Memories are made of this...

Memory is a deeply mysterious thing, don't you think?

Take the example of how a couple of weeks back, when Diarmait was over from Dublin. After being out in Squirrels we wound up drinking tea in my room with a few of the others. Stories were swapped. 

Diarmait entertained the crowd with a story of how we'd cycled down towards the river in Palmerstown as children. His bike was a Releigh Grifter, which bore much the same relationship to a BMX as a rhino does to a horse; mine was its idiot cousin, a small blue beast with solid tyres and back-pedalling rear brakes and a regular front brake. Hurtling downhill, for Mill Lane is very steep, I pulled the front brakes for no apparent reason and was catapulted not merely over the handlebars but over an adjacent wall into the local hospital for mentally handicapped people. There I was surrounded by the patients, who were deeply fascinated by this unusual visit. A nurse charged over, scattering the crowd, and yelling at me to leave. I gladly obliged.

An entertaining tale, I'm sure you'll agree, but one which, as I pointed out to Diarmait the following day, rates at about a mere eight per cent on any authenticity index. Elements in the tale do certainly converge, however tangentially, with reality, but I'd not say more than that...

We did indeed cycle headlong down the very steep Mill Lane, and accidents nearly took place, but nothing like this. The bike as described by Diarmait is a mutant hybrid of my sister's bike, a maroon machine with back-pedalling brakes, and my own inferior specimen, a tiny thing, navy blue with solid tyres and, by the time we took to hurtling down Mill Lane, no brakes whatsoever. My braking technique consisted of putting my shoes on the ground several times in succession to slow the infernal device down, and then a final application of sole to ground. It was a braking technique that wore out many a shoe, as you can doubtless imagine. The only person I know of who was cast over the front of his handlebars was Christopher Cass, and that tale has already been narrated on this site; I certainly never suffered such an ejection; indeed my cycling accidents were usually more elaborate, less dignified, and more painful. I would rather not speak of them. And while there is indeed an enormous hospital for mentally handicapped people in Palmerstown, located to either side of Mill Lane, I'm fairly sure that there is no point at which someone could be catapulted from the road into the grounds. The wall is too high, and would surely be at an impossible angle to the road for such a feat to occur. Which is a shame, because the story, while entertaining as it stand, would be even better if true.

Diarmait believes this story. He has apparently been telling it for years. It is possible that a true story, based perhaps on simply how stupid it was for me even to attempt cycling down that hill on my ridiculous 'bike', grew with the telling, mutating in strange directions, converging with other anecdotes and speculations, eventually freezing into the form in which it was told the other day. I guess it's been told that way for so long that it's become almost 'historical'.

What's the point of this, you might ask? This site, you are probably saying, while rambling and never remotely to the point, usually has at least some tangential connection to events that happened that day. Well, true enough. I'm getting there.

I described at some length yesterday the rules and etiquette of our computer room. For the past couple of days, keys have been rarely necessary, save to provide support when you absolutely needed to claim a computer, because the door was really difficult to shut. There appeared to be nothing wrong with the lock. At some ungodly hour last night, or this morning to be chronologically accurate, I realised what was causing the door to remain so conveniently open.

Along the floor, at the base of the door, where a door jam ought to be, lies a thin metal strip, pinning the carpets in place. This strip has been loosened by the simple expedient of having partially unscrewed one of the screws. The strip is now slightly raised; more importantly the screw itself protrudes a good centimetre above the strip, creating a small, but fairly effective, doorstop.

I was impressed. Indeed, I still am.

I have no idea who did this, but that's not the point. This minor act of sabotage reminded me of an old school friend, a potential criminal mastermind who was content to waste his talents and become a mere Tom Sawyer-esque waster. God only knows where he is now.

Eoin was a great man for minor acts of sabotage. His speciality was lightbulb theft. Many's the time he'd be spotted sauntering about our school's corridors, drifting aimlessly between classes, stretching a casual arm above his head, swiftly and nonchalantly removing lightbulbs. The Lord alone knows how many lightbulbs the school was deprived of during Eoin's five year reign of mischief.

One of his finest hours took place while in our Inter Cert year, if I recall even remotely correctly. Whenever we'd have book-keeping homework in commerce class the answers would be displayed on the overhead projector the following day. One day, for some reason, no sooner had the class begun that our teacher had to leave the room; hardly had he gone, leaving us with work to do, that Eoin darted out of his seat and over to the projector. He calmly took the plug from the socket and produced a screwdriver from his pocket. It was the work of a moment to open the plug, remove the fuse, reassemble it, plug it in again, and then merrily skip back to his seat. Not a word had been said, and I think less than a couple of minutes had passed. When our teacher returned he was not in a good mood, and his temper was further aggravated by the inexplicable failure of the projector to work. Much time was wasted in that particular class that day.

A good story, I think you'll agree, and one I've been telling for years.

Lately, however, I've begun to doubt it. Could I have once been talking to him, and he merely suggested doing this? Or maybe a few of us had been talking in the canteen over whether such a thing would be possible? In either case the scenario could well have been vividly imagined and described, always preceded with the words 'Wouldn't it be brilliant if...' And at some point those opening words could have been dropped. And eventually the story would have become, to all intents and purposes, true.

In the World Fantasy Award-winning 'Midsummer Night's Dream' issue of Sandman Neil Gaiman has Dream comment to Auberon and Titania that 'Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.'

He has a point. But I wish I could be sure.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might have been better off dead

Two years ago, when I was intermittently working at the Canadian excavations at Stymphalos in Greece, I wound up attending a performance of Aristophanes' classic anti-war play, The Acharnians. Unfortunately, I hadn't actually read the play at that point, and it was in modern Greek -- or at least pronounced in the modern Greek fashion, so I understood nothing. Nor did my friends. Josh, Andrea, Lisa, Crystal, Dana, John, and several others including myself sat clustered together high up in the theatre at Epidavros, staring in bemusement, frequently gesturing in confusion, and laughing in the wrong parts. Afterwards, I commented that it was like watching a Monty Python sketch in a foreign language, if it had been directed by Salvador Dali. I'll tell you all about it some other time, if you're good.

Anyway, I never imagined that I would someday have the same experience when watching an English play.

Last night was extraordinary. It was beyond all my expectations. 'Theatre of the Absurd' indeed... you have no idea.

I mentioned yesterday that last year's play, A Bird in the Hand, was by all accounts abysmal. Among other oddities, it featured, I am told, one character who was unaccountably covered in glitter for the duration of the show. To this day, nobody knows why. Marlisa, who attended that show, was somewhat anxious that this year's display might not remotely rival that mess. She need not have worried. Brace yourselves . . .

Of the two main characters in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Guildenstern tends to be the wordier, having longer speeches, questioning the meaning of things; Rosencratz, on the other hand, is simpler, earthier, more concerned with the here and now. This is not always the case, as at times the characters are virtually interchangeable, but it works as a general rule of thumb.

It was inconvenient then, that I could hardly understand a word Guildenstern said. He had an impenetrable Geordie accent, tended to splutter, and spoke incredibly fast. Now, I speak fast, as you know, but at least I make a brave effort to separate the words. Guildenstern made no such attempts, so that whenever he spoke, which was often, all that would be emitted were strange machine gun-like bursts of Geordie, loud and incomprehensible splutterings of northern saliva.

To give an example, take a look at the following passage, where coins have been flipped, turning up heads on eighty-nine occasions in a row. After the eighty-ninth flip, Guildenstern wonders how this could happen:

"List of possible explanations. One: I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of a man spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement for an unremembered past. Two: time has stopped dead, and the single experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety-times. On the whole, doubtful. Three: divine intervention. Four: a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise each individual time it does."

Now, I count ninety-four words there. I may be off, slightly, but that's about right. Guess how many I could distinguish when they were (spl)uttered last night?

Two.

'Divine intervention.'

I make that less than 3 per cent of the whole thing. Granted, that was a particularly puzzling passage, but even so, I doubt he made it above a comprehensibility ratio of 15 per cent over the course of the play. What made this particularly bizarre was that the girl playing Rosencrantz was fine, or at any rate I could understand her. I don't ask for much really. So what would generally happen was that Guildenstern would splutter away for a minute or two, and the Rosencrantz would reply with a clear, pointed, one-liner. Than Guildenstern would go off again. . . with barely a word being distinguishable.

To say I was mystified would be putting it mildly. Marlisa constantly had to turn away from me, or to shield her eyes so that they did not inadvertently alight on my dumbfounded face. Every time Guildenstern spoke I leaned slightly forward; sometimes my eyes narrowed and my head tilted in a futile effort to catch some semblance of Guildenstern's meaning; other times my eyes simply widened, my jaw dropped, and my hands spread in a blatant state of hopeless perplexity. My mixture of horror and confusion had her on the edge of laughter for the duration of the play, and she constantly had to nudge me so I adopted a more seemly countenance.

Guildenstern, for the record, was played by the same guy who played the lead in a Bird in the Hand last year. Sadly, Marlisa can't remember how he sounded, but, I'm told, he was distinctive by having just one facial expression, a perpetual sneer of some sort. Shaw remarked at the interval that, although it sounded really nasty to say this, the guy playing Guildenstern had the same face as the guy who haunted her childhood nightmares.

A bit of a breather...

The interval was fun, it must be said. We resisted the temptation to run away - to be fair, I was enjoying the weirdness too much, and in any case, I don't think our warden would have been happy had all five of her postgrads in the audience all scarpered at half-time. She knew we were there. When we arrived, we were announced to the two wardens, who would then shake our hands... ' Miss Hubbard!.... Miss Cartwright!.... Miss Ross!.... Mr Daly!....and so forth.'

No, the interval was spent munching sandwiches and drinking wine, while laughing at the photos of the boys in the hallway - our brother hall, as you might expect, is an all-male hall. Aside from the fact that it appears that the boys must get through a vast quantity of hair gel - I felt decidedly undergroomed -- many of them have highly entertaining names. Mr Drinkall... Mr Drysdale... Mr Coxhead. Need I say more?

Before returning to the play, Shaw and I explained the plot of Hamlet, so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead might be slightly more comprehensible to the others. In case you don't know, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are just about the two least significant characters in Hamlet, and R&GaD takes place in the margins of that play, with the action occasionally intersecting with episodes from the source play.

The explanation given by Shaw and me was quite entertaining, I think, and must have come across as something from 'The Reduced Shakespeare Company,' with each of us completing the other's sentences, adding in quirky references, surprising ourselves my how much we remembered, and being mutually nonchalant when our memories failed us. I'm not entirely sure that it helped the others, though.

Having resisted temptation...

The second half began with us trying to keep straight faces. Not a hope. The minute Guildenstern opened his mouth it was all I could do to stifle the paroxysms of laughter than threatened to overwhelm me. I was shaking with mirth, keeping my mouth shut the whole time, and occasionally failing to control the snorts from my nose. Jenny, two seats along, held her programme over her face to conceal the tears that were running down her cheeks. She had the added disadvantage of being able to see the guys working the lights constantly holding up cards with hastily scrawled words on them in a desperate attempt to prompt the leads.

Making our situation, and indeed, behaviour, worse, was the fact that the lads who'd been sitting in front of us during the first half had all done a runner, so that we were in plain sight of the cast. And we'd gone to so much trouble, sitting in the back row over at the edge.

(The back row is the only place to sit when you have a bad feeling about plays. Alison, Georgia, Claire, Daron, and I once saw a spectacularly bad version of King Oedipus in UCD, where we were all very grateful that we were seated well away from the stage. Especially when all five of us were quaking with silent laughter. I had to take my glasses off that time, so I couldn't see the stage. I'm not sure what caused me to crack that time... was it the dubious bandage Oedipus wore over his gouged-out eyes....or the rather busty messenger falling onto the stage.... or the shepherd with crutches and a broken leg?)

During the second half the American girl playing Hamlet was far more prominent that earlier on - Shaw reckoned she was drunk, since she was slurring so much - and indeed, at one point I heard what sounded like a beer can being dropped backstage, but I half-suspect that she'd been taking acting lessons from Guildenstern. Whenever she spoke it seemed as though the stage was being filled with a fine mist. There's a bit where Hamlet says that Rosencrantz is like a sponge 'that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities... when he needs what you have glean'd, it is but squeezing you and, sponge, you shall be dry again.' By the end of that I bet that poor Guildenstern was wishing for a sponge to mop the spittle off herself.

The Player King definitely had the privilege of creating the second half's most memorable moment, revealing himself on the ship to England by leaping up and declaring 'Ah Ha!' Not, in the traditional manner, I must point out. No. Think Alan Partridge.

As for the rest of the cast? 

The director played Polonius, and was clearly inspired by every Hammer Horror 'Igor' that has been committed to film... 

Ophelia and Horatio were played by the same person, who was fine in that small part (there are no small parts - only small actors - blahblahblah)...

Gertrude was nicely unobtrusive, a good thing compared to some of the others... 

And the King? Ah, Claudius was definitely a real find. This smiling damned villain was wan and insipid, almost zombified in appearance. His speech was a thin and reedy upper-class English accent, punctuated with countless pauses, each one located with a truly Shatnerian randomness.

I quite liked the guy playing Alfred, one of the tragedians... definitely the play's unsung hero.

I should stop now. Who am I to take the piss out of this? I'd never have the nerve to do it myself. Fair play to them for having the balls to do it.

(Except for Guildenstern, who has apparently been in thirty-five plays, and doesn't feel complete without a script on his desk. By this point he should have realised how crap he is. Plonker.)

Rubbing my hands in anticipation...

This evening I'm going to see 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead' in our brother hall. Last year the combined halls Christmas play was an unintentional comic masterpiece - a farce, for want of a better word. This was, however, as much due to the material being performed as it was to the performance. At least this year they're doing a decent play. I'm looking forward to this...

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.