City(e)scape 1

The current issue of The Times Literary Supplement, despite the exotic and even scary cover (Beauty and terror), has something of a metropolitan theme (and will keep Malcolm happy for these couple of posts)

Joycean

With both The Guardian‘s  Doonesbury strip and the TLS rear-gunner NB (initialled J. C., so assume James Campbell) Malcolm starts at the back and works forward. Since J.C. subtitles NB as ‘Londoners’ we know where we’re heading. It’s a subtle sophistication: NB‘s first and main item concerns James Joyce in London  (‘Londoners’ — geddit?)

This includes the quite perverse statement:

In an article in the current James Joyce Quarterly, Gordon Bowker writes that the Irish writer’s link with the former ruling power “has not received the attention it deserves”.

Really? Really?

Malcolm diffidently suggests that Bowker revisits Oxen of the Sun. What Joyce does there is filter the authentic voices of Dublin through the tradition of ‘English’ authors, or rather those represented by a couple of contemporary collections: William Peacock’s The English Prose: From Mandeville to Ruskin (1903) and George Saintsbury’s The Anthology of English Prose (1912). Anyone who, like Malcolm, studied the snippets anthologised for Leaving Certificate (1960) will see where this sub-litcrit is coming from.

Those who wrestle Joyce’s Episode into submission may well do so with help from the explanatory letter Joyce sent Frank Budgen on 20 March 1920:

Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition. Scene, lying-in hospital. Technique: a nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude (the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon (‘Before born the babe had bliss. Within the womb he won worship.’ ‘Bloom dull dreamy heard: in held hat stony staring’) then by way of Mandeville (‘there came forth a scholar of medicine that men clepen etc’) then Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (‘but that franklin Lenehan was prompt ever to pour them so that at the least way mirth should not lack’), then the Elizabethan chronicle style (‘about that present time young Stephen filled all cups’), then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton-Browne,  then  a  passage  Bunyanesque  (‘the reason was that in the way he fell in with a certain whore whose name she said is Bird in the hand’) after a diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn (‘Bloom sitting snug with a party of wags, among them Dixon jun., Ja. Lynch, Doc. Madden and Stephen D. for a languor he had before and was now better, he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy and Mistress Purefoy there to be delivered, poor body, two days past her time and the midwives hard put to it, God send her quick issue’) and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. This progression is also linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. The double-thudding Anglo-Saxon motive recurs from time to time (‘Loth to move from Horne’s house’) to give the sense of the hoofs of oxen. Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.

Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1966), pp. 139-40.

Hardly hidden in there is the Anglo-Irish thing that plagues us all: Swift (born Dublin, 1667), Steele (born Dublin, 1672), Burke (born Dublin, 1729), Goldsmith (born Roscommon or Longford, probably 1730) — all who made their reputations in London. In fact the ‘nationality’ crisis is implicit throughout: Mandeville was really Jan de Langhe from Ypres, a Fleming writing in Norman-French, Sir Thomas Maleore may have been Welsh … Newman, the London High Anglican who translated himself from London to Dublin(at the request of the Irish bishops) establishing the Catholic University of Ireland.

Anyway, back to J.C. filleting that James Joyce Quarterly:

The English were generous to Joyce, Bowker says: he received a grant from the Society of Authors and a pension from the Royal Literary Fund. In 1923, T.S.Eliot, who would later publish Finnegans Wake at Faber, took him to see (in Eliot’s words) “some of the waste lands around Chichester”. On a gravestone in Sidlesham churchyard, Joyce read the name “Earwicker”. Thus, Bowker writes, “an ancient English name stands at the centre of Finnegans Wake and winds through it”.

Nora Barnacle, who loved London, went shopping while Jim And Anna Livia set about enlarging basic Irish-English. He and Nora were married at Kensington Register Office in 1931 (Pound was married at the church next door). In the Electoral Register for 1931-2, James Joyce of 28b Campden Grove is listed as eligible for jury service. The other tenants were Nora and May Joyce … A neighbour was called Miss Gertrude Stein.

Quite what all of that ‘proves’, beyond West London being then, as now, cosmopolitan and liter-arty, is beyond Malcolm’s comprehension.

Every day a new distraction

Today’s was William Bloat.

That has divided those who venture these ways into an immediate switch off (the usual “dwell time” on a blog page is reckoned in micro-seconds) or a more positive, Oh, yes! I know that one!

Well, here’s the best-known rendition (from the Clancy’s reunion concert):

Once the final verse gets into one’s neurones, it’s ever-lurking, ready to pop out:

But the strangest turn of the whole concern
Is only just beginnin’:
He went to Hell, but his wife got well,
And she’s still alive and sinnin’
For the razor blade was British-made
But the rope was Belfast linen!

There is considerable debate about that “British-made”. That’s the version Tommy Makem gave us, and he was the first (as far as Malcolm knows) to marry the verse to The Dawning of the Day. Well, even that’s arguable. There’s a delicious, earlier, Makem concert (also on YouTube) when the blade is “Japanese-made”. That’s worth a visit if only to see Tommy trying to break through the rigidity and hyper-politeness of the RTÉ audience (don’t miss the lady with the hat).

We have, then, another opportunity to deploy the pencilled variae lectiones. But this is folk-music, for heaven’s sake! The whole point is modification, adaptation, re-working, interpretation. It’s what kept Cecil Sharp (and others) in tea and biscuits.

What we may grasp at is that the verse was by Raymond Calvert of East Belfast. And that’s Orange country. It seems the original blade was “German-made”.

Confuse a Mudcat

In any case of doubt or difficulty over folkery matters, a ready resort is the Mudcat Café. Sure enough, there’s a couple of threads on William Bloat. What is evident there is the lack of understanding of what goes on in Ulster (even in Irish) humour. Above all, it is wry. It is self-referential. And it crosses all the divides of religion and culture. The same jokes crop up each side of the Great Divide: all that happens is the protagonist is ‘ours’ and the stooge or ‘antagonist’ is one of them uns.

So, depending on where one is — north or south — the razor-blade may be be Free State-made or English-made. Belfast linen, though, is a matter of pride both ways. It’s the same as the Titanic gybe: it took 10,000 Ulstermen/Belfast men/ Irishmen (that bit depends on locality and allegiance) to build it, but only one Englishman to sink it (that bit is common to all parties).

While we in these parts …

The other — perhaps far greater — song that is set to The Dawning of the Day is Paddy Kavanagh’s love-lorn appeal to Hilda Moriarty:

There’s a useful RTÉ archive on the song, including Benedict Kiely asserting that Kavanagh had the tune in mind, and intended it to be a song rather than just a verse. There also is Hilda Moriarty briefly commenting on the inspiration.

For a couple of years in the early ’60s, undergraduate Malcolm used to stagger home, alone, bereft and unloved,  to his cold-water basement flat in Elgin Road, Ballsbridge, after a night at O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street. If it wasn’t Wellington Road, it would be Raglan Road he passed down. He never met or was inspired by a Hilda.

Dublin is a small place, and Hilda — having discreetly repulsed the inept gropes of Kavanagh — went on to marry Donogh O’Malley, the later Minister of Education. Which, finally, brings us to another personage worthy of respect and admiration.

The not-so-great and the not-so-good, no. 30: “George Smiley”

No, not really: try John Michael Ward Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook. Same difference?

Malcolm doesn’t pretend to omniscience, quite. [In passing, he ventured "omniscient" in a Sixth Form essay at the High School, Dublin, and had it crossed out as a spelling error. It still rankles.]

The spur for this one came out of a book review, by Stella Rimington (no less)  in the current Spectator. The book under review is Michael Jago’s The Man Who Was George Smiley: The Life of John Bingham. To his discredit, Malcolm only made the connection fully when he read:

Born in 1908, the heir to an Anglo-Irish barony, [Bingham] saw his ancestral home sold for a pittance and his parents living in genteel poverty. The French and German families with whom he had become friends in the 1920s were broken up or turned into enemies by a war which destroyed the Europe he knew. He was still in the Service when the situation in Northern Ireland  began to raise new security threats, but he retired before he saw the radical change that terrorism was to bring to agent-running and everything else about the Service. He would not have liked it.

Note that Mrs Rimington does not say that “agent-running” is a matter of history, merely that the practice has been “changed”. She is also explicit about what the practice had originally been:

When I was a new MI5 recruit, working in Leconfield House in 1970, there was a group of middle-aged men who came and went at unusual times of the day, often gathering in the late afternoons, talking loudly and cheerfully. They were the F4 agent runners and I envied them; they seemed to be having a lot more fun than I was.

F Branch, the counter subversion branch, was responsible, amongst other things, for monitoring the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain and in particular for identifying its members, in support of Clement Attlee’s 1948 ‘Purge Procedure’, excluding communists and fascists from work vital to the security of the state. By 1970, the F4 agent runners, of whom John Bingham was one, had done a pretty thorough job. The Party’s King Street headquarters was penetrated by long-term agents, the membership records had been regularly covertly copied and the building was thoroughly bugged.

Malcolmian asides:

Clement Attlee’s 1948 ‘purge procedure’ is covered by Peter Hennessy in The Secret State, and, more sensationally and subjectively, by (but natch) Chapman Pincher in Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders and Cover-Ups. The accepted version seems to be that, in mid-1947, the Whitehall in-crowd were pressured by MI5 to set about excluding “communists” from sensitive work — on the basis that such “communists” might have divided loyalties. “Communist”, of course, increasingly became a very elastic term, allowing the right-wing governments that followed to spook on all and any “enemies within”, who were inevitably on the left.

Attlee went public on the “Purge Procedure” on 15 March 1948. In April 1950, after  the conviction of Fuchs, Attlee authorised the further development of “positive vetting”.

Both the ‘purge procedure’ and ‘positive vetting’ are spun out of MI5 files: no more, no less. Donald Cameron Watt, reviewing The Secret State for The Political Quarterly has a tart, but pertinent observation about:

British security policy towards the ‘enemy within’, that fifth column which had turned out to be so mythical in its nature during the 1939-45 war with Nazism, and still has to be properly assessed for the forty-five years of the Cold War.

Our value of those MI5 files might be enhanced did we not know:

• that Jack Straw, of worthy citizens, was the subject of one of them [while an interview Malcolm had in 1994 suggested someone in the Home Office had information on his alter ego from the early 1960s];
• that Charlotte Bingham (Lord Clanmorris’s author daughter, and also employed  in “intelligence”) once “mislaid” 29 of them,
• and that David Cornwall (later “John le Carré”) was recruited as an undergraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford, presumably to report on his contemporaries.

Be all that as it may, Bingham’s name crops up sequentially in the “usual sources”, such as half-a-dozen mentions in Guy Liddell’s Diaries (interviewing a Polish émigré about approaches from the Germans; posing as a German secret serviceman to wind in a suspected enemy agent — and being denounced by her as a Gestapo man; “baby-sitting” a “safe house”).

The Bingham heritage

North-east of Dorchester, on the River Piddle (stop sniggering!) is the ancient seat of the Bingham family. As these things go, it is Bingham(‘s) Melcombe (above). In the time of Henry VIII, one Robert Bingham had a prolific marriage to Alice Coker. Their third son, Richard, distinguished himself in Elizabeth’s Irish wars, and in 1598 was appointed Marshal of Ireland and governor of Leinster. Richard’s next younger brother, Henry, followed and set up shop at Castlebar [☟]: this is the line we shall shortly follow. Meanwhile …

Three generations, and five successive baronets, later we arrive at Sir John Bingham. He married Charlotte Sarsfield (sister of the more famous Patrick) — who was a niece of the Duke of Monmouth, and a grand-daughter (albeit by one his many irregular connections) of Charles II.

By now the more genealogically-sensitive will have spotted where this is leading. Sir John Bingham’s second son, Charles, became Baron Lucan of Castlebar in 1776, and the first Earl of Lucan in 1795.When Charles popped his well-heeled clogs in 1799, the title passed to an earlier Richard Bingham.

Scandal!

What else would one expect of this family?

The 1838 edition of Debrett has it succinctly, if baldly:

married 26 May 1794, Elizabeth Belasyse, da. and co-h. of Henry, last duke of Fauconberg, (whose marriage with Bernard-Edward, duke of Norfolk, had been dissolved by act of parliament the same year,) and by her had issue, — 1. Elizabeth, b. 1795.

Do the sums. The divorce was passed in May 1794, She married Bingham forthwith. In due course, a decade later,  they separated, and she went to life in Paris. Anyway, something wrong: “Duke of Fauconberg”? Err, no: daddy was Sir Henry Belasyse and 1st earl of Fauconberg: mummy was Charlotte Lamb.

Five generations on we arrive at the infamous Lord Lucan.

“Baron Clanmorris”: who he?

Ah! Someone’s paying attention!

We have to start with Henry Bingham, whom we met above, the younger brother of Sir Richard — who was last seen setting himself up in state at Castlebar [☝]. Sadly, he was on 22 July 1691 decapitated at the Battle of Aughrim.

His son, Henry, was Lord Justice of Ireland, and — in turn — his great-grandson, John Bingham, was created the first Baron Clanmorris on 30 July 1800. Mark that date, and consider the politics. This Bingham was M.P. for Tuam, one of the rottenest of two-seater boroughs:

Tuam, 3150 inhabitants; electors, a Sovereign and 12 Burgesses — a venal and rotten borough under the patronage of Mr. Bingham.

 For £8,000 cash he sold those two votes for an Irish peerage — and for supporting the Union.

Three generations on, we arrive at the 5th Baron Clanmorris of Newbrook (also a John, no great imagination at work here), who was an aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of India, and came home to be a J.P. in County Down and Galway. The sixth Baron was an Arthur (some originality at last), who served in the Boer War, went out to be  aide-de-camp to the Governor-General of New Zealand, and was a captain in the First World War. And so we arrive at the seventh Baron, the subject of this demolition job.

Of my nation? What ish my nation?

So, reviewing the career of this Anglo-Irish succession — 1801 and all that followed, let us try to find room in our hearts for Stella Rimington’s punch-line:

… the book is very readable for its main character: novelist, patriot and moderate man in a world of extremes.

Floaters

Once upon a time, Malcolm rented a basement flat in close proximity to Dublin’s Lansdowne Road. Should y0u prefer: Bóthar Lansdúin, D4. Adjacent to the rugby ground.

Also convenient to the buses into Trinity College, and — when the last nickel went over the bar at O’Neill’s in Suffolk Street (or wherever), Malcolm could always walk back to a lonely pit.

The rent on that flat was just £6 a month. No! Don’t marvel. There were down-sides. No toilet (sneak upstairs and borrow). No bath. One tap and a bucket.

Oh! When the sewer-cover lifted,  there were floating turds by the back door. Right outside where Malcolm’s bed-head was. Then he had to go in with the sticks.

Nice. Or not.

To this day he knows not why his “hit-rate” was so worse than “babe-magnet” Nick Clegg. It might just be that sewer-cover.

So, let us move on …

Actually: it was the movements which caused Malcolm most grief.

Had you inspected…

You might have found in today’s Times [£] the misery equally felt by Mark White of Bracklesham Caravan & Boat Club [let's term that the BC&BC].  Mark’s problem is that Chichester Borough Council may be approving a further fifty dwellings “up stream”. The BC&BC have noticed that a previous development of over a hundred houses, about fifteen years ago, caused problems:

Locals objecting to the proposed developments say that even after moderate rainfall they are unable to flush toilets because of blocked drains.

Hold on there!

Malcolm has sat through sessions enough of local authority planning committees to know that foul water and surface water sewers should not interconnect.

Even so (again with that Times report):

… the club floods several times a year and has closed twice due to sewage coming up through drains.

Malcolm remembers it well. After the sticks, he always needed a long, hot wallow at the (long-dismantled) TCD bath-house. Followed by a change of clothes from the flesh outwards.

All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds

David Brocklebank, managing director at the developer Wates, says technical experts have concluded that the new homes will have “no adverse effect on flodd risk to the surrounding area”.

A spokesman for Chichester District Council added that  ”all comments from local residents will be considered together with advice from the Southern Water, the Environment Agency and the council’s own drainage engineer”.

Lest we forget:

• The Wates Group makes repetitive £50,000 donations to the Tory Party.
• [from wikipedia] Chichester is currently under Conservative control… : the Conservatives held 34 seats, the Liberal Democrats held 11 seats and there were 3 independent councillors.
• Southern Water is owned by Greensands Investments Limited.

Think on.

Screwing the screwers

While Malcolm was swanning around Berlin, the Guardian seems to have expanded the Westminster digested column to a full G2 page. Somehow, too, John Crace’s by-line goes missing this week — though, not for the on-line version.

Crace on top form, then:

Cameron: … Now I suppose I’d better do something about my own party. Any thoughts on a bill that would show the country the Tories are totally united?

Theresa May: Gay weddings. We need to send out a strong message that the Conservatives are no longer the nasty party.

Cameron: Great plan. Sam’s very keen on it, too. Though we must leave plenty of opt out clauses for religions that don’t like gays so they don’t have to marry them if they don’t want to. If you know what I mean.

May: Of course. It would be remarkably intolerant of us to ask the church to treat gays equally.

Sir Roger Gale MP: That’s absolutely outrageous. May I just remind the House that I have been married three times, so no one is better qualified to speak on the sanctity of marriage than me. And quite frankly it is absurd to think that anyone other than a man and a woman should be granted such an honour.

Another traditionalist: Hear, hear! Adultery is an holy estate and not something that should be made available to a bunch of same-sex perverts.

Gale: Indeed, if we open marriage up to practising homosexualists then we might as well tear up the Bible completely and let every Tom, Dick or Harry marry his dog.

Yet another traditionalist: Steady on old boy! You’re losing some of the Tories from the shires here. They’re very fond of their labradors.

Gale: Or worse still, a member of their own family.

The Queen: Shut up, you horrible little man. There’s nothing wrong with marrying one of your relatives.

What Gale said in Tuesday’s debate was hardly less surreal, but even more deliberately offensive:

…  if the Government are serious about this measure, they should withdraw the Bill, abolish the Civil Partnership Act 2004, abolish civil marriage and create a civil union Bill that applies to all people, irrespective of their sexuality or relationship. That means that brothers and brothers, sisters and sisters and brothers and sisters would be included as well. That would be a way forward. This is not.

Oooh, you are awful!

Jump across the staple from that Crace to Stephen Moss, on Revenge is rarely sweet. Another tea-time treat, listing the betrayed wives who have done so much to enliven social discourse:

There are dozens of examples of women in the public eye, or whose partners are in the public eye, who seek revenge. When Robin Cook left his wife, Margaret,she wrote a book detailing his alleged infidelities and heavy drinking. When the then Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik split with his weather-presenter fiancee Siân Lloyd in 2006 and succumbed to the charms of Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia – he called it a “meeting of minds” – Lloyd wasted little time in rubbishing Opik. “I regard our break-up as my lucky escape,” she said. “It is just a huge relief to be out of that relationship. He’s a fool when he’s in love and totally oblivious to the damage he is doing to his reputation.”

Journalist Maria Shriver reportedly took revenge on her former husband Arnold Schwarzenegger by leaking material on his infidelity and the child he had fathered with his mistress. Lady Sarah Moon avenged herself on her straying husband by cutting up his designer suits, covering his car with paint, and leaving much-prized bottles from his wine cellar on their neighbours’ doorsteps. Princess Diana exacted her revenge for her failed marriage in a gripping TV interview watched by 15 million people. More stomach-churningly, there are those stories that periodically appear about women who cut off the penises of their unfaithful husbands, which is taking an eye for an eye to extremes.

All of which, over 1100 words, is put in the literary contexts of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and particularly Francis Bacon’s 1625 essay, On Revenge. That last one is pungent, moral, uplifting, pertinent — and all in fewer than 450 words. Irish Leaving Certificate English introduced Malcolm to Bacon; and it’s a delight which has lasted over half-a-century. Ten minutes with Bacon can occupy the mind for hours thereafter, relishing the words, weighing the eternal truths. In the case of On Revenge, however, Malcolm guesses Bacon was building on the bare dozen or so words of the fifth maxim of the sixth book of Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

In the matter of Vicky Pryce seeing off Huhne, though, let’s hear it from Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince, chapter III):

… one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.

Divided loyalties: being Hiberno-English

A long while since (5th September 2008, since you didn’t ask), Malcolm put up a post on being Anglo-Irish. For some reason, that still attracts a fair number of “hits”. This, then, may be the logical  counter-part.

J’ai deux amours

Josephine Baker famously had two loves:

J’ai deux amours
Mon pays et Paris.

If Freda McDonald — barely two generations from slavery — had a hard life, growing up in St Louis, she found fame, fortune and a distinguished personal history as Josephine Baker in her adopted France.

Therein lies the rub

In this 21st century, many of us have two identities: one on the birth certificate, and one in the life we live. There’s little particularly “new” in this:

• Arthur Wellesley got himself born in what is now the Merrion Hotel, Dublin — but is the archetypal English Iron Duke;
• David Lloyd-George arrived in the world in the Manchester suburbs, but is forever “the Welsh Wizard”;
• Éamon de Valera originated in New York, but re-made an Ireland in his own image;

— and so on.

Malcolm’s eldest has a surfeit of air-miles and is quadri-lingual in English and American, Tottenham and Noo Joisey. Even daughter number 2, the Earth Mother, manages to switch effortlessly between south Saxon RP and narrow-vowelled Anglian North Yorkshire.

Your nationalism quiz

Yesterday’s

Times

,

at its fullest fluffy Murdochian populism, was rattling on:

A new version of the Life in the United Kingdom handbook, published yesterday, aims to prepare would-be Britons for the citizenship test. The guide focuses on history, tradition and what it means to be British and has ditched more mundane sections on the practicalities of life in the UK …

The 180-page guide, costing £12.99 is unashamedly patriotic, with a red, white and blue cover and pictures of the Queen and of crowds waving the Union flag at the Last Night of the Proms and on the Mall. Sir Winston Churchill is pictured alongside quotes from his wartime speeches but only two post-war prime ministers receive separate biographies: Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher.

The new edition finds a place for Monty Python, Morcambe and Wise and Torvill and Dean, but migrants will also be expected to know about important figures of English literature including Sir Kingsley Amis, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and J.K.Rowling.

Pass the sick-bag, Alice.

On the other hand, the side-bar was a Commentary by Matthew Syed, and it went a way to re-entering normality. Syed refers back to background:

My father arrived on these shores in 1966 as a Muslim, Pakistani, and harbouring deep suspicions about British cultural assumptions. Almost half a century later, he is a monarchist, Radio 4 aficionado and just about the most patriotic Brit I know. With the exception of his Christianity, to which he converted, Britishness is perhaps the most important and cherished affiliation of his life.

My maternal grandfather, who died last week at 98, lived a very different life to my father. Born in the Rhondda Valley at the outset of the Great War, he worked down the pits from 14 then spent a lifetime serving others, first at a home for deprived children and then as warden of an old people’s home. the one thing he shared with dad was a deep love of nation, but he interpreted Britishness in a fundamentally different way.

Not deep. Not philosophical. But neither, reading between the lines of that Times piece, is Life in the United Kingdom [£12.99 at all good bookshops, or around £7.99 if you're Brit enough to order on-line — a nationality test in itself]. Syed scores by being domestic, humane, direct, down to earth — even dignified, in the best sense. All the good things the official line seems to miss.

For an example, today’s Clare in the Community (Harry Venning’s unfailingly reliable weekly cartoon for the Guardian‘s Society section) is an instant education in ‘Britishness’, and — unlike the nostrums in Life in the United Kingdom — transcends the regional cultural divides that Syed glosses in that final phrase above:

What are little boys made of?

Everyone differs: we are an unregimented, frequently-bolshie and mutually-incompatible lot, each with our peculiar passions. What is it that makes Malcolm’s academic and professorial Little Brother traipse out fortnightly to stand with perhaps 5,000 other stalwarts and watch Notts County? The heterogeneousness is an essential part of belonging anywhere on this archipelago.

Unlike Syed, Malcolm was denied personal knowledge of either of his grandfathers: one tends his plot eternally in Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension No. 2; the other died of miner’s lung around the time the (first) Great Slump arrived. Did either of those have a deep love of nation, an overwhelming sense of being “British”?

As for the royalist thing, Malcolm recalls (and can date) 15th February, 1952. He doesn’t remember the funeral of George VI — apart from the oddest early-adopter, television hadn’t penetrated north Norfolk. He does know it was a day of national mourning, and so a Friday off school. Dear Old Dad spent much of the day double-digging the long vegetable garden, and none too chuffed. When pre-adolescent Malcolm murmured a triteness about it being “Sad about the King”, the parental snort was followed by “Why, what did he ever do for me?”

Was that the germ of a young republican?

Two loves? Well, two affections.

For Malcolm neither north Norfolk nor dirty Dublin quite amount to “‘loves”. The former has changed, not wholly for the better, over the years as the have-yotties and weekenders made the coast a transplant of Camden Town — Hampstead-by-the-Sea is further south, at Southwold. Dublin has changed even more, though there remain vestiges of the old scruffiness. West Cork has gone the way of the gentrified English coast. Once away from the “gold coast”, the rest of County Down is not wholly spoiled — but could one transplant and enjoy living there?

Despite all the confusions, that double pull recurs and endures. After all, when GCE English History and English Literature immediately leads into the Irish Leaving Certificate, a cultural trauma persists for life.

Par eux toujours,
Mon coeur est ravi.

A passing thought

This one was meant to go up on New Year’s Day, however …

It’s too early after a heavy night for a pondered, even ponderous, piece.

Even so, as Malcolm stirred in the late morning light, his eye passed over the guilt pile of books read and — hence the guilt — part-read or even unread.

For a start, he has to admit that December has been poor month for reading. It wasn’t so much one of those chronic reading blocks, but there was so much else happening — two major expeditions occupying three weeks of the month. Even so, there’s shame that Ian Rankin’s latest was carted to New Jersey and back, and barely opened, so is still squatting on recent life and conscience like Larkin’s Toad.

Too heavy, already

No: that’s becoming far more intense than New Year’s Day deserves. And the household rubbish needs to be decanted for the imminent arrival of the dust-cart on Wednesday morning.

Instead, prompted by that glance at the bedside books, overhung Malcolm settles for a reflection on recent gains and losses.

On the down-side he would list two disappointments:

• Lindsey Davis’s Master and God.

Now Davis’s Falco series has been a long-term delight: light, bright and witty. Somehow when she turns elsewhere the magic fades. Yes, this fictionalising — and humanising — of the appalling Domitian is well-researched and well-plotted, even well-written. It somehow seems soul-less, even predictable: a trite love-story wrapped around with shenanigans and machinations.

The book reads well, but — for Malcolm — lacks any lingering of warmed satisfaction. Malcolm found himself wondering on that: why? what does one expect from a piece of disposable reading? in there is the difference between ‘writing’ and ‘literature’?

Perhaps it is that reaching the end of a book is, in itself, an achievement — both for the author and for the reader. When the ending is so predictable — one is well ahead of Gaius Vinius Clodianus, the central character with his anachronistic PTSD (Davis’s own usage), long before the denouement — that terminal satisfaction is denied. Something is missing, and so some satisfaction is lacking.

• Donna Leon’s The Jewels of Paradise.

Here’s another one, to which much of that previous comment might equally apply.

The score-plus-one of the Brunetti sequence has to stand as one of the major monuments of crime-fiction. Joyce claimed that Dublin could be reconstructed from Ulysses. Leon might similarly boast that the visitor’s Venice has continuing existence through those novels: Brunetti’s amblings and meanderings across and around  his native city catch the light, the glamour and the squalor, the glories and the underlying filth of La Serenissima. Ahem! Have you ever observed a diver emerge from the cess-pits beneath those well-photographed buildings?

In The Jewels of Paradise Leon attempts to construct a different protagonist in the same environment. When Maureen Corrigan was reviewing the book she hit the buttons:

It may take a few chapters beforeDonna Leon’s avid readers get over their disappointment in her latest mystery. All looks molto bene at first: Venetian setting? Check. Insider descriptions of Italian food and architecture? Check. Corrupt officials and brutal criminal bottom-feeders? Check, check.

Throughout 21 novels, Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti has investigated . . . Holy Cannoli, there’s no Commissario Brunetti in this story! A Donna Leon mystery without Brunetti, at first, feels empty, as though a mischievous god had pulled the plug on the canals.

“The Jewels of Paradise” is Leon’s first stand-alone mystery, and, while it is undeniably strange to be wandering through Venice without the protection of Brunetti’s solid presence …

Unfortunately Corrigan then allowed herself to be taken in by:

the young heroine of this novel … so winning that readers should find themselves forgiving the commissario his absence. Native Venetian Caterina Pellegrini holds a recently minted PhD in music, with a specialization in baroque opera.

Yes, but Ms Pellegrini is so thin, and the plot so trivial, the thing doesn’t quite hang together. The novel ends in a typical Leon wrap-it-up-and go away fashion. Yet, unlike the Brunettis, it seems rushed, anticlimactic … and unsatisfying. Unlike the Brunettis, Leon has allowed her deep knowledge of Italian opera to take over and stifle the plot for the less committed and less musicological. And the later Brunettis all come laden with a convincing social conscience: something missing here.

Perhaps, if Dr Leon allowed Ms Pellegrini another outing or two, we might come to love her more. At the end of The Jewels of Paradise she has been despatched to sub-arctic Russia, and — presumably — fictional oblivion.

On the other hand …

Malcolm would wish, at greater length, to celebrate two discoveries — well, to be more accurate, one discovery and a rediscovery.

The rediscovery is William Boyd.

It has been a long while, some half of Malcolm’s adult reading life, since A Good Man in Africa. Malcolm’s edition — alas! — is not that first edition (as right). To be honest, there are a couple of previous offences to be taken into consideration:

• that Malcolm assumed Boyd was touching, if not taking on the mantle of Evelyn Waugh;

and

• that Malcolm found Ordinary Thunderstorms a trifle tough on the tooth.

And then came the prior publicity for the BBC TV production of an (abbreviated) Restless. Fair enough: half-a-dozen years from publication to adaptation is a decent interval; but it does require a re-reading from days-gone-by. And, in the cold light of a reappraisal it is a very, very good book:  a convoluted plot and an easy-reading (but not sanitised) writing.

And so to Waiting for Sunrise. OK, Mr Boyd: you did for WW2 in one book: now it’s time for WW1, and what a delight! And what an enigmatic ending! Here’s another which would provide a decent production company, with access to early twentieth-century wardrobes, another two-parter. Just wait and watch.

Above, Malcolm suggested one of the satisfactions of a novel is simply reaching the designed end. So read Waiting for Sunrise and define your own end and ending. It’s remarkably tormenting and satisfying.

On which ambiguous note, let us pass on from the guilt pile … (of which, we will doubtless hear more).

And the discovery is …

Christopher Fowler’s delicious, delightful, sparky and seductive Bryant and Webb series. Take it from the horse’s mouth: it takes something for Malcolm to scour the bookshops of North London to complete the sequence. But he did … and felt better for it.

And the pick of a very plump litter, by the narrowest of margins, is Full Dark House.

Say no more: Fowler’s website does it for one and all.

Disclaimer:

This post has done great damage to many worthy and worthwhile reads Malcolm has enjoyed in 2012. And has overlooked here.

Face off

While Malcolm was in the former American colony of Noo Joisey and in absentia, WordPress would seem to have re-arranged how photographs are inserted into posts. That Malcolm was somewhat jet-lagged after an eventful ride with Mustang Sally was a further confusion.

That means the two protagonists of that anecdote in the previous post went un-illustrated. While Malcolm works out what he is doing wrong, let’s hear it for Aelia Galla Placidia (above).

There’s a decent Wikipedia mini-biog of the lady, well worth a quite viewing — for she was a figure of considerable consequence. She is also mother  to millions — try the account on rootsweb for a taster. One way or another, she figures in the ancestry of many Europeans — and probably all of their hereditary rulers. She was, for example, Elizabeth II’s something-like forty-six-times-back great-grandmother.

Ravenna

The source of that image is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna, which deserves to qualify as one of the wonder of early European art, recognised by UNESCO as:

the earliest and best preserved of all mosaic monuments, and at the same time one of the most artistically perfect.

Slide out of the Mausoleum, take a swift left past the Information Bureau into the Via Cavour, then right into Via di Roma, and there is the Basilica of San Apollinare Nuovo. [Aha! See! Malcolm is getting the knack of this insertion business!]

San Apollinare Nuovo was where W.B.Yeats was confronted by his:

sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

— another poem Malcolm was made to learn at Dublin’s High School for his Leaving Cert., and which has fertilised brain-cells ever since.

A note of dubiety

Despite that image of Galla Placidia having a prominent position in her eponymous Mausoleum (as part of the family group with her two children, Valentinian and Honoria), there are certain snippy critics who question whether it does in fact represent the lady.

Malcolm will have none of that. That is she, majestically, imperially, imperiously so, and no-one else.

Oh, and a further footnote …

One modern legend has it that Cole Porter visited the Mausoleum, came outside, looked up at the Italian sky, and had the notion for Night and Day. And if that’s not a good enough excuse …

The not-so-great and the not-so-good, no. 29: Joe “Spud” Murphy

As for the numbering of this irregular series: E&OE.

To be fair, the only “not-so-good” in this post belongs to the (ig)noble Montagu family. Well, OK: a certain Taoiseach gets a mention  — but, thanks to the competition among the holders of that office, he is squeezed out of the medal places for blackguardry. Beyond that …

And, no, it’s not April Fool’s Day.

In 1954: the world changed

Seamus Burke invented the cheese-and-onion crisp.

He did so at the behest of Joseph Murphy, a go-getting Dublin entrepreneur who deserves his place alongside the Tony O’Reillys and Michael O’Learys. But Joe Murphy got there before either of those luminaries.

Joe sprang from Dublin “trade”: his father ran the builder’s business, his mother the retail side with a paint shop. His education was the Synge Street Christian Brothers, which was to south Dublin’s inner city as Eton was to the English rolling acres: it was a tougher number, but the students were better people.

A Malcolmian aside

Put it like this: in recent years Synge Street CBS worked out why so few of its boys were applying for university entrance though the Central Applications Office — entries had to be made in January, when post-Christmas parents were strapped for cash.

Solution: Con Creedon, a past pupil, made a legacy, and the trust fund provides scholarships. Now nearly 60% of Synge Street boys are getting the Leaving Certificate points and going on to tertiary education.

Eat your heart and your ‘academies’ out, Mickey Gove. 

Sinning

When he left school, in his mid-teens (a sign of ambition in itself: too many Dublin lads towards the end of the 1930s — and later — had left school far younger), he went into the storeroom and then behind the counter of James J Fox & Co, conveniently across the road from Trinity’s Front Gate and the Bank of Ireland. During Malcolm’s Trinity years, Dear Old Dad prompted a once-a-year visit for a Christmas present (usually a briar pipe).

That move in retail was a decided move by Joe: the family already had two of his brothers in the priesthood, and that would have been a natural career move for an upwardly-mobile CBS boy. ”To hell with this,” he allegedly declared, “we need one sinner in the family.”

The deep fat fryers of O’Rahilly’s Parade

O’Rahilly’s Parade is off Moore Street, Dublin, a bullet’s shot from the GPO, noted for two events (only one of which seems publicly memorialised).

It is named for the Director of Arms of the Irish Volunteers, Mícheál  Ó Rathaille. Ó Rathaille claimed the headship of his clan, and insisted therefore he was The O’Rahilly. On the Friday of Easter Week, O’Rahilly volunteered to reconnoitre an escape route out of the GPO. He was either mown down by British gun-fire in (then) Sackville Lane), or died of wounds much later through intentional British neglect.

Anyway, in O’Rahilly Parade, the other legend — that of Joe “Spud” Murphy — took shape. Already he was on the up: he had realised that Ribena was not available in the Republic, so he imported it. Ball-point pens were another (for Dublin) innovatory line. By then he had a van and eight employees. He had an addiction to the potato crisp, and he had his wife — officially Bernadette, but always “Bunny” — slicing potatoes, to fry them in a couple of deep-fat fryers. Even Murphy’s prodigious appetite could not keep up with the production, and so the notion came to market the surplus.

Findlaters, the grocers to Dublin’s ton, were already taking Murphy’s Ribena and other products and imports, and agreed to market his crisps — which were now officially Tayto Crisps (again, allegedly, because that was how Murphy’s infant son called them). Murphy’s genius for marketing had the packets emblazoned with Mr Tayto, whom we met, above.

Now flavoured!

This was a time when all crisps came in two flavours: unsalted and salted — consumer choice involved locating the small screw of salt in each packet, adding it to the other contents, and shaking the bag. Decades on, reinventing the blue salt sachet was to be another marketing break-through.

This was not good enough for Joe: like Alexander the Great, he yearned for new worlds to conquer. So, Seamus Burke experimented with a kitchen table of condiments and additives, until — ta-rah! — Joe was satisfied with the cheese-and-onion variant. This was released upon an unsuspecting world in 1954, and Joe’s fortune was made.

Well-shod Joe, not from Hannibal, MO

By the start of the 1960s Joe was a millionaire, and being hailed by Seanie Lemass as the epitome of Irish drive and success.

The Tayto neon sign guided South Dubliners back to safety from forays across O’Connell Bridge. There was a regular sponsored Tayto programme, and insistent ad-spots, on Raidió Éireann. Joe wafted around the city in his Rolls-Royce (never more than two years old). Valet-parking it for Joe was an opportunity to double a flunkey’s weekly wage. He was a universal Mr Affability.

Joe never really got the hang of his wealth. He would arrive at an outfitters — Brown Thomas or Switzers in those good times when they faced each other off across Grafton Street — and ask to see shirts or (a particular favourite) cashmere golfing sweaters  — both of which he had like Imelda Marcos had shoes. He avoided decisions of colour or cut by ordering the lot presented to him.

Expansion and retirement

Tayto continued to grow, buying up other manufacturers, and was employing 300 by the start of the 1970s. Tayto even crossed the Border: the Castle at Tandragee, County Armagh, became Tayto Castle. This had been the seat of the Dukes of Manchester (their other pad was Kimbolton Castle) until the 9th Duke went broke, retired to hunt heiresses in the USA, and survive as a con-man. The Castle was requisitioned for military use, and suffered further indignities at the hands of the US Cavalry, until Tommy Hutchinson bought it in 1955.

By now the Tayto empire was being stalked by international predators: a Chicago food group had a stake as early as 1964. By 1983, Joe celebrated becoming sixty by selling out and retiring to Spain. He continued to decorate the golf-courses around Marbella, in his cashmere sweaters, and to delight the pro shops by constantly updating his clubs, until his death in late 2001.

No road through Knockmore

Here’s an awful warning:

That’s from the Rail Accident Investigation Branch web-site. The RAIB is — finally — being allowed into the secret, two months on.

Yesterday evening, the BBC News website had picked up the story and published this:

More than 100 people escaped injury after a train ran over a section of damaged railway in County Antrim.
However, the full incident, which took place on 28 June, was not reported to an investigation team for two months.
The driver was unable to stop before the first of six carriages had run onto an unsupported section of track.
The train was bound for the Irish open golf tournament, over a line not normally used for passenger services.
The train did not derail and was reversed away.
The Rail Accident investigation Branch (RAIB) is looking into the incident at Knockmore, outside Lisburn at 07:05 on 28 June.

So that’s all right, then?

Not really.

At first sight this looks like a repeat of another near disaster when the Broadmeadow Viaduct, near Malahide, north of Dublin, was washed away. That was on the main Dublin-Belfast line (and on a major commuter route). Iarnród Éireann hadn’t inspected the viaduct, which was known from previous erosion to have stability problems, for three days.

The Knockmore line, of course, does not have that strategic importance — though, arguably, it has considerable potential:

It could provide a corridor through Antrim to the north coast and to Derry. Currently the intention remains to upgrade the A5 trunk road  from Derry to the south. This involves a total cost of at least £850 million — that estimate is already three years old. And only last week, the lead constructor, Mouchel, went bust. Meanwhile the fragile rail link along the spectacular coastline of County Londonderry is closed for many months — while the grand and long-overdue sum of £75 million is spent on it. Do the comparisons.

Beyond that, Belfast has two under-used airports (City of Derry is NI’s unsatisfactory and even more under-used third — it is right on the rail line, too): the Westminster Northern Ireland committee is taking minutes and lasting months chewing on all this. Dublin airport, by comparison, is heavily patronised, and — until recent cut-backs — was going to get a second runway, long enough for direct flights to the Far East. The Knockmore branch runs immediately behind the terminal at Belfast International: it could easily connect with central Belfast, and Dublin (particularly so, if and when the Metro North plan were implemented).

Politics. Politics. Politics.

The old Unionist regime at Stormont disgracefully ripped up the Ulster rail network. There may have been an economic case for retrenchment and “rationalisation”; but the main issue was to break unnatural connections with those damnable Fenians in the Free State. So a whole swathe of natural links were abruptly severed. Anyway, the motor car was the future.

From that, notice how , when the Malahide viaduct went down, so did any north-south link. Any rolling stock north was stuck there.

That map is unfair in that it omits the real improvements in the Dublin commuter belt — unlike Belfast which is liable to a daily tail-back along every arterial route. North of the Dublin commuter lines there isn’t a millimetre of electrified track; and any mass transport system to alleviate the Belfast photochemical smog — an airport tram, for one obvious example — is systematically rubbished. The present “dynamic” pie-in-the-sky is a “rapid-transit”, based — believe it or not — on Las Vegas. It amounts to a bendy-bus.

Knockmore is a symptom of wilful neglect

In this climate, the rail sector in Northern Ireland will continue to decline and decay.

Malcolm is left bemused left bemused by the bizarre insouciance evident in the Knockmore incident:

• A span of some fifteen sleepers and tracks was unsupported. A train was seemingly sent down that track, which is usually-unauthorised for passenger service, apparently without proper inspection. For heaven’s sake, were there any doubt s over the security of the line, why not run a pilot loco along it? That (and proper daily inspection by linesmen) was the Victorian approach — and still (linesmen apart) the norm for many lines.

• The collapse and a near calamity has gone two months without being reported or (apparently) investigated.

Questions (as they say) must be asked.