But perhaps it frightened her too- for when she was returning our marked essays to us she said, ‘They were very good, but some of them were too personal.’ I was mortified. I immediately assumed she was referring to me because I knew I felt uneasy handing up the essay wondering had I overstepped the mark. That mark that everyone else seems instinctively to know but I for some reason don’t see. Or maybe I see it and say, hang that I’m telling my truth whether they like it or not.

Once I wrote a story that upset a family member – not deliberately, I knew they wouldn’t like it because it came too near the bone but it was never intended for this person’s eyes. It was an expurgation from my soul - something written to make sense of what I saw, to try to understand. Anyway, another family member said ‘you shouldn’t have written that’. I was stunned. Censorship. At my own door. Is that not what has been wrong with this benighted little country of ours? Don’t tell. Don’t tell. Keep quiet, it’ll all be the same in a hundred years. Yes, it will be the same – if we don’t speak out and stop it. I have to write it. You can choose not to read it.

So sit back, close your eyes and listen through the silence hurting to find that inner core you know is there. And accept that nastiness also dwells in your soul side by side with goodness, matter and anti-matter if you like. In order to move forward you must acknowledge the badness and vow to try to overcome it. For we are all human and everyday we must battle against our selfishness, our envies, our petty grievances. And it is only in accepting all these things and vowing to try to forgive ourselves we can

And I’m not drunk. Or drugged. Or insane. Or ‘special’. I’m Irish!

And Etty Basgetti….don’t be crying!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

'Gwan the Girls........

I had a lovely night last night. I was invited to read in the Irish Writer’s Centre along with other women writers to celebrate International Women’s Day. The event was organised by Eileen Cooney of the Centre of Gender and Women’s Studies in TCD in conjunction with the Irish Writers’ Centre.

The two big rooms off the first landing in this lovely Georgian building were given over to the event and I was delighted to see such a large number of young people at it. Most writers' nights I go to seem to be populated by the grey brigade (I’m one of them!). If I could find my programme I’d list the women who read but in typical middle-aged forgetfulness I put it somewhere safe last night and now I can’t find it.

Anyway, the women all know who they were and I think they’d agree with me when I say that we all instinctively write about the same topics. Big themes. Death, sex, birth and family. Little themes. Cleaning, cooking, gardening, child-rearing. Life. And do y’know what - we do it bloody well! It was a gentle humourous night, no barging maleness here, and although there were some men present, they were nice and quiet - afraid maybe to make a noise!

A lot of the women who read were in and around my own age and I was impressed to see how many of them had gone back to college as mature students and done degrees in Creative Writing. I’d love to do one. I’d particularly like to do the one in East Anglia. But I have no basic degree (‘cept in arse-wiping) and I’ve no money to indulge myself. Mebbe some rich philanthropist out there will fund me –‘gwan – y’know y’want to!

But just you wait world. Once I hit sixty and me kids are fled the nest I’m going to do degrees ‘til they come out of me ears. Philosophy, Social Studies, English Lit, History, Psychology. And I’m going to do them in Trinity College. And I’m going to join Trinity Players ( they must need older wimmin). In other words I’m going to start my life at sixty as I should have done at seventeen.

I did start in college, but because my mother worked part-time it pushed us over the income limit and I wasn't eligible for a grant. The money was borrowed to pay the first term's fees but even scraping together bus fare and lunch money was a strain on the family purse and I decided to drop out. That was the excuse I used to leave after my first term. The money would have been found if I had showed willing – I know that now. But the reality was college terrified me. Everybody seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing. Between tutorials I would sit in the cubicles in the toilets smoking and reading a book. Weird or what? I couldn’t handle the freedom, the being treated as an adult. I was a peculiar adolescent; went straight from being a child to being a surrogate parent - helping my mother with younger siblings – bossing them about. Mammying them. It’s no wonder they were always fighting with me! Bossy-boots.

So I missed out on the whole teenage and college experience and I never learned from my peers. None of my peers in the area I grew up read and I had no interest in clothes and make-up or boys. Well, I did I suppose, but I wasn’t great at picking clothes that suited me because I thought I was fat and ugly and boys terrified me. Rough, noisome creatures. So I left college with relief and got a safe job in the public service – I was only staying for six months - until I got a proper job. Thirty years later I look back and say how did that happen. If I could only time travel back and take my shy seventeen year old self by the hand and walk her through Trinity’s beautiful archway and spread the world of learning and literature and words, beautiful beautiful words at her feet. I would put my arms about her, say ‘You can do it Charlie Brown’, tell her she was statuesque, beautiful and intelligent and all she had to do was be herself. People would like her, she would make intelligent friends of her own age and her brain could be sharpened by the whole college experience.

But. If I had taken that path I mightn’t have met my Jemser. Nor found my beautiful Donegal – my spiritual home. Nor had my beautiful boys. And where would I be without my men? My rocks, they who accepts me completely even when I’m being totally irrational. Now don’t be thinking they're perfect! They're not – and no better woman to let them know that. The craithuirs. They have an awful handful with me as the woman in their lives - for the moment anyway.

How did this post start at International Woman’s Day and end with Jemser and me boys? Isn’t a woman’s mind a strange - sometimes frightening - but always beautiful place.

Friday, March 4, 2011

The Cripple of Inishmaan

Jemser and I went to see Druid’s production of Martin McDonagh’s Cripple of Inishmaan last night. I was surprised that the Gaiety theatre in Dublin wasn’t full. Druid normally play to packed houses, perhaps a sign of these straitened times?

As always with Druid the set was magnificent albeit a little large for the small shop in the West of Ireland it purported to represent. Perhaps this particular theatre isn’t intimate enough for the pared-back look at claustrophobic small town and rural life Mc Donagh always gives us; the shop interior has a counter the length of which Argos would be proud! But it is the attention to detail that Druid take in all their productions that so endears them to me. The way the tinned peas and bags of flour were stocked – in a particular way that I have seen mirrored in many tiny shops all over the country.

We Irish spend most of our time looking for the flaw - ‘ye missed a bit’ – that fatal little mistake a blow-in will make that will mark him as not one of our own. But McDonagh, reared for the most part in London although spending every summer in Connemara, has us to a T - the petty backbiting, fatalistic thinking and determination to be the first with news, good or bad; our awful predisposition to sneer and jeer and our elephantine memories for slights in the past. The way we’ll back each other up – we can laugh at ourselves but no-one else shall! McDonagh holds a mirror to Ireland for the world to see this decidedly unsentimental side of our psyche.

McDonagh’s female characters are fantastic-I’m a Dub and proud of my accent but I would and go all sibilant eshs to play any of those particular ladies. They remind me of Synge’s Pegeen Mike and Widow Quinn. Strong earthy feisty women, uncowed by centuries of oppression by men, Church and State.

The cripple’s two old aunts who run the store are worry warts who appear to have been standing behind that counter for all eternity. Standing there like Vladimir and Estragon, waiting and wondering, waiting and wondering. Stoics commenting on the anarchy and amorality about them. I particularly love McDonagh’s younger women, Girleen in ‘The Lonesome West’ made a huge impression on me years ago and the character of Slippy Helen in The Cripple of Inishmaan is just as vivid. Her tongue is foul and she has no mercy and one gets the feeling she always tells the truth - and hang the consequences. No dressing things up for our Slippy!

The acting was superb as you would expect from a sterling cast that includes Ingrid Craigie, Liam Carney and Dearbhla Molloy, and Tadhg Murphys’s crippled Billy is masterfully understated. In this production (as in life) there is as much said in the silences on stage as there is in body language and in conversation. Laurence Kinlan’s Bartley makes the most irritating and hilarious clicking noise as he endlessly ponders on which sweetie to take; he's like a clock ticking away the seconds of your life.

Crippled Billy decides he can wait no longer for his life to start, passing time by reading and re reading the few books on the island and staring at the island’s cows for entertainment, so much so that half the populace think he is touched. Doing nothing – as generations before him have done is not an option for Billy. An American film crew has arrived on a neighbouring island to film ‘Man of Aran’ and all the youngsters are determined to go over and be part of this big event. Billy cannot get anyone to take him, sure isn’t he crippled and ugly and not a one on the island wants him let alone a film crew - to paraphrase Slippy Helen and Bartley. So Billy forges a letter from the doctor saying he has not long for this world and shows it to a local boatman BabbyBobby, playing on his sympathies to take him in the boat too.

The boat man does that and returns the following day with the other two youngsters but the cripple stays behind declaring he is off to Amerikay for a screen test and will return wealthy and famous. Life ticks relentlessly by in the shop, Slippy Helen wreaking havoc on the males of the island for presuming to touch her or even think of touching her without paying in some way. Johnny Pateen Mike and his ancient Mammy fight with each other to be first with tidbits of news, each hoping the other will pop his/her clogs asap.

The shop is a bit of a rabbit warren. In and out in and out, everyone saying the same thing and at the same time saying saying no thing.

The States doesn’t work for Billy and home he comes, screws up courage asks Slippy for a date. She laughs at the notion of him - plug ugly and crippled - asking anyone for a date. In despair Billy he plans to kill himself, but even this sombre subject matter has a magical touch of anarchic black comedy that only the McDonagh/Druid combination could come up with. I won’t ruin the ending for you.

What I’ve always liked about Martin McDonagh’s plays is his unflinching honesty and his wicked sense of humour. This is life parodied at a bestial level – cruelty, both physical and emotional abound. And there is certainly no sentimentality. The world claims that the Irish are a sentimental lot ( we’re not, we just cry and sing sad songs when we drink too much) and sometimes we are portrayed in a romantic way, shrouded in tales of Celtic heroes and druids, poets and scholars, brave men fighting our oppressors to free us from colonial rule and globalised religion.

Real Irish life is harsher, the elements and alcohol make sure of that and Ireland’s people are far more pragmatic than the world gives us credit for. Martin McDonagh manages to send us all up, make us laugh at ourselves while accepting unwholesome truths about our tarnished Celtic souls.

So if the show comes within driving distance of your home make sure you get a ticket - a great night out.