Lessons in Loyalty

There's a marvellous interview with Roy Keane in today's Irish Times, conducted by Tom Humphries, who I tend not to think of as one of Ireland's best sports journalists, but rather as one of Ireland's best journalists, and one who just happens to write about sport. He has quite a history with Keane, of course, having conducted the interview that precipitated the whole Homeric Saipan affair -- thus ultimately inspiring I, Keano -- and seems to be rather good at getting Keane to open up.

I never liked Keane as a player -- for all his talent and industry, I felt he was basically a thug. Sure, when he was in green he was our thug, but a thug nonetheless. As a manager though, I keep being impressed, being struck by his intelligence, his freshness, his openness, and indeed his humility. This little detail is very telling.

Things are changing with him anyway. Sunderland has infected him. For instance he pays some attention now to the wisdom of crowds. A few weeks ago against Everton in the Black Cats' own backyard he heard a voice behind him having a pop. He swivelled around and caught the end of the it. "Playing for 75 minutes with one up front and it isn't effin working ya . . ."

His face darkened and then.

"Do you know what? He was spot on. We had five in the middle and one up front and it wasn't working. It's like that. He was right. I don't always agree but a lot of time fans are spot on. Sometimes we get nasty letters. Sue in the office, well I don't think she shows me many, just the odd one when she thinks I should know what is going on. She gave me one last week. This man was having a go at the way we played (pause). So I rang him up."

At this point he allows a moment for you to picture the stricken features of the poor soul who hastily committed his frustrations to the vellum and sent them off confident perhaps that Sue in the office would either include the epistle in the bundle for the days shredding or hand it over in a sheaf heavy with disgruntlement. And here now was Roy Keane on the other end of the telephone. The thump, thump, thump of that vein in his temple audible down the line.

And?

"Ah, we had a chat. I said to him I knew what he was saying but it isn't time yet. In a few years hopefully we will have five maybe six players capable of getting forward but for now we have to survive. We need to play the way we do to stay in the division. Not to be a yo-yo club."

Patience is a virtue, after all, and realism matters. It's the kind of thing I wish legions of posters on Toffeeweb would keep in mind, that construction schedules for eternal cities are perhaps of their nature not so speedy as we might wish. It's interesting to see him cast a cold eye on loyalty in professional sport, too.

United. It's a surprise to hear him say he feels no affinity with any of his former professional clubs. Everything is changing though. He goes to clubs now as a manager where he remembers being booed, and fighting tooth and nail with the locals and hating the sight of their jerseys and they are wonderfully courteous and friendly to him. Good people. Arsenal couldn't be more decent. Arsene Wenger and Pat Rice. Rafa. Great. David Moyes. Excellent. He spent some time with Martin O'Neill after the Villa game and he could have sat listening to him all night. Everywhere he goes he soaks things up, looks for evidence of values and the right way to do things.

And affinity? It is with Rockmount AFC. Where he was made. The lads come over regularly. A couple of his old mates manage the team now and they talk about the old days and management. They were all over for the Villa game. Len Downey and Damien Martin are coming over for Middlesbrough.

The older he gets and the more he sees, the greater his appreciation of the innocence and the loyalties he saw at Rockmount. He went to Rockmount when he was eight and stayed till he was 16 or 17. That he believes now is what football is all about . He has seen the business side of the game and people suddenly begrudging you when you cease to be of use.

It still hurts. Forest tried to milk him for money he was owed when he was sold to Manchester United. The postscript to his playing career at Celtic was a mistake he feels. United still feel the sting of his venom. Their betrayal still hurts.

Having statements ready like United when you have served a certain amount of time for them and they don't even get the years you were there right in the statement. You think "Ah well, there you go".

"The day I left United, in hindsight, I should have stopped playing really. I lost the love of the game that Friday morning. I thought football is cruel, life is cruel. It takes two to tango also. I am fully responsible for my own actions but some things are wrong. I left on a Friday and they told me certain things before I left that day. I was told the following week I couldn't sign for another club. I had been led to believe I could. There were certain things I was told at certain meetings that were basic lies.

"That was part of the exit plans, I am convinced. Especially with my pride, I wasn't going to accept that. They had a statement prepared and they were thanking me for 11 and a half years of service. I had to remind the manager and (Manchester United chief executive) David Gill I had been there 12 and a half years. I think that might have been part of the plan. Then financial stuff was mentioned. I was thinking, my God. I am happy to leave. I won't go down that road. A week later they announced £70 or £80 million profit after telling me I hadn't played for six weeks and so they weren't prepared to do this and that. I told David Gill I had broken my foot playing for Manchester United against Liverpool. Pretty sad.

"I look back and think I should have said this and I should have said that. It is like Mick McCarthy at the World Cup. I always think when he said if you don't have respect for me you can't play for me, I should have said to him what I felt. I am not playing for you I am playing for Ireland. It is easy to be wise afterwards."

He talks for a long time about loyalty. Its meaning in his life. United hurts and Saipan hurts. They were times when he expected some loyalty back but he realises now when you outlive your usefulness to some people loyalty is too much to expect.

It's a telling point, really: loyalty to clubs is for fans, more than anything. Players can be fans and so too can owners, but ultimately players tend to play for money, for glory, and for fun; they're mercenaries, and owners are businessmen or moneylaunderers. But loyalty to teams? That's a fans' preserve.


I can't help wondering, when I think of this, whether fidelity in sport is related to fidelity in life; is it the case that people who are loyal in one thing are more likely to be loyal in other things? Are people who stick by teams through bad patches the kind of people who'll stick by friends and lovers through hard times? That's the real test: celebrating success is easy; it's enduring failure that's hard.

Chesterton wrote a fine essay on Kipling once, where he remarked that Kipling, ultimately, was a man who understood nothing of patriotism, as he lacked the faculty of absolutely attaching himself to any cause or community.

He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.

It's when success ebbs away that the true measure of the sports fan is shown. Whether this applies to other aspects of life is a different matter. Are Everton supporters less likely to cheat on their spouses than Chelsea ones, say? I reckon there'd be a Sociology PhD in that if someone wanted to give it a shot - Marital Infidelity and Football Fanaticism: A Study in Correspondence.


Just to wrap up, regarding the Keane interview, it's good to see that he's not quite as dour and earnest as he can sometimes seem.

Last year going for promotion everyone was getting uptight and the pressure was starting to tell. They were playing Wolves at home, a big game on the verge of the play-offs. They players were called in to their pre-game video analysis of Wolves. Instead they got that wonderful segment of Ken Loach's 1969 movie Kes where Brian Glover plays a teacher with a Bobby Charlton fixation. They just had a good laugh together. They never mentioned Wolves once. Then they went out and won.

You've not seen it? No, well, it'd been years since I did too, but don't worry, I've dug it out just for you. The Brother reckons it's one of the best passages in any film ever. Enjoy.

Is this the way to Amaretto?

I saw this sign in Southwark this evening, and haven't been able to stop grinning at it since. Alas, it seems to be one of a kind. In an ideal world -- or an ideal Southwark, at any rate -- there'd be a whole serious of similarly stuffy signs, straight out of an Ealing comedy. 'Commit No Nuisance'. 'Do Behave Now'. 'Well, Really.' 'Oh, Put That Down'. 'Now Look Here'. And so on.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Last you heard I was in Fulham, and indeed I was happily encamped there till late this morning, wondering why on earth my hair had metamorphosed from Han Solo to Farrah Fawcett. It may need cutting.

Taking my leave of my industrious hostess I strode out into the grey and damp of London just after eleven today; I was due to meet Technically and the Fairy Blogmother by Knightsbridge tube station, and was rather winging it in terms of how much time I'd need for the trip. I wasn't too worried, though, as I was walking more through desire than need; were time's winged chariot to hurry too near I was more than happy to grab a bus.

My curious London knack for punctuality when dependent solely on my feet paid off again, and I wound up skulking under an awning waiting for the others to arrive, dug into Conrad's masterpiece of spy fiction while wondering why the fur protesters next to me were complaining. If Harrod's were indeed engaged in illegal trade, as the protesters' banners claimed, then why didn't they just report them to the police?

The girls joined me soon enough, and we set off to meet up with the Cheesemonger before going for a stroll along the South Bank, browsing in the somewhat overpriced book market. Eventually we ambled towards Southwark, there to increase our numbers, to quaff an ale or two, and have some dinner, before setting out for the main business of the evening.

The centrepiece of this trip was always going to be tonight's performance of Involution, running in Southwark's Pacific Playhouse for the past fortnight, and which I first heard good things of back in September, wandering through Whitehall with the Blogmother, saying that she thought it was Ms Welch's best work so far.

I'm inclined to agree; while I've enjoyed her earlier plays, all of which I've found hilarious, this was a lot meatier. It's not just that the characters seem more substantial and better-rounded now than before; it's that she's grappling with serious questions this time, and does it well. I like plays and novels of ideas anyway -- it's hard to like Edwardian writing otherwise! -- and this is a fine example of such. I'm hoping to have a read of the script itself at some point, since I'd like to think it through properly. There were a couple of aspects of it that didn't ring quite true for me, but until I have a look at the script I'll reserve judgment. Like I said, it was a meaty play, with lots in it.

I'm still not sure about the performances of the two blokes, but the four girls were, I thought, spot on. Jane Lesley's Violet was -- for my limited amount of money -- the best of the quartet, but the other three were good too. Samantha Hopkins's 'Gemma' was hilarious and must have taken a phenomenal amount of control, Sara Pascoe's Talulah was disturbingly reminiscent of one or two people I know myself, and Ursula Early's Dorcet had a Jo Brand-esque earthiness that grounded the character remarkably well.

As for directing, there were a couple of violent scenes that were brilliantly executed, while the set seemed depressingly apt, though I'm sure the Fairy Blogmother is deluding herself in her conviction that Cohen's flat, in which all the action is set, is based on her own. Granted, it's about the same size, and both rooms have ingenious folding out chair-bed things for guests, but there the similarities end. And yes, I know, such clever bits of furniture surely have names, but I'm drawing a blank.

Anyway, enough of this. There's Amaretto to be sampled, and old Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy sketches to watch. I'll play your game, you rogue.

You Can't Imagine the Rapture in Store

I must be getting old. I'm missing puns, and bad jokes are drifting past me without me even noticing. I went to see Sweeney Todd a couple of days back, arranging to go for drinks beforehand. A couple of hours before I left the house I got a text from Dublin's most shameless immigrant punster:

'I'll just have a quick shave and a pie for my tea, then I'll be making my way in.'

Bizarre English people with their pie obsessions, I thought. Why on earth is he telling me what he's having for dinner? Or even that he's going to shave? Weird.

It was only during the film that I got the joke.

Predictably enough I loved the film, though I'm not sure that it edges out Ed Wood as my favourite Tim Burton film, as it did for Neil Gaiman. I think it probably pushes Big Fish into third place, mind.

It looked fantastic, and I found Depp truly compelling as London's favourite butchering barber. Helena Bonham Carter's take on Mrs Lovett was refreshing, to say the least -- in the show she comes across as utterly amoral, whereas here she's amoral, yes, but more than that she seems damaged. From her first appearance on screen she appears to be barely holding herself together.

Alan Rickman oozed refined menace as Judge Turpin, Timothy Spall was obsequiously brutal as Beadle Bamford, and Sacha Baron Cohen was hilarious as Pirelli, though I rather wondered why his non-Italian alter-ego wasn't Irish as he is in the show. The younger members of the cast were all fine too, and I was particularly impressed by having Anthony played by someone so young; making him obviously as young as Johanna lent their romance a Romeo and Juliet element, and also explained much of his naivety.

On the other hand, I missed quite a few songs -- I could understand their being removed on the grounds that they slowed the story down and made little cinematic sense, but Sondheim's songs aren't gratuitous, and it felt as though the characters were being slimmed down just to speed the plot up. Oddly, I couldn't help but feel that what the film really missed was an interval.

I know, that sounds a bit odd, but think how the first half ends with 'A Little Priest' as the showstopper. First Sondheim takes us through the great anti-climax of the Judge's visit to Todd's parlour, drags us down to the abyss of 'Epiphany', where Todd resolves to turn his rage on all London, and lead us laughing out of the theatre to the puntastic strains of the horrifically hilarious promise by Todd and Mrs Lovett that their partnership will serve anyone -- and to anyone -- at all.

There's no real sense of time at the start of the play's second half. Sure, in a sense 'Johanna' does follow on from 'God, that's good!', but it doesn't really need to. Essentially, what Sondheim does is to hurl us some time into the future -- we've no idea how far, but certainly Todd now has a thriving barbershop and Mrs Lovett has a thriving pie shop. Time has passed, that's the main thing, and that makes sense, because we've left their world for twenty minutes after 'A Little Priest', laughing and gasping about the first half over coffee or gin or ice-cream.

The film doesn't manage that. Instead we go straight from Todd and Lovett's murderously musical contract to Toby calling for our attention, singing the praises of Mrs Lovett's pies. Sure, time has passed, but it doesn't feel that way.

It's only a small gripe, really. When I watch it on DVD, I'll make sure to stop the film and make tea, or maybe have a pie, at the appropriate spot.

In the Company of Wolves

The other day, talking about Christopher Hitchens, morality, and the 'Golden Rule', I raised the question of whether being nice is the same thing as being good; I might as easily have asked whether it's the same thing as being right. I'm inclined to agree with Little Red in Sondheim's Into the Woods who -- chastened by her experiences -- declares that 'nice is different than good'.

Into the Woods was my introduction to Sondheim, long before I was captivated by Sweeney Todd; a musicologist friend of mine loaned me her copy, after raving about it for months, and washed away all my ingrained contempt towards musicals. Heavily influenced by The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim's fascinating study of the importance of fairy tales, it's immensely clever and really quite hilarious in how it interweaves and interprets the stories of Rapunzel, Jack the Giant Killer, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty to enthralling and enlightening effect. If you ever get an opportunity to see it -- whether in the theatre or in the American Playhouse version -- you shouldn't miss that chance.

Bettelheim's analysis of the Red Riding Hood story is primarily based -- like pretty much all modern retellings -- on 'Little Red-Cap', as the Brothers Grimm version of the tale in entitled. He sees this as a fairy tale for inquistive children who've outgrown 'Hansel and Gretel', and sees its value in how it allows children to give vent to their oedipal fantasies while ensuring that the natural order is ultimately restored.

While it's the Grimm version that interests him most, Bettelheim doesn't ignore the tale's prehistory and devotes special attention to Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Charles Perrault's 1697 French version of the tale, the earliest published form of the story. Unlike the Grimm version, Perrault's version is a cautionary tale that ends with the girl being devoured. There's no rescue by a woodman, no snipping open of the wolf's belly with a scissors, no filling of the wolf's belly with deadening stones. Nope. The girl and her grandmother are eaten, that being the end of them, and in case Perrault's point isn't blindingly obvious, he hammers it home by tagging on a moral:

Children, especially young ladies – attractive, courteous, and well-bred – do very wrong to listen to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide a wolf with dinner. I saw ‘wolf’, for there are various kinds of wolf. There is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy nor hateful nor angry, but tame, obliging, and gentle – who pursues young women in the streets, even into their homes. And alas! Everyone must know that it its these gentle wolves that are the most dangerous wolves of all!

Perrault also seems to have been responsible for introducing the red hood itself to the story; it doesn't appear to have been part of the oral tales from which he drew his Tales of Mother Goose, at least insofar as they can be established, although there was a tale current in the Eleventh Century of a red-capped girl found in the company of wolves.


It seems that Perrault may have toned the story down a bit too, removing elements he apparently deemed unsuitable for his polite audience; this rendering of the tale, taken with just one adjustment from Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, is representative:

Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother. As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going.
"To grandmother's house," she replied.

"Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?"

"The path of the pins."

So the wolf took the path of the needles and arrived first at the house. He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed.

"Knock, knock."

"Come in, my dear."

"Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk."

"Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry."

So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

Then the wolf said, "Undress, and get into bed with me."
"Where shall I put my apron?"

"Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

For each garment -- bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings -- the girl asked the same question; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more."

When the girl got into bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!"

"It's to keep me warmer, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!"

"It's for better carrying firewood, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!"

"It's for scratching myself better, my dear."

"Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!"

"It's for eating you better, my dear."

And he ate her.

Darnton has the girl taking the path of the needles rather than the path of the pins, but Bettelheim notes that early versions of the story describe the girl choosing the path of the pins, and explain the significance of the choice by saying that it is easier to fasten things together with pins than to sew them together with needles; as such the girl is choosing the pleasure principle over the reality principle, and suffers accordingly.

I first read this version of the story in a slightly abridged form in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, as told by Gilbert -- Gaiman's Chestertonian embodiment of a very special place -- to Rose Walker, the heroine of The Doll's House. It's apparently a pretty accurate reflection of the story as it was told among the peasantry of Eighteenth Century France, at around the same time as Perrault's somewhat sanitised version was gaining popularity among the literate classes; you'll probably have been rather startled both its cannibalistic element and by what Darnton describes as 'the strip-tease prelude to the devouring of the girl'.


Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, notes that other retellings seem to preserve a different tradition again. She describes how some versions indeed have the wolf tricking the girl into eating the flesh and drinking the blood of her grandmother, but with the girl refusing to get into bed with the wolf, saying that she needs to relieve herself. The wolf encourages her to join her anyway, saying she can relieve herself in the bed, but as the girl persists in her refusal he ties her to the bed post with a long cord that allows her to leave the cottage but go no further; once outside, the girl undoes the knot and escapes.

Warner makes much of how the wolf takes the place of the grandmother in the story, eschewing Bettelheim's psychoanalyical interpretation to point out that both the wolf and the grandmother are marginal figures in the story: both dwell in the woods away from people and are in need of food. This parallel seems to reflect and embody the peasant fantasies of early modern Europe, where the werewolf was a male counterpart to the female witch or crone.

If you've seen The Brotherhood of the Wolf, you might be familiar with the story of the 'Beast of Gévaudan', upon which the film is loosely based. The Beast terrorised a part of south-central France between 1764 and 1767, killing at least sixty people. More than a hundred years later, Robert Louis Stevenson described it as 'the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves':

What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gévaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and ‘shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty’; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king’s high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for that.

It's not surprising that the locals had been so terrified, and indeed superstitious. The nightmare of the loup-garou -- the werewolf -- was deeply embedded in the collective psyche of the peasantry of early modern France. Throughout the Sixteenth Century, with the countryside apparently being plagued by lycanthropic attacks, thousands of people were accused of being werewolves. Although torture was often used to educe confessions, there were cases where the evidence against the accused was clear in relation to charges of murder and cannibalism, albeit not to association with wolves!

The whole phenomenon, strikingly similar to the witch-trials that were so common throughout Europe at the time, petered out after it was decreed in a 1603 trial that 'the change of shape existed only in the disorganised brain of the insane'. With lycanthropy now seen as a delusion rather than a real supernatural phenomenon, werewolves faded from the French courtroom, but they clearly remained fixed in the French popular imagination, being trasmitted down through the centuries through folklore, fairy tales, films, and even parlour games.

Here below, to live is to change...

And so 2007 ends. It's been a quiet year in a lot of ways, certainly less tumultuous than 2006, thank God. I'm off to wrap it up at a friends' house in a few minutes. We're having a murder mystery dinner. I have narrowly escaped having to go in drag. There are some ways one really shouldn't start a new year, after all.


I was struck the other day by a passage in Father Martin Tierney's article in this week's Irish Catholic -- I'm rarely caught by Fr Tierney's column, but this one was a little different.

We come to the end of another year.
John Moriarty, the philosopher, was asked in a radio interview: 'are you happy?'
'That's not the question,' answered John.
'So what is the question?' asked the interviewer.
'The question is -- "have I grown?"'
If we have grown in holiness, wisdom, charity, and patience, this has been a good year.

Have I grown? It's a good question, and I really don't know the answer, though I think I have. I hope so, at any rate.

Certainly I've done so in how I've handled the ongoing mess in my life I tend to refer to as 'the War', and in terms of the decisions I've made regarding leaving academia and taking a new path. As for which path I'll follow, there are a couple of options that are foremost in my mind, and one of my main tasks in the next year will involve discerning which one's for me. I have hopes, but we don't always get what we want.

So what has the old year held? Well, I haven't got the work done I'd hoped to do, but then the war has rather been my priority -- justice needs to be done, I'm afraid, and to be seen to be done, and people need to be protected, so I've had to leave my own interests aside to focus on that. Yes, I know that my studies, my career, and my life have all been hurt in ways by this, but really, what option have I had? Could I have let things go, and still be who I am? And even if I could, should I?

Other than that, how does the year stack up?


Sister the Elder got married, and a new Brother-in-Law and a new niece joined the clan. Sister the Elder's wedding saw the Gargoyle clan in one exact spot for the first time in nearly ten years; once the photos were taken we dispersed, though not very far. Brother the Elder returned from America, and though I'd rather he hadn't had to come home, it's good to have him around.

Several of my friends enriched the world by bringing new people into it, though so far I've encountered only one of the offspring, who I'll be seeing again this evening; with luck I'll see the others soon enough. Two of my closest friends got together, following my nudging one of them into action. With nearly a year down, things are still going well, which pleases me more than I can say.

I had a lovely trip to Greece, where I tramped around battlefield after battlefield, renewed old friendships, spoke to one of my dearest friends while on the site of the 300's last stand, revisited a hill where my eyes filled with tears for the only time all year, and consumed far too much alcohol and not nearly enough octopus. And on the way back I had a decidedly strange night in Zurich.

I spent a few wonderful summer days in London, on the way there hearing a marvellous quote from Mother Teresa that has stayed in my head since, challenging me as much as it consoles. London was magical, with me seeing my niece for my first time, staying with one of the most attractive girls I know and lunching with another, catching up with a very old friend, falling in love with Westminster Cathedral, and saying goodbye for now to three people -- all of whom mean the world to me in very different ways, and none of whom I've seen since.

(I haven't had my hair cut since that week. This is a coincidence, I assure you, and since my barber offered me a charity haircut when I bumped into him on Christmas Eve, I shall probably be rectifying this soon enough. Five months of growth, would, I feel, be extravagant.)

I fixed a portrait that I'd been unhappy with last year and gave it to its subject, and managed my first ever mass-produced Christmas card, and smiled to see how my cartoons had been acknowledged in my old school's fiftieth anniversary yearbook. I made my radio debut, which was fun, and is still online if you know where to look, and I marvelled at the discovery that people are still buying my book.

I let my old blog die with a whimper, and started this one with rather more sense of what I was doing than I ever had with my old one. If nothing else, I think I deserve some plaudits for the colour scheme. I've started a couple of other blogs too, but I'm keeping them under wraps unless things turn really nasty in the war. It does no harm to have a few nuclear options.

Speaking of which, I visited the Oireachtas, and addressed a very old acquaintance as Deputy, and just a week or so ago I addressed an old friend and travelling buddy as Counsellor. Times have changed; all these things were new to me. Also for the first time, I made the front page of a newspaper; considering my story was on the front page the reporter did a remarkably discreet job in relating my vindication.

And for all my thoughts of old friends, I made some fine new ones too, especially one cloak-and-dagger evening where truths were told. Along the way I've helped celebrate a few birthdays in style, and bestowed a couple of Claddagh rings to mark two angels' comings of age, telling them what they mean. If I've returned even the tiniest amount of the kindness, the patience, the generosity, the love, and the loyalty that's been shown to me over the last couple of years then I'll have done some good.

Not enough, I know. But some.


I've spent much of the last year making feeble progress with Bleak House, but have along the way -- aside from academic books and sundry bits of the Bible -- read The Names by Don DeLillo, Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, Rome Sweet Home, Letter and Spirit, and Reasons to Believe, all by Scott Hahn, Persian Fire by Tom Holland, John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, By What Authority? and Making Senses of Scripture by Mark Shea, The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene, Garry Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess, Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney, Ethan M. Rasiel's The McKinsey Way, William Poundstone's How Would You Move Mount Fuji?, Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland, The Complete Bone by Jeff Smith, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Volume 1, and John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra's Strontium Dog Casefiles, Volume 1. I've also reread Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and The Man Who was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man, all by G.K. Chesterton.

I graced the cinema with my presence eighteen times, making this my most cinematic year in quite a while, taking in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, London to Brighton, The Maltese Falcon, Into Great Silence, Black Book, Perfume, The Man Who Would Be King, Blood Diamond, 300, Amazing Grace, Spider-Man 3, Magicians, The Lives of Others, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Stardust, Beowulf, and I Am Legend. It's an obvious call, but just as Pan's Labyrinth was my favourite film of 2006, so The Lives of Others was the film that impressed me most in the last year.

I'm afraid that a peculiar combination of necessity and opportunity saw me going to a concert alone for my first time, to see Ani DiFranco in what used to be The Red Box. It was the sixth time for me to see her play, and I was delighted to see that she hadn't lost her touch.

I also wound up seeing Henry V on my own too, enraptured for the best part of three hours in Manchester's Exchange Theatre. Don Pasquale in the RDS was rather more of a group outing, as were Julius Caesar in the Abbey and both trips to the breathtaking gate production of Sweeney Todd. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was a delight in Manchester's Library, as was The Tempest in the Royal Exchange. I'm afraid that The Vortex was just as uninspiring as my Fairy Blogmother had warned me it would be, while Things of Dry Hours proved rather surprising, not least in how it developed in the second half.

Oh, and then there was Alton Towers.


Any regrets? Quite a few actually, but barring my failures to finish my thesis or to master straight-razor shaving, not getting to see The Police or Ireland play in Croke Park, seeing only one decidedly uninspiring football match all year, and not managing to meet up with Josh and Clare anywhere, I think they'll be staying strictly offline, except to say that insofar as I can do anything about them next year, I plan to do so.

He'd seen how civilized men behaved...

I have a weakness, as I remarked to a friend the other evening, for stories of redemption and revenge. I'll take either any day, and both together given a choice.

Both? Well, yes. revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it's rarely filling. In the end, revenge is empty, as Inigo Montoya realised having finally slain the six-fingered man - redemption beats it hands down. Think of Orestes, or the Beast in whatever version of the fairy tale you care you sample, or Darth Vader, or best of all Edmond Dantès, the eponymous antihero of The Count of Monte Cristo. Yes, for all that that masterpiece of nineteenth century pulp fiction is focused on revenge, it ultimately gains much of its power from Edmond's eventual rediscovery of the humanity that he had lost in the darkness of the Château d'If. It is only through learning how to forgive and remembering how to love that he finds peace.

But sometimes, sometimes, you can get a hell of a story just focused on revenge. Or justice. There can be times when it's difficult to tell which is which. That's just one of the ways that friends come in handy - if you're in danger of losing your moral compass it's useful to have a few stars to navigate by. Life without friends can be as perilous as it can be dull.

All of which leads me neatly to the great Stephen Sondheim's greatest masterpiece.

Sweeney Todd, due to be hitting our screens in a month or two, depending on where you are, and surely not to be missed, is an astounding story of a wronged man who, consumed by a desire for vengeance, becomes a monster.

By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and horrifying, it is about as profound a study of greed, hypocrisy, and obsession as you'll ever see. It's magnificently written and thrillingly scored, and features at its centrepiece what must be the finest and funniest attempt at linking cannibalism and capitalism in the history of music.

(I've no idea if there are others, but if so, I'm confident they pale next to the wonderfully witty wordplay of 'A Little Priest'.)

To say I'm a fan of the show is to put it mildly. I've seen it twice in Manchester, the first production there being probably the best thing I've ever seen on the stage, and twice just a few months ago in Dublin, a production described by the Guardian as a 'miracle'. Not content with occasionally seeing it in the theatre, though, I have a DVD of a 2001 concert performance, and two versions of it on CD.

Yes, I know, I've yet to acquire the DVD of the show with George Hearn and Angela Lansbury as Todd and Mrs Lovett, but I'll get round to it eventually. There's no rush.

With so much invested in the show, I have to admit that I've been a little bit worried about the prospect of the film. Granted, all the ingredients seemed fine - I can't imagine a director better suited to this than Tim Burton, and the likes of Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall look perfectly cast. Even Sacha Baron Cohen could prove an inspired choice as Pirelli. But what of Jonny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter? They look great, and can certainly act, but can they sing? That's where this will stand or fall, after all, as unlike the kind of musicals I grew up hating on telly, Sondheim's shows don't involve people strolling along chatting and then unaccountably bursting into song; they're almost entirely sung, with only the occasional bit of spoken dialogue bridging the songs.

I'm not worried anymore. The early word is good, and the trailers look encouraging. I have a feeling that this is a tale we can look forward to attending.

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm

A friend of mine in Manchester often says that he usually prefers the productions in the Royal Exchange's Studio theatre to those in the main theatre itself. He finds them more experimental, more interesting, and often simply more fun. I've only been to the Studio twice, but have been pretty impressed both times, especially by the staggering Knives in Hens.

This season sees two plays that premiered in the Studio getting a full run in the theatre proper. I'll be curious to see how they work out. The first, The Flags, won a ganseyload of awards last year, and had a healthy run at the recent Dublin Theatre Festival, although it didn't get unambiguously positive reviews.

Written by Bridget O'Connor, and directed by Greg Hersov, who seems to direct everything at the REx, the play is apparently a hugely funny tale of two lifeguards:

JJ and Howie are lifeguards on the second-worst beach in Ireland. The job running the BEST beach in the country is unexpectedly vacant and these two are determined to clean up their acts and get the job. The trouble is JJ and Howie are not very good at being lifeguards. In fact, they're alarmingly bad...

The best beach in Ireland, according to the play, is Banna Strand, perhaps best known as the spot where poor auld Roger Casement was captured in 1916, trying to smuggle in arms for the Easter Rising. In the play it's described, apparently, as the perfect beach 'with tits and ass as far as the eye can see'.

A big hit in Manchester, but met with scepticism in Dublin. I'm intrigued. It could be worth a look - maybe on a Monday.

Anyway, speaking of lifeguards, have you ever considered what happens when an enormously fat person is drowning? No, I hadn't either, until today, when I read that a Denbighshire company has created a 28-stone training dummy so that lifeguards and firemen can practice rescuing obese people. Lifting them takes some doing, I gather.

All of which reminds me: if you're ever at Alton Towers, about to set off on the stomach-churning launch of the Corkscrew, it's best not to glance over towards Rita, Queen of Speed, at least if you've not yet braved its insane acceleration.



Because if you do you'll see, piled on the ground below the tracks, heaps and heaps of crash test dummies.

I'm not sure if they were intact.

But I'm pretty sure they didn't have arms.

Into Great Silence

Those poor unfortunates whose ears I so frequently bend in nocturnal sessions on Skype or phone may find it hard to believe, but I've not been talking that much this year. I've been working lots, of course, and the combination of poverty and industry have led me to socialise less, but in general it's just that I've been happier on my own - reading, working, watching films.

Despite being a huge cinema-goer in the past, my viewing slackened hugely in my time in Manchester, and I utterly wasted the fine opportunity that was the Cornerhouse being scarcely more than two miles from my domicile in halls. I think in the five years that I was there I doubt I saw more than four films in that marvellously pretentious treasure-trove of alternative and classic cinema.

Admittedly, I probably made up for that by becoming a regular visitor to the theatre in Manchester -- and another trip is lined up for my next Mancunian jaunt -- but still, leaving all that aside, it's good to again be a member of the Institute formerly known as the IFC.

Having yesterday slipped in to town to see the relentlessly entertaining masterpiece that is The Maltese Falcon -- and it really is a delight, isn't it, with its cynical heart, sardonic wit, and unforgettable gallery of rogues? -- yesterday, today I felt an entirely different cinematic experience was in order.

Yes, I know that visits to the cinema two days in a row might seem a bit decadent, but opportunity is all too rarely a lengthy visitor, and frankly, after the past few days I've needed this. I've been busy with something that's pretty far removed - though alas not far enough -- from my research, and everytime I get involved in this I feel indignant, tense, and angry. I won't go into it now -- perhaps later, when the dust has settled, I'll tell all here, or maybe elsewhere. But not just yet...

So anyway, this afternoon, having spent far too long photocopying and frowning and muttering darkly, I slipped into The Palace Bar, one time haunt of the great Flann O'Brien among others, there to have a quiet pint and peruse a paper, before strolling down to the IFI to watch Into Great Silence.

Have you heard of this? Unless you're German you'll probably not have had this on in your local multiplex, as it's a film unlike any I've ever seen before. It's a documentary about French Carthusian monks at the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the Alps, and is extraordinarily still, extraordinarily quiet, and extraordinarily beautiful.

The film's two-and-three-quarters long, and has no more than a couple of minutes of conversation in it, the only sounds being heard in the rest of the film being bells, footsteps, creaks, the buzzing of an electric trimmer, pages being turned, raindrops and even snowflakes. Time after time the camera settles on a Vermeer-like scene where there appears to be no motion at all, and then eventually somebody will budge, ever so slightly. And those almost imperceptible movements and those barely audible sounds gain a staggering significance in this still and silent world.

The film's not so much a documentary as it is a re-presentation of Carthusian life; if you can accept the film on its own terms, if you can allow yourself into its rhythm, watching it is in itself becomes an act of contemplation, allowing you, in a way, to join the monks in their asceticism.

It was exactly what I'd needed. Walking back into the street afterwards seemed almost deafening. I can see this being a film I'd like to own a copy of myself at some stage.

Dying to live, we only live to die

Assuming I can leave tomorrow -- the Irish Sea is being somewhat temperamental -- this will turn out to have been an almost perfect trip. Granted, I failed in my main mission, but come late on Wednesday evening, that looked pretty much inevitable.

So. Today was lovely. Work in the morning, a fine and final departmental lunch - though with some sad news being shared, a carefully drafted letter in the afternoon, a swift pint with Gareth and his Dad, and then off to meet Louise for dinner - which was lovely -- and then to see Cyrano de Bergerac at the Royal Exchange.

Seriously, how good is Cyrano? Admittedly, I'm biased, but how many plays are there out there that combine fencing, letters, pens being mightier than swords, capes, swaggering, unrequited love, delicious pastries, groanworthy puns, a refusal to bow in the face of impossible odds, and -- of course -- the very soul of panache?

All that, and a Dubliner in the title role. How could I not adore it?

Ben Harper was marvellous as Cyrano, with Oliver Chris -- Boyce from The Green Wing - spot on as Christian and Jonathon Keeble imperious as De Guiche. Jessica Oyelowo was rather annoying -- Louise called her 'insufferable' -- as Roxane, but that's the fault of the character, rather than the actress, and she does redeem herself massively as the play goes on. All the mucking about before the play proper looked good, though with us arriving in the nick of time - having to forego the pleasures of the Weihnachtsmarkt as we'd hurried to the theatre -- we didn't see much of it. Still, it sounds like it's getting a good response.

It's funny -- Lou and I have been to the Exchange four times together now, and with the exception of Separate Tables every play we've seen has ended with a man slain on the ground. That's a truly troubling trend. Hopefully that'll get suitably derailed in the new year, and if we're lucky we'll get to see something that really takes advantage of what the REx offers set designers.

The Tempest has potential, I reckon. Mind, there'll be things to be seen before then, and not just in the REx either. Anyone for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead?

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...