That Damn Lard

I'm looking forward to this evening, when I'll have a visitor from Dublin, my first since moving to Manchester. My visitor is one of my two oldest friends, the leader of a childhood trio that was -- frankly -- rather wild. At any given moment in our youth we were bound to be wandering around our neighbourhood's more remote spots, doing things we, frankly, shouldn't have been doing.

We each had our preordained role. My visitor was the oldest, and had a legion of older brothers to inspire him; as such he was the leader, and it was his job to come up with ideas. His deputy's job was to get enthusiastic about them so we would actually carry them out. Mine, invariably, was to get caught, since I was always prone to stitches, which made it hard to run far.

Getting caught was generally not a problem though, since unless I had been apprehended by an adult, our leader was always able to return and point out that he had numerous older brothers. Faced with the implications of this, my captor would almost always let me go.

One of the few exceptions to this rule was a thoroughly lovely fella, a near neighbour of mine, who was one of my childhood nemeses. This was almost entirely my fault, since I rather spoiled our friendships by once dropping a large chunk of cement on his head. It was an accident, but for some reason he took it personally. I still can't see why. He needed less than a dozen stitches...

My scarred nemesis took to hassling me constantly. He stopped, however, after once foolishly approaching me in the presence of my visiting friend, who was on foot, and holding a stick. This gave him a massive tactical advantage over my nemesis, who was on a bike. I'm sure you can imagine what happened.

One whizzed past on his bike, the other waited patiently; the cyclist whizzed past again, and my visitor turned slightly, but did nothing; the rider tried to whizz past yet again - and my guest thrust the stick between the spokes of the front whell. The poor bastard was hurled headlong over the handlebars. Quite a nasty gash he wound up with on his leg as I recall. Ah well. Kids, eh?


Many other anecdotes could follow, but I'd be here for weeks. Instead, one will do.

You may have heard this already... still, when's that ever stopped me before? In the mid-1980's Irish summers were phenomenally wet. I don't actually remember this, but I am assured that this was the case, and I certainly have very clear memories of glorious Septembers as we returned to school.

Well, on one particularly wet day, which itself followed several other insanely wet days, the three of us headed down to the local field. This is a field about two minutes' walk from my house, with several football pitches, some scrubby bushes at the edges, and back then, far too many marauding horses. Running through the field is a stream, or more accurately, an open storm drain.

It used to be possible to climb into the pipes from where the stream flowed, and indeed one gobshite once did so on a school sports day -- climbing through storm drains not being an approved activity so much as one engaged in by the dossers at the fringes -- but slipped and fell. When he emerged with tears running down his face he was covered in green slime. I think the rats may have scared him too. Ah well. But I digress.

Well, on this rainy day in, say, 1983, my guest decided that it would be good if we could dam the stream. Needless to say, we thought this was the best idea ever, so, well-armoured in raincoats and wellies, we began wading along the stream, hopping from rock to rock, gathering as many rocks as we could carry and piling them up.

We made a pretty impressive wall, which, of course, had no ability whatsoever to prevent any water from getting through. This was a problem, and my guest's oft-proclaimed and -- let's face it -- nonexistent knowledge of building wasn't helping us. My visitor's Dad, I should mention, was a builder. So, rather stuck for how to make our 'Dam' work, the three of us began scouring the stream and its banks in a determined quest to find something that would somehow enable the dam to actually function as a dam.

Amazingly, we found something. Something which astonishes me even to this day. Near where the pipes fed the stream, where the water was shallowest, was a giant slab of lard. It must have been a foot-and-a-half square. I had no idea that lard was available in anything larger than the little white bricks, which, as Eddie Izzard points out, tend to lie at the back of supermarket fridges, bearing the simple red legend 'LARD'.

What am I saying? That's projecting my later mystification. I had never even heard of lard then! All I knew, instinctively, that this strange white malleable slab was 'cow fat', and what's more, waterproof...

(And no, I have no idea how it got there. This happened. I'm not making it up.)

So, needless to say, we took the lard to the dam, and began to break it up into smaller bits, which we moulded and rubbed between our hands, before shoving it into the dam, plugging all the holes, cementing it over, and waterproofing the whole thing. And it worked. Okay, it wasn't very big, but it did succeed in forcing the stream to fill up behind it, driving the waterlevel up a good couple of feet. Somebody had to come and break it down a couple of days later. Deep down, all three of us consider that day one of our finest achievements.

Unfortunately, there were side effects. The most worrying was the fact that this slab of lard had been lying in a storm drain for ages, and smelled worse than usual. And we'd been playing with it. And it was waterproof.

So we stank. For days.

But it was worth it.

The Greatest Briton? Really?

I was about to do a big nostalgic piece today, but more important matters have come up.

Winston Churchill is apparently the greatest Briton ever. Hmmmm. I suppose this was inevitable. What with the Second World War being just about the only thing on the British history curriculum, most people seem to think that Britain's 'finest hour' was more-or-less Britain's only hour. How could there have been any other result? Unless the Di brigade had come out in force....

I must admit, I'm a little puzzled at John Lennon having done so well. A couple of years back, if i remember rightly -- and I haven't checked so don't just take my word for it -- Channel 4 and HMV organised a poll in which John Lennon was ranked as only the second most important musician of the millennium, a nose ahead of that little-known Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Well, it should be noted that the winner of the poll, the person regarded by most Britains who voted as the most influential musician since the year 1000 AD, was the illustrious Robbie Williams. Since Mr Williams is undoubtedly a Briton, surely he, and not Mr Lennon, should have pride of place among the nation's greatest children?

Incidentally, I see that said Mr Williams is to perform in Dublin's Phoenix Park early next August, to an estimated crowd of 120,000 people, and presumably a few deer. This will be the biggest gathering in Dublin since the visit of the Pope in 1979, of which I have hazy -- but I'm sad to say very real -- memories. More than a million people were in the Park that day, which is a bit weird, considering that there were only about five million on the whole island at the time, a million of whom weren't even nominally Catholics. Williams' response to hearing this was typically 'witty'. If I may cite the great man: "Great billing, eh? The Pope and me. But his last album wasn't up to much, John Paul Sings the Blues, I think it was."

It might have been funnier had similar jokes not been made by Irish people on at least four million other occasions over the last twenty-odd years.

The eminent Robbie also claimed he was "bigger than Bono," which is a useful link to bring me back to the main thrust of this blog.

Bono, Bob Geldof, and Arthur Wesley, later Wellesey, the first Duke of Wellington all made the top hundred Britons list, but thankfully didn't make the top ten. This is probably just as well, since none of them were actually British. Irishmen all, I have to say. At this point, I suspect, someone is ready to pipe up with that Wellington nonsense about being born in a stable not making one a horse. Fair enough, he probably has Jesus on his side on that one, but it's worth pointing out that not merely was Wellington born in Ireland, of an established Anglo-Irish family, but he also was married to one of the Longfords, spent many years as MP for Trim, a seat traditionally held by the Wesley family, and was even appointed Chief Secretary in 1807. The Peninsular War, Waterloo, and his stint as Prime Minister, during which he ushered in Catholic Emancipation, came later. Incidentally, he was one of only three non-Royals ever to get a state funeral in the United Kingdom, the others being William Gladstone and Winston Churchill.

Which by an admittedly circuitous route brings me back to the point. Why was Churchill picked? Ahead of Newton, or Brunel, or Elizabeth I, or Shakespeare, for Heaven's sake! What were people thinking?

The short answer is World War Two, where he was undoubtedly the right man for the job, once the UK was in that mess and hanging on my the skin of her teeth. The rest of his career though was basically a shambles, which makes it odd that people should revere him now. But then, see my opening comments about modern 'education'.

Look at the First World War: who bears the blame for the farce that was the Dardanelles campaign in general and Gallipoli in particular? Yep, good old Winnie.

And who was Secretary of State for War and the Air during the Irish War of Independence? Fancy that, Winnie again. Dear old W.C., if I may be so familiar, was opposed to the deployment of regular troops in Ireland to fight the IRA and instead favoured the RIC being backed up with irregular units - the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans, who have such a fond place in Irish hearts.

He also was a big fan of the idea of chemical warfare, even after the miseries of the First World War: with reference to the Kurds and Iraqis in particular he commented "I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes." Charming.

Let's also not forget that despite popular mythology, prior to the Second World War he was hardly a Lone Prophet in the Wilderness who predicted the rise and threat posed by the Nazis only to be ignored by the British establishment. Appeasement was a policy largely designed to buy time for the British and French to build up their armed forces so they could credibly challenge Germany. Everybody knew war was coming.

I also tend not to approve of his expectations that Ireland would be a willing vassal for Britain in the war, but that's a personal thing. And of course, there's Dresden. Perhaps 135,000 people killed -- probably rather less, but certainly an incredible number -- in the firestorm on the night of 13 February 1945. Arguably history's greatest single war crime, carried out by the 'good guys', when the war had basically been won.

In his favour, however, it must be said that he could on occasion come up with the odd decent put-down, and was, along with Adenauer and De Gaulle, an advocate of a United Europe... so I guess he wasn't all bad.

I have no idea who I would have picked as the greatest Briton... I'd be tempted to pick Newton, but if the English language is indeed the greatest British contribution to the world, as Melvyn Bragg argued in yesterday's Observer, then I guess it has to be a writer. Despite his cosmic canvas, Milton's too narrow, and Chaucer not so much British as English -- in many ways he invented what it is to be English, or at least immortalised it. It has to be Shakespeare then, really, doesn't it?

A cliche, perhaps, but only because it's true.