The sky is falling! (selectively)

Murdoch’s Times not only went tabloid, it has acquired some down-market degeneracies with it.

A couple of posts back, Malcolm was whining about the comic’s fullest fluffy Murdochian populism. He now bemoans a parallel ghoulish, blood-chilling, thrill-seeking sensationalism.

The Melanie Phillips memorial meme

What provoked this was the third Comment article in yesterday’s fish-n-chip wrapper. After Finkelstein (a contract artist, so comes with the fixtures and fittings) on the holocaust, and the German Foreign Minister soft-soaping the chasm between Cameron and Merkel, comes Maajid Nawaz:

Muslim patrols are s sign of things to come

We should worry that battle-hardened fanatics could impose their dogma on Britain’s streets

Then — yawn! — his opening tries to draw straight-lines across a very uneven surface:

On the streets of Greece supporters of the far-Right Golden Dawn party patrol neighbourhoods, attacking anyone who looks like an immigrant. In Denmark a group calling itself Call to Islam has declared parts of the country to be “sharia-controlled zones” and its “morality police” confront drinkers and partygoers. In France right-wing vigilantes ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp. In Spain nine Islamist extremists recently kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery under sharia and attempted to execute her before she managed to escape. And here English Defence League thugs march in towns and cities “reclaiming” the streets from Muslims.

Something very worrying is spreading across Europe. Fascist and and Islamist extremists alike are copying what Hitler’s Brownshirts excelled at — enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods, And the moderate middle is left gawping.

Well, well: if that had appeared in any inter chat chat-room, Mike Godwin would be invoked:

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I’d decided, had gotten out of hand – in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like” was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer…

I developed Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Then there’s the other matter: proportion. The European Union embraces a population of nigh on half-a-billion. Let’s be generous to Maajid Nawaz: he has identified, at most, a few hundred ne’er-do-wells. His nine Spanish Islamists amount to 0.00000019% of the people of Spain. Similarly, there’s a Grand Canyon of difference between the hysterical:

The complete Islamification of Tower Hamlets continues, as anyone who dares to “look like a fag” or drink alcohol in their declared republic now risks harassment walking in the street.

and the factual:

A small group of individuals were recently seen harassing members of the public in East London, and the council is proactively working with partners in the community and police to monitor for further incidents and take appropriate action.

And the marauding Muslim hordes of E1 amounted to precisely —

A fifth person has been detained after a video of a ‘vigilante Muslim gang’ tormenting members of the public in east London was released on YouTube.

The 17-year-old boy was questioned at a police station in Walthamstow in relation to incidents that were posted on the video sharing website on January 12 and 13.

The pillars of bourgeois society have not even been vibrated. The events Maajid Nawaz wants to daisy-chain are, taken one by one, not insignificant — but on a continental scale do not register on the Richter Scale of earth-shakers.

Another small country about which we know nothing

Curiously, though, Maajid Nawaz omitted one obvious civil disruption.

We have had some eight weeks of continuing street riots in East Belfast, orchestrated by the local UVF. Arson-attempts, especially on Roman Catholic targets, are regular events. The Police Service have reported dozen of officers injured, truing to contain the almost-nightly excursions. Numerous arrests have been made. The cost is now running towards eight figures. And the machinators are known to all:

A small number of senior UVF men are directing the riots in east Belfast that have brought shame on Northern Ireland.

Two senior henchmen of the UVF chief in east Belfast have ignored warnings from the organisation’s leadership to bring an end to the violence which has left dozens of PSNI officers injured and cost millions of pounds.

And while the UVF’s leader in the east of the city — as the ‘Beast from the East’ — could end the rioting immediately, he has failed to bring his men under control.

Even Andrew Gillian, at the [London] Daily Telegraph knows where to go calling:

What East Belfast, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey do have in common, however, are maverick factions of the Loyalist paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

“We’ve got no doubt whatever that this is coming from the UVF,” says Terry Spence, leader of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland.

The East Belfast leader of the UVF – the so-called “Beast from the East” – was not at home to callers when The Telegraph dropped in to his small terraced house in a quiet side street.

His white reinforced front door doesn’t have a knocker or a bell, but there are five CCTV cameras just in case anyone tries to murder him again.

Two of his lieutenants have been spotted in the background helping direct the main East Belfast riots.

Security sources say they are acting with the Beast’s consent, if not the UVF leadership’s active involvement, and he could end the trouble in the area whenever he wanted.

Ugly Doris

If you go to those-in-the-know, you’ll hear a lot about this reclusive figure. Here’s an Analysis from the Irish Times, eighteen months ago:

THE SO-CALLED “Beast from the East” took over the Ulster Volunteer Force in east Belfast about six years ago and has strengthened his power base since then, according to well-placed loyalist sources. He and some of his senior lieutenants are chiefly responsible for the violence in east Belfast over recent days, they say.

He makes his money mainly from “gangster-on-gangster or bad-on-bad crime”, which is chiefly about drug dealing and extorting other criminals – while also managing to maintain some distance from these activities to keep him, so far, out of prison. How to clip his wings is the challenge for the police and also for other members of the UVF…

… what is happening in Short Strand and on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast these past dangerous nights is not about the dissidents. It is about the UVF, which is fomenting the disturbances. And it is primarily about the UVF leader in east Belfast nicknamed the Beast from the East or “Ugly Doris”. The first nom de guerre relates to his east Belfast bailiwick and the second refers to the late Jim Gray, the UDA east Belfast leader or “brigadier” murdered by his own people. He was called Doris Day because of his blond hair and his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, pink jumpers and gold jewellery. The UVF leader is said to resemble Gray only in his strands of blond hair – hence Ugly Doris.

According to senior loyalist sources, the new man, who is in his 40s, has “lost the run of himself” and is becoming increasingly dangerous and, some fear, almost unstable. “He is creating a little empire for himself in east Belfast and is now flexing his muscles,” said one loyalist insider. “He is also partial to cocaine and likes to party . . . He believes he is untouchable.”

The Belfast Telegraph identified the East Belfast UVF as:

… the most powerful paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland.

With a fiefdom stretching from the Lagan’s edge on the Newtownards Road to Millisle, Donaghadee and beyond, it struts a swathe of territory no other loyalist element can match.

It has dwarfed the UDA in east Belfast and the Ards Peninsula to the point where seasoned paramilitaries declare a ‘no contest’ between the two loyalist terror groups.

Note that didn’t say most powerful Loyalist paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland. Nor are we considering a handful of self-advertisers in Brick Lane, or even a tight little gang of perverts in Malaga. This is something far bigger, far nearer to the dystopia with which Maajid Nawaz would wish to chill us.

What you don’t find in those columns, usually, is a given name for the Beast a.k.a. Ugly Doris. He is (pace Susanne Breen) A former prisoner from a well-known loyalist family. His code-title is “S” [the UVF just lurve these Ian Flemingesque touches]. Look a bit further and you’ll find the name of Stephen Matthews.

Now there’s a candidate for Maajid Nawaz’s little black book.

Bilbo on Boa Island

Malcolm spent thirty-six hours while a hacking,wracking, rancid cough developed into the full-blown streaming head-cold. This meant much of the Saturday press passed him by.

So, this Sunday morning, sniffling over coffee and marmalade, he ignored the trivial newsy stuff and concentrated on the real meat: the supplements.

And, as a further consequence, in short order he read:

• Douglas Kennedy, in The Times [£], on Mark Binelli’s The Last Days of Detroit;

and

• Michael Viney in the Irish Times on a The Flora of County Fermanagh.

One so dystopian it underlines Malcolm’s settled intention never to go near Motown: the other … well, try this from Viney himself:

The landscape of Fermanagh, it occurred to me, would be Ireland’s best refuge for hobbits, if we had them. The heights of the county are frowning and wild, it’s true, and even quite scary at the windy clefts of Cuilcagh’s summit, or under the Cliffs of Magho. Great limestone caves and swallow holes speak of unexplored tunnels to alien lands: Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan, hemming the Shire on three sides, and closing it off from the sea.

In the rain shadow of all this, however, is the intimate, drumlin landscape of grottoes, gorges, woods and hundreds of hushed, reedy lakes.

Even the great expanse of Lough Erne, an ideal playground for hobbits when young, is full of little islands for modest, measured lives.

Malcolm has always conceived Hobbiton in rural Worcestershire, around Tolkien’s own home in Evesham, now transliterated to Waikato Valley of New Zealand’s Northern Island. Yet, on one of the few balmy summer days that bless the Lakelands, Viney’s conceit would figure.

After all: Derrin/Doirín, Pollnagollum and Slawin/Sleamhain may also exist in an alternative, happier, healthier universe.

“At least leave me the f**king k!”

The British press evidences some of the most advanced double-standards on the planet. Fortunately Private Eye (although itself no stranger to ignoring ill-doings by its ‘likes’ and to showering chronic, festering poison on its ‘dislikes’) exposes quite a few of them.

Malcolm has one particular bugbear: the asterisking of ‘forbidden’ words. When The Times reports a t***, we all get the meaning, while the Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells have no grounds for complaint. Well, not many.

The topic was redolently illustrated by Malachy Cleary, in an article for the Irish Times earlier this year. It deserves to be given an honourable retrospective:

It’s always the footballers, isn’t it? A long time ago, in another life and another newspaper, a few of us were sitting around a table planning a piece on the trial of Leeds players Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer. You remember it – a club night out gone awry, an Asian student who ended up in hospital, days upon days of court testimony filling up every page and airwave slot that was going.

To borrow a phrase John Terry employed in his statement to the FA that was read out in Westminster Magistrates Court this week, there was plenty of industrial language in the witness box. Our little round-table discussion came upon the dicey area of how to approach it. Shit or s**t? Wanker or w****r? Leeds or L***s?

Those of us who argued that we’re all grown-ups who can take a little cursing from time to time knew from pretty early on that we were onto a loser, asterisking in the wind if you will. No matter that the page was going to end up looking like the ceiling of a planetarium, there was just no way were we going to be allowed to write out the full words.

Having taken our beating, the final ignominy came when we lost the battle for just how many asterisks we would have to use in each word. The general feeling from on high was that, just to be on the safe side, we should reduce the f-word to literally that – an f and three little stars. “Oh for f**k’s sake!” grouched one of our number. “At least leave me the f**king k!”

The Guardian, bless its liberal pretensions, has no such hang-ups. And that Malachy Cleary piece reminds us how Ireland has changed since the dreary days of blue-nosed Bishop Michael Browne of Galway (of whom more in another post) .

What makes this all the more peculiar is how perverse this can become.

Having a clue

Consider one example, from the Review section of last Saturday’s Times [£] — which comes wrapped in the Weekend section, which in turn is fronted by a semi-Beckham lookalike young male apparently simulating breast-feeding. An exercise in bizarrerie, indeed.

Mike Mulvihill is reviewing tv and radio in the suggestions for christmas books. Yes: The Times has now adopted The Guardian‘s habit of using lower-case.

He choses:

I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue: the best of Forty Years (Preface, £20) [which] salutes that perennial Radio 4 favourite, which attracts 2.5 million listeners. Basically it’s Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke Taylor, Barry Cryer and guests performing silly tasks set by chairman Jack Dee, which usually involve ingeniously excruciating wordplay. Here are the best puns from four decades grouped together into categories from Famous First Words to Celebrity Misquotes, the Rules of Mornington Crescent to the Pensioners’ Songbook. The Chat Up Turn Downs section may prove particularly useful at this time of year. Q: “are you from Tennessee, because you’re the only ten I see?” A: “Are you from Scunthorpe?”

There’s something going on here (apart from large chunks of that ‘review’ being lifted from elsewhere). Malcolm hopes it is the creative writer trying to slip another spicy one past the prudish editorial blue pencil.

The end of history, as we’ve known it?

Well, not quite (though the Israelis and Iranians seem intent on heading that way). We are, though, coming to the end of Fintan O’Toole’s A History of Ireland in 100 objects, which has been a staple in the Irish Times, Saturday edition, since February last year.

It wasn’t an original notion — Neil MacGregor got there earlier, was a bit spicier, had a much broader canvas — and a far bigger budget. All the same, O’Toole has done us pretty well.

So Malcolm will be buying his copy tomorrow:

A history of Ireland in 100 objects
What single item sums up 21st-century Ireland? A decommissioned Armelite? A hospital bed? Jean Butler’s Riverdance dress? The smartphone?
Tomorrow in The Irish Times we present the icons of our age, the objects that symbolise boom and bust, conflict and peace and life as we know it.
Tomorrow in The Irish Times 

If there’s to be only one Twentieth Century object, it’s clearly this one:

 

We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather

This post is a bit of a rummage round the lumber-room of Malcolm’s mind. Take it as such, or leave it.

Let’s start navigating at the prime meridian

In 1941 Myles na gCopaleen , a.k.a. Brian O’Nolan, published An Béal Bocht. It is to Irish literature as Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm had been a decade earlier to the English of-the-earth, earthy stuff.

Alas! Malcolm’s Irish (failed Leaving Certificate) was never up to appreciating the original Irish, and an English translation, magnificently illustrated by Ralph Steadman, only became available in 1996. So for too long, whenever the works of the Great Flann, Myles and Brian came into the conversation, on any mention of An Béal Bocht, Malcolm could but nod sagely, and seek to redirect onto more familiar Dalkey Archive territory.

Flann/ Myles/ Brian was never averse when it came to Épater la bourgeoisie. Thus with An Béal Bocht. Irish officialdom, especially since the ascent to power of Éamon de Valera, was heavily promoting da kulcha  — in this parallel universe, the main ‘Culture’ was agriculture — not for nothing did the Dubliner refer dismissively to ‘culchies’. No Fianna Fáil bun-fight was complete without a flush of Fáinní (those ring lapel-pins to indicate an Irish speaker). Such types were indoctrinated to revere Peig Sayers as the true voice of “real” Ireland, and so inflict her serial miseries on the school-student.

For the record the prevalence of Fáinní in Fianna Fáil has declined in direct proportion to their increase among Sinn Féiners. When Gerry Adams began sporting a Fainne, that was the ultimate no-no! in polite political society.

A bit of plot (Sacs-Béarla version)

It’s always raining torrents in Corkadoragha, home of the first-person narrator Bonaparte O’Coonassa. Corkadoragha is about as impoverished and unreconstructed as anywhere could be in deprived, rocky, drenched Connacht. Or, as the Dalkey Archive edition blurb has it:

The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O’Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family’s daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on the Irish, this work brought down on the author’s head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941.

Yet it has one natural resource: the Irish spoken in Corkadoragha is regarded as the most perfect in the island. Annually, therefore, Corkadoragha becomes infested with language-revivalists from the city — until the weather and the all-too-”authentic” poverty drive them away again.

Nearer home, and a few points east

A blog-artist of some ability has adopted the persona of ‘Bonaparte O’Coonassa’ — though, to be honest, there cannot be many literary grotesques who don’t have an afterlife on the net. Mr Downey of Romford (where Malcolm was once a borough councillor) has a nice sense of humour, is sound on the things that matter (Nick Griffin is a piece of shit), though is lamentably soft on cats. Nobody is perfect.

Fond of Romford as Malcolm (almost) is, he would usually be visiting Mr Downey blog, and passing by without acknowledgement. However, a wrinkle appeared.

Whale song and Zentz

Riffling through a drawer Malcolm had come across a well-worn key-ring. Beyond decipherment of any text on the plastic tag was a memory source: that New Age coffeehouse/bookshop the Redfellow entourage visited in Cortez, Colorado — back in the summer of 1994.

He recalled that the ambiance was being reinforced by whale song on the muzak channel. That seemed a trifle odd, since Cortez CO is some mean distance from either ocean.

Somehow that recollection triggered another: a song by Bob Zentz of Norfolk, Virginia:

Zentz, as a young man, had served in the US Coast Guard, and this song recalls being on watch. Yes, it’s sheer romanticism; but — one way and another — it persists as a repetitive soundtrack to Malcolm’s life. Here is the lyric is full:

Ocean Station Bravo, North Atlantic Ocean,
Somewhere west of Greenland, somewhere far from home.
Nothing on the radar, nothing on the sonar,
Hove-to and drifting on this ocean all alone.

CGC Sebago, high-endurance cutter,
Ocean station vessel number 42,
Studying the weather, aids to navigation
Plotting ships and aircraft as they come sailing through.

In the middle of the ocean, center of the circle,
There’s nothing but horizon, wind and sea and sky:
This whole world in motion, blowing from the northeast,

Not a hint of sunshine, just the gray clouds running by.

Then the lookout calls the bridge-watch, objects in the water —
Moving surface contacts off the starboard bow:
Plot ‘em on the radar, fire up the sonar
Listen for their echoes, can you hear ‘em now?

Well there’s echoes in my headphones, whale sounds on the speakers,
Filling all the spaces inside CIC:
Songs of loves and travels, songs of generations,
Echoes of the ages in cetacean harmony.

And me, I had to answer, I sang, I talked, I whistled.
Well, I even played the mouthharp through that microphone;
And they returned the favor with chirps and clicks and whistles —
A sound of celebration not so different from our own.

And when the watch was over, it’s out onto the bridge-wing
To view them sounding singers as they sing and sport and play:
Just a pod of humpbacks, farewell flukes a-wavin’,
A memory worth saving as they travelled on their way.
For we’d had a conversation with Leviathan that day.

Skirting the board …

That was somewhere on the periphery of Malcolm’s mind while he was daubing white paint onto bedroom skirting-board.

In a senior moment, he realised he couldn’t quite recall the name of the author: Zing? Zane? Zlotz? So, downstairs and crank up the search-engine.

Weather Station Kurt

One of the bits of serendipity that cropped up came from Mr Downey’s Poor Mouth, which for this post was very rich. One of the themes Mr Downey seems to revisit is “Backwaters of history”, little gems of actuality that have dropped out of consciousness, or only been rediscovered. In this particular post, Mr Downey has the quite remarkable tale of

… the only armed [Nazi] landing anywhere in North America [which] took place in Canada in October 1943 when a U-Boat landed a small party in Northern Labrador to erect an automatic weather station.

It looks as if Mr Downey resurrected this one from wikipedia. It was a good find, makes a good story, and provided Malcolm with a welcome diversion from the glossing task in hand (his knees, in particular, thank Mr Downie). It is a story, in its own way, almost as bizarre as anything in Myles.

With an “e”

Frank McNally has appeared for repeated approbation here at Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service. Not, of course, that the Magnificent Frank needs such trifles.

Today’s Irishman’s Diary, though, is a special treat.

Kilbeggan

Until the M6 was built, this was the cross-roads of the Dublin-Galway N6 (which took one down Bridge Street, and past the distillery) and the Nenagh-Dundalk N52. Now you turn off the motorway onto the Tullamore Road.

The gift wrapping for McNally’s offering is the Kilbeggan Distillery, in the County Westmeath. That was originally the Brusna Distillery (because it sits on the River Brosna, and has a water-mill — soon again to be functioning). The original licence is dated 1757; and so claims to be the oldest continually licensed distillery in the world. Let us remember that every bottle of Bushmills boasts a 1608 licence from James I to distil uisce beatha … in the territory of the Rowte (Rowte = rout, the area controlled by the private army of the MacQuillans), and that  the Old Bushmills Distillery was recorded in 1743.

Malcolm will happily drink to either claim.

The original Brusna distillery was set up and owned by the McManus family, and control passed to the Codd family in 1794. The distillery manager was John McManus, who was also a colonel in the United Irishmen, and who ended his life, condemned for treason (and apparently for breaching the curfew), on the gallows at Mullingar in the aftermath of 1798.

In 1843 the distillery was taken over by John Locke and Sons, by which name it became better known until Locke’s closed down in 1959. That led to one of those typically Irish shenanigans: the assets — which amounted to the run-down property in Kilbeggan and some 60,000 gallons of mature whiskey — had been “acquired” in 1947 by The Transworld Trust, based in Switzerland. To nobody’s great surprise The Transworld Trust, and its £305,000 was a wide-boy operation. From the start Oliver J Flanagan was asking awkward questions. As McNally puts it succinctly:

A subsequent tribunal of inquiry found that Flanagan had over-egged the allegations, somewhat. Even so, a bad smell lingered. And the Locke’s scandal helped usher De Valera out of power after 16 years, to be replaced by the first inter-party government.

… which all sounds dismally familiar

Inside this wrapping, McNally rattles through a broad view of what went wrong for Irish whiskey. His account boils down to:

1. Coffey

In 1830 a Dublin-born (the DNB prefers Dublin to the alternative of Calais) exciseman, Aeneas Coffey (left), came up with an alternative to the ancient alembic:

The Coffey still (a.k.a columnar still) consists of three interconnected towers equipped with perforated trays stacked at intervals of approximately 20 – 30 centimetres. Each tower has to inlets; one for the alcohol-containing liquid the other for pressurized steam. The ferment is fed through the top inlet and the steam from the bottom. As the liquid trickles down the steam rises and literally strips the alcohol from it at a high temperature and speed. The vaporized alcohol travels to the top of the tower and to the next tower to undergo the same process. The third tower usually shorter distils a smaller quantity, as the volume is now much smaller than at the beginning of the process. 

At the end of the run, a highly purified (90 percent ABV) alcohol is obtained which is, regardless of the base material, tastes the same -colourless, and tasteless much like vodka or industrial food-grade alcohol. This alcohol consists mainly of ethyl alcohol and very little, lethal methyl alcohol.

The result was a lighter distillate, cheaper to produce. The Scots took up the invention: the Irish stuck with traditional methods, or as the DNB has it:

Initial production problems and the conservatism of Irish distillers meant that Coffey had little success in introducing his apparatus in Ireland, and in 1835 he moved his business to St Leonard’s Street, Bromley by Bow, Middlesex. From the 1840s his patent still gained in popularity, notably in Scotland. During his tour of 1887 Alfred Barnard found Coffey stills in all the major Scottish distilleries. Improved versions are widely used in the manufacture of grain whisky, gin, and other potable and industrial spirits.

2. Prohibition

The Volstead Act (the National Prohibition Act of 1919) implemented the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Instantly Irish whiskey lost its main export market.

Worse still, the Locke’s brand and others were so well known they was counterfeited for hooch. By 1928 whiskey production in the Free State was 36.6% down, to 560,000 barrels.

When prohibition was repealed in 1931, the reputational damage had been done.

3. Independence

Sales in Britain of all things distinctly “Irish” were damaged by the War of Independence.

In 1932 the incoming  Fianna Fáil government of Éamon de Valera ramped up tariffs on imported goods, which in those days were mainly British exports. In retaliation Irish whiskey went AWOL across the British Empire.

4. Overpaid, over-sexed and over here

There should have been a reprieve when the GIs arrived, during the Second Unpleasantness.

Alas, thanks to a combination of the above factors, the American occupation developed a taste for Scotch, in McNally’s racey account:

Dev’s economic war with Britain was a disaster, and neutrality didn’t help much either. All those US troops stationed in the UK were a whisky marketer’s dream, bringing their newly acquired taste for Scotch home with them after the war.

… and a round finish

They are back distilling at Kilbeggan: production restarted in 2007, and will be on the market in a couple of years time.

Meanwhile the Cooley Distillery (now yet another subsidiary of the Jim Beam operation) in the County Louth will offer substitutes: Kilbeggan, Locke’s Blend and Locke’s Malt. The link with Kilbeggan, for the moment, is that the maturing process takes place in Locke’s old granite bond-store.

Sláinte

Lost in translation

Hugh Muir, back doing the day-job on The Guardian Diary, today encounters a linguistic problem. In full:

… it has fallen to Northern Ireland assembly Speaker Willie Hay to rule that the term “village idiot” is not acceptable for use within the chamber, after health minister Edwin Poots said his political rival Kieran McCarthy was acting like one. This appears to overturn precedent. Lord Alderdice, a previous Speaker, judged “eejit” to be OK. The key seems to be pronunciation. Fewer problems in the Republic, where there is a list of words banned in the Dáil, including chancer, coward, guttersnipe, rat, scumbag and fascist. But then they had reason to act after one former representative shouted “Fuck you, Deputy Stagg, fuck you!” Seemed better to have some rules.

Two points of clarification, there, Ceann Comhairle:

First, the loose mouth

Emmet Stagg (brother of the more famous, loopier, and more defunct Frank) can look after himself, and needs no defence. Anyway, as a Labour man with a TCD connexion, he gets respected here.

However, Paul Gogarty deserved all he got, and has a track-record for staging similar stunts — Babygate, Callely, numerous “celebrity” outings for RTÉ (not that the bar for celeb-status is that much lower in Dublin). He won the soggy biscuit when he denounced Free Education for Everyone protestors as “muppets” and supported the physical intervention of the Gardai — doubtless in retaliation for FEE previously taking over his office. How Green! What a brave civic activist!

The electors of Dublin Mid-West had Gogarty’s number, all right: in the 2011 General Election, he lost his seat ignominiously. He took all of 3.5 % of First Preferences, limping in eighth of the fourteen runners. The previous outing he had taken 10.8%, and finished second after transfers.

After Gogarty’s excursion in English guttersnipery, it involved a change in Irish parliamentary proceedings:

CHANGES ARE likely to be made to the document dictating acceptable parliamentary language in the Dáil and Seanad after Green Party TD Paul Gogarty’s defence of his use of an expletive in the Dáil last week.

The 18-member Dáil committee on procedure and privileges, which meets tomorrow, will deal with Mr Gogarty’s use of the “f-word”, directed against Labour party whip Emmet Stagg.

Second, a cultural chasm

Anyone familiar with Hibernicisms knows that “eejit” and “idiot”are no way near synonyms.

You’d take a drink with an “eejit”, even a “mad eejit”, and even respect him. You take a swing at an idiot, and be cheered for doing so and laying him out. Gogarty, for example, belongs in this latter category.

Believe it or not (number 94)

There really is an academic study on what is acceptable in a parliamentary exchange. The key “finding” goes this way:

Parliamentary insults are offensive rhetorical acts performed in a highly competitive institutional setting. They are deliberate in the sense that they are intended to be perceived and recognised as such by the person targeted. Unparliamentary language uses can provide important clues about moral and social standards, prejudices, taboos, as well as value judgements of different social and political groups in a community. Because they underlie culturally defined negative values and norms, insults are meant to reduce the targeted person, group or institution (and what they stand for) to stereotypically undesirable or detestable attributes. Cross-cultural studies are particularly enlightening in this respect, since it can safely be assumed that the forms and functions of insults and their respective feedbacks vary in different cultures and institutional settings.

Enjoy that? Then your sociology degree must be showing.

Compare and contrast:

1. David Cameron, 6th December 2005:

… we need to change, and we will change, the way we behave. I’m fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name calling, backbiting, point scoring, finger pointing.

2. David Cameron, 18th April 2012:

The right hon. Gentleman will not take any lectures on the fuel strike because he is in the pockets of the people who called the fuel strike. That’s right. They vote for his policies, they sponsor his Members of Parliament, they got him elected. Absolutely irresponsible—that is what we have heard once again from the right hon. Gentleman. Not good enough to run the Opposition, not good enough to run the country.

Of which Ann Treneman said in her Parliamentary Sketch for The Times [£]:

Dave did his usual Flashman, refusing to answer the questions, changing the subject to Ken Livingstone’s taxes, playing to the gallery. He was sneery, insulting, preening. When you seeDave like this, you just know he deserves to end up in panto.

Pub-talk and legal parlance

When the rain came yesterday afternoon, Malcolm was emerging from the supermarket, laden. What to do? Silly question: turn right and, wind assisted, into the John Baird. Two pints of Fortyniner (yes: 4.9%) fortified the parts enough to struggle home.

What with Harvey‘s at the Hansom Cab on Friday, this was becoming something of a south-coast end to the week. As to that latter joint, follow Malcolm’s hot-link to John Walsh’s review for background, but trust not the views and comments therein: it’s a far, far better joint than than Walsh describes.

A Malcolmian aside

There’s this current vague (French, noun, female gender) for emphasising how many boozers are closing. And, yes, that’s sadly soundly-based.

The Irish Times is currently regaling us with an extended cri-de-coeur from Paul Cullen, under the title The pub loses its pulling power — as if any real pulling (apart from the subsequent interpersonal exchange of bodily fluids) has been going on in a land long devoted to top-pressure CO2 delivery.

Cullen rattles through the predictable:

Various reasons have been put forward for the collapse of the sector. For much of the past decade, publicans griped about the smoking ban and changes to drink-driving laws. Yet these changes took place some time ago — the smoking ban was introduced in 2004 and the first changes to drink-driving laws date back to the introduction of random breath-testing in 2003.

In the next paragraph Cullen hits a nerve through a quotation from Professor (of marketing) Mary Quinn:

“As people got richer and more sophisticated they weren’t prepared to sit in a dirty pub any more. Young people in particular wanted newer, brighter, more modern places to meet in.”

Which presumably explains why the pub-owners have a habit of ripping out old, authentic interiors to instal older ersatz ones.

So let’s address the problem from a different view-point. Why are some pubs (such as the Hansom Cab, and even the Baird) adapting and prospering, and why? In both those cases, along with the Nicholson’s houses, the Stag and The Bridge House, which all feature regularly in Malcolm’s life, and have been hat-tipped here, it’s because they have moved on from the days of the boozer. All are places where one can eat and drink — and drink good beers — in some comfort, the company of one’s nearest-and-dearest, without embarrassment. What if they tend to the trendy, to be dismissed as “gastropubs” or whatever? What if their prices permit decent facilities and amenities?

Oh, and reliable and regular public transport certainly helps. Though austerity, and loss-leader supermarket alcohol pricing most certainly don’t.

Back to the main event

Malcolm, remember, is in the corner of the Baird, with his pint of Fortyniner. He could (and eventually does) get out the copy of the Times for the world according to Murdoch. First, though, some light relief.

This week’s Times Literary Supplement has a couple of decent, deserving pieces among the other stuff: now why was Malcolm caught by an Antony Scull review of Simon Baron Cohen on A new theory of human cruelty? What grabbed Malcolm more was Brian Vickers running the rule over Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson — A Life.

This one looks very tasty indeed. Currently Malcolm’s other bedside book is John Stubbs’s delightful and delighting Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, now available in paperback. Despite the title, Stubbs takes a long run-up, and prefaces the deal with the seminal figure of Jonson. Stubbs is sufficiently tangential to appeal to Malcolm’s butterfly mind — he is as near to a reincarnation of old John Aubrey as one could wish.

Moving on from Vickers on Jonson, the TLS has a two-column scamper, in the tail-gunner slot, by Ferdy Mount on Ronald Blythe’s latest, At the Yeoman’s House. This is a matured and marinated treatment of the book: all the main reviews came in a couple of months since. Mount starts with this observation, from the particular to the general:

Ronald Blythe has not budged much. In eighty-nine years, he has moved only a few miles down the Stour valley, and he has never left his home on the Essex-Suffolk border for more than a month on end. Nor did his ancestors, a long line of Suffolk shepherds who took their surname from the River Blyth, which dawdles past the great windows of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, into the estuary at Southwold. Rootedness on this scale may seem odd to us who like to feel footloose, but it comes naturally to our great country writers: Thomas Hardy and William Barnes in Dorset, Richard Jeffries in Wilts, and John Clare in Northants (though William Cobbett did get about a bit). They stand out from other writers, too, by coming from the labouring classes as often as not, the sons of stonemasons and farmers, and in youth often labourers themselves. They have now and then been joined at the plough by the sons of the professional classes, such as John Stewart Collis and Adrian Bell, but the native sons of the soil are somehow different.

The cover (as right) of Blythe’s “elegy in a harsh key” (nice one, Ferdy!) is a 1954 John Nash oil-painting, The Barn, Wormingford, almost certainly the view from the top-floor studio of Bottengoms Farm (back to Mount for this):

… the very old farmhouse Blythe has lived in ever since he inherited it from the painter John Nash, whom he nursed when he was dying … For centuries, Bottengoms was a farm with seventy ill-favoured acres, from which the yeoman, defined by Cobbett as “above a farmer and lower than a gentleman”, scratched a precarious living. Gradually the acres fell away into other hands. In the 1920s, what was left was sold for £1,820, in 1936 for £1,200, and in 1944 Captain John Nash, Official War Artist, snapped it up for only £700.

Mount (born 1939) sums up on Blythe’s meditation:

This is a production of old age, gentle but not soft, othe tough-minded and charitable. Blythe is a lay Reader in the Church of England and nearly became a priest, like William Barnes and George Crabbe and Gilbert White before him. Yet I find his unillusioned, lyrical tone curiously similar to those ruralists who were lifelong atheists, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jeffries. It is as though the unblinking countryman’s eye has no room for religion, one way or the other.

Are we wholly happy with “unillusioned”? What other descriptor would possibly work there? Du mot vrai! Anyway, when Ferdy Mount ploughs through today’s Sunday Times, he will find Minette Marrin arguing that the Church of England exists for those who need “religiosity”, but not demanding beliefs, in their lives:

A sense of the numinous, a longing for ceremony, a love of the religious punctuation of the year, a need for a regular time to examine one’s conscience, a passion for church music — these are all things that appeal to Anglican unbelievers such as me and to unbelievers of all traditions.

On which, Malcolm would nearly as happily drink to Ms Marrin as to the third baronet Mount of Wasing Place.

Towards the bottom of the second pint …

… Malcolm reached the back page of the TLS, and the weekly miscellany. This week’s was a trifle disappointing — a long snarl at copyright-cuddling by the James Joyce Foundation (as if we needed to be told), then a nip on the ankles of “St” Jeanette Winterson. In between there is a bit of uplift, delicately balanced on passing wind about Lawtalk: The unknown stories behind familiar legal expressions.

It starts like this:

Heard the one about the dying man who insisted on studying to be a lawyer? After a great deal of trouble to his family, he qualified just in time. As he received his degree, a a relative aced the question: Why? “One less lawyer”, said the man as he expired.

The rest of this three-paragraph scamper covers the origin of

• The law is an ass

Yes, Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, but “an obscure seventeen-century play called Revenge for Honour“. Not only “obscure”, though it merits a wikipedia entry and it was attributed to George Chapman: The Review of English Studies, as far back as 1935, reckoned this was a “worthless play”, but noticed it borrowed from Othello.

• with all deliberate speed

Famously, or infamously, from Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter’s draft for the 1954 Supreme Court judgement on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Yet, the term appears in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy. The TLS doesn’t help much here, but Malcolm can assure all and sundry that a visit to Chapter Nineteenth, in volume two, will locate this:

The Bailie … was obviously relieved from his impending fears of ridicule, when I told him it was my father’s intention to leave Glasgow almost immediately. Indeed he had now no motive for remaining, since the most valuable part of the papers carried off by Rashleigh had been recovered. For that portion which he had converted into cash and expended in his own or on political intrigues, there was no mode of recovering it but by a suit at law, which was forthwith commenced, and proceeded, as our law-agents assured us, with all deliberate speed.

That neatly exemplifies the ironic ambiguity which must also have been in Frankfurter’s mind, in 1954.

• blackmail

Oddly, both Lawtalk and the TLS assume that this is also from Rob Roy, though the TLS adds:

The same novel popularised “blackmail”, though the practice is as old as shame itself.

Malcolm cocks a wry eye at the MS Word “z” in what was once, back in the eighteenth century again, and derived from the French populariser (though the OED is happy with “popular adj. and n.  and -ize suffix“). Yet, there’s more to this than meets the eye. The exact use of blackmail is in the Editor’s Introduction to the Waverley edition of Rob Roy:

At Tullibody Scott had met, in 1793, a gentleman who once visited Rob, and arranged to pay him blackmail.

Do the TLS, and the authors of Lawtalk recognise that “blackmail” originally meant something very different from its modern context? The original meaning was a tribute extorted by the Border revers, and nearer in meaning to “protection money”. This is the sense in Rob Roy.

• jailbait

The TLS gloss here is:

We have the Chicago author James T. Farrell to thank for the evocative “jailbait”, over which the authors of Lawtalk lay down the law: “The term is best used sparingly: if intended or perceived as a slur upon the character of a girl it is offensive”.

 In point of strict accuracy, Farrell used it as two separate words (in Calico Shoes, from 1934):

She’s not hard on the eyes but she’s jail bait.

 By the time it has crossed the Atlantic, it has become hyphenated, as in John Braine’s Room at the Top from 1957:

I’m not interested in little girls. Particularly not in jail-bait like that one.

Quite when it became a single word is another question. For sure it was previous to Jonathan “Jonny” Spelman having his cabinet minister mother rush to the High Court to seek that injunction on his behalf.

The cause behind the injunction is still a mystery (it seems), but speculation includes the ill-advised posting to Facebook, as right, but now (it also seems) taken down. It does help to have a millionaire mother in a public office: such courtesies are rarely extended to lesser beings.

• play the race card

The TLS properly notes that this one has different meanings here and in the States:

British politicians in the 1960s who spoke about immigration were accused of playing the race card, but the proper use applies to a person under duress invoking the spectre of discrimination as a trump card — you’re only doing this because I’m black/ Chinese, etc.

Ho hum.

That’s a sanitized version of what Malcolm recalls of “British politicians in the 1960s”.  It went a bit further than accusations. Whether or not Peter Griffiths, fighting the Smethwick constituency in the 1964 General Election personally endorsed “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” (as the many posters said, but almost entirely in that one constituency) is immaterial, it worked.

Home, James, and don’t spare the sauces

You may recall we began this phantasmagoria with Malcolm taking refuge from the rain.

Two pints later the wind was still strong, but the worst of the wet had passed over. So Malcolm returned his glass (a habit stemming from birth over a bar), rolled up his various newspapers, picked up the shopping, and headed off.

It all took rather less time than the development of this extended posting.

In gob-smacked admiration of …

… well, the Irish Times.

Malcolm is on record for his weekly indulgence in Fintan O’Toole’s A history of Ireland in 100 objects — this week we were well into the the Fourteenth Century, with the Anglo-Norman period sliding gently into the time of the “Old English” (as they were in Malcolm’s school history books).

These wee mannikins (left) are one of the seventeen illustrations in the Waterford Charter Roll and are, O’Toole says they are:

the earliest image … of the medieval mayors of Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick.

Adding a neat analogy:

Eamonn McEneaney of Waterford City Museum calls the charter roll “the mediaeval equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation”, designed to “flatter the king, add weight to the legal arguments and keep those listening to the mayor’s presentation focused on the facts being elaborated”. As an exercise in verbal and visual persuasion, the roll is a brilliant early example of targeted advertising. It did the trick: the king restored Waterford’s shipping monopoly.

Extra kudos there for the “a” in what even the OED prefers as “medieval”. Doubles all round had the compositor managed “æ” (on a Mac key-board it’s option+apostrophe).

But that’s not all …

The daily dose of info-amusement comes on the main editorial page in the form of An Irishman’s Diary (except, of course, when it’s just as happily An Irishwoman’s Diary). This is always essential reading — Malcolm has a couple of acquaintances who start here, then knock off the Crosaire crossword, before proceeding to the “real” news.

Good as it consistently is, the Diary reaches a new level when Frank McNally has the by-line. As yesterday:

A History of Ireland in 100 Questions.

Here’s Malcolm’s 101, Q&A:

What are ye coin reading this tripe for?
Get ye onto that hotlink straightaway!

An’ sure enough, if ye had, ye’d have been enjoying something of a gentle brain-teaser as you tried to spot the source of many of them. Apart from the commonplaces, you’d have got:

23. Are ye right there, Michael?

25. Captain Boyle: An’ as it blowed an’ blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky an’ assed meself the question – what is the stars, what is the stars?

26. Joxer: Ah, that’s the question, that’s the question – what is the stars?

27. Boyle: An’ then, I’d have another look, an’ I’d ass meself – what is the moon?

28. Joxer: Ah, that’s the question – what is the moon, what is the moon?

As well as (by Malcolm’s quick count) three from Yeats, the same from De Valera, two from Percy French (you got the easier one above), one from Christy Brown (the predictable County Clare one) and many more. So, Frank, which version of How Are Things in Glocca Morra? runs in your head — Dick Haymes? the Broadway cast album? Petula Clark (the 1968 movie)? even Sonny Rollins (though that was pure instrumental genius)?

Ray Houghton’s goals feature strongly (and properly: UEFA 1988 — England 0, Ireland 1; 1994 World Cup — Ireland 1, Italy o). The Offaly goal in the dying seconds of the 1982 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship is there, too, if you know where to find it. For Malcolm, though, the gem is either:

24. Is it about a bicycle?

or

69. How do Jacobs get the figs into the fig-rolls?

Somewhere in between is the essence of Dublin, and of Malcolm’s addiction, into its sixth decade, to the Irish Times.

One last thing …

At the end of a long,and rather tiresome day, Malcolm finally got to the Irish Times property porn.

That is captioned:

… once the home of Iseult Gonne and Francis Stuart.

By definition, then, a nest of Nazi sympathisers — and, by any usual definition, traitors to Ireland.

Malcolm may one day blog again the extraordinary history of Maud Gonne MacBride and her very strange daughter — and that very strange daughter’s very odd husband.

For the time being, let it be noted that Larragh Castle (in fact, as the description and text of that Irish Times piece makes clear, no more than a tarted-up armed camp, a barracks, and a gaol) occupies a small, and disreputable place in modern Irish history.