All for want of a nail

Lynne Truss, in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, revisited the trial of Roger Casement, in search of a comma.

Roger Casement was tried, found guilty, sentenced and executed under the Treason Act of 1351. That was, and is (for it remains in force in English law to this day) quite an enlightened piece of legislation, in that it attempts to define and circumscribe what is involved in an act of treason. Essential to the conviction  was whether or not Casement had been

adherent to the King’s enemies in his Realm, giving to them aid and comfort, in the Realm[,] or elsewhere.

Notice that critical second comma: if it’s there, Casement was indeed guilty, and Mr Justice Darling was entitled to read that “giving aid and comfort” were words of apposition: that is to say, if one took the side of the king’s foes, one was a traitor irrespective of whether one was in or out of the kingdom. On the other hand …

Casement had done his stuff in Germany, not in the lands of George V. Once back in Ireland, still part of the United Kingdom, he had behaved impeccably, surrendering to the police, and obeying the law. Serjeant Sullivan, imported for the occasion and a stranger to English courts, argued the 1351 Act:

neither created nor declared an offence of treason by adherence to the King’s enemies beyond the realm.

The precise wording meant:

the giving of aid and comfort outside the realm did not constitute a treason which could be tried in this country unless the person who gave the aid and comfort outside the realm, in the present case in the Empire of Germany, was himself within the realm at the time when he gave the aid and comfort .

It took the keen eyes of two learned judges, and a trip to the Public Record Office, to spot there might, just might, be a second comma. Anyway, the mood of the time probably made Sullivan’s nit-picking pointless, and so Casement was condemned. Presumptions of innocence and guilt tend to get a bit clouded when matters are so politically polarised, as they were in 1916.

A Malcolmian aside

That picture has a history in itself.

The presiding judge, Sir Charles John Darling, invited Sir John Lavery into the Court. Lavery had to keep his materials out of sight while he sketched. The finished version (above) was not completed until 1931, and remained in Lavery’s studio until the artist’s death in 1941. Casement is put at the centre, straight in front of the viewer, who is thus rendered judge and jury.

The painting became part of the Irish National Collection, and is generally to be found at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin, though it came to London for restoration work in 2003 — which was its first display in the United Kingdom.

Yeats, however, put the painting (or was he thinking of some sketches for it?) in The Municipal Gallery Revisited as early as 1938:

Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride …

How might this apply to the arrest, for perjury, of Andy Coulson?

Well, it might come down to a similar piece of pettifogging.

Another Malcolmian aside:

from the OED:

pettifogger, n.1

1. Originally: an inferior legal practitioner who dealt with petty cases; formerly occas. also as a professional name … (now hist.). Hence: a lawyer who engages in petty quibbling and cavilling, or who employs dubious or underhanded legal practices; a lawyer who abuses the law. Usu. derogatory.

Consider:

• Tommy Sheridan represented himself at his perjury trial.
• He called Coulson as a witness.His crucial question to Coulson was: Did the News of the World pay corrupt police officers?”
• Coulson replied, “Not to my knowledge”.

Coulson could answer no other way: he would have been incriminating himself, for corruption law makes both briber and bribe-taker guilty.

But, even now, Coulson has a get-out: it may be the NotW didn’t pay off “corrupt” coppers, but honest ones. The NotW had no knowledge whether the individuals receiving dosh were “corrupt” or not. The paper was serving the wider good,covered by the public-interest defence: a small technical offence to expose a greater one, etc., etc. And with one bound our hero is free!

Coulson the escapologist

Sheridan also questioned Coulson on why he had left the NotW. As always, he gave the noble answer.

There had been a crime committed by a member of the NotW staff: Clive Goodman had been done for intercepting Clarence House telephone messages, and for that went inside on a four-month stretch. At that stage the NotW management were maintaining that Goodman was the single “bad apple”.

Coulson had accepted “taken the ultimate responsibility and stepped down” for this “illegal phone hacking”, even though —perish the thought! — he had “no knowledge of it”.

That has been Coulson’s consistent stated position. Sheridan had pressed him further, particularly over Goodman’s connection with Glenn Mulcaire, he of the numerous records. Coulson denied he had any awareness at all of Mulcaire, did not even know the name until Mulcaire’s arrest: “I never met him, spoke to him or emailed him.” The £105,000 the NotW paid Mulcaire was inexplicable to Coulson: this, and other outgoings, had been “made without my knowledge”. Coulson believed that just “five other people” had had their voice-mails hacked. We now know (and many of us studying the US press had wind at the time — read down to Malcolm’s comment) Coulson was out by an underestimate by about 2,668.6%.

We also now know that, included in multitude of victims, was a wide swathe of Sheridan’s family and associates, all targeted by Mulcaire. The extended as far as Sheridan’s mother and Joan McAlpine (who co-authored  with Sheridan a book on the Poll Tax Revolt).

All of this, and far more, will be revisited if, and when Coulson is tried for any perjury. It is worth noting that, in the Scottish system, an arrest is not made until a pretty-convincing case has been prepared. Coulson has, most definitely, been arrested and charged.

What adds to the drama is that the Sheridan trial, and any wrong-doing by Coulson in that court, happened while Coulson was on the 10 Downing Street pay-roll. In other words, while Cameron was giving Coulson his “second chance”.

Meanwhile — and it must, surely, be coincidence — Cameron is also given a convenient let-out: he cannot answer any pointed questions at Leveson, for fear of muddying the waters of Strathclyde.

Malcolm’s headline

So, has Coulson been nailed this time?

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The earliest versions of that date from around the time Edward III’s legal team was formulating his Treason Act.

It was already proverbial when John Gower used it in Confessio Amantis, around 1390.

‘Twas a wonderful craft, she was rigged fore and aft

First up, it’s clear that Malcolm has had issues with Slugger O’Toole (or, to be more precise with Pete Baker thereof). But, then, if you invite people to be offended, what d’ye expect? Take that as your starting point, and all that follows here is sour grapes.

Second, Malcolm has a personal interest here. There is at least a strong possibility he may be rusticated from Norf Lunnen to the County Armagh for extended periods over the next while.

Third, the antecedent, eponymous Slugger O’Toole has been part of Malcolm’s experience since a pasty-faced freshman at TCD, on his walk back to a cold-water flat in Ballsbridge, encountered the Ronnie Drew Ballad Group at O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row.

Now consider this:

0 – 0 – 1 – 0 – 0 – 8 -37 – 0 – 2 – 4 – 0 – 18 – 17 – 3 – 9 -2 – 7 – 16 – 16 – 1 – 0 – 5 – 0 – 9

Those are the number of comments each the last two dozen posts have received (and that’s back to Monday morning — admittedly those numbers were collected before Malcolm was summoned to fodder). What’s more eighteen of those posts have been made by Mick Fealty, the onlie true begetter, himself.

The biggie there (37 comments since Wednesday, 22 February, at 1:29pm) is on the thread Many Catholics are questioning whether they necessarily have to be nationalist… Now there’s a matter open to dispute and definition. It might even say something of what, sadly, enthuses and engages Six Counties types. Or is the main focus for Sluggerdom.

Again, anticipating the usual, let it be understood Malcolm is an aficionado of Slugger O’Toole; and has offered hundreds of posts (some good, some … inebriated)  over many years. Only a couple have run foul of the editorial process, such as it is.

Slugger has been, in so many ways, the most open, most available, least prejudiced, least partisan, least partial cyber-forum in Northern Ireland. It should, it ought, it must continue.

Apart from anything else, Mick Fealty has committed time and energy, sweat and blood to this platform. Nor is he the only one.

Clearly something has gone awry.

It could be that we are in an inter-election dip; and that temperatures and involvement will rise in due course.

It could be that the whole Northern Ireland thing is presently outside that famous “marching season”.

It could be that everyone is so content with the dispensation given us, there is little reason for discontent or dispute.

Certainly it is self-evident that the previous poison and vituperation has quietened — which is to be celebrated.

It could be that Slugger‘s Pale is too much the golf-club and garden-centre belt around Belfast (actually, these days, it stretches the length of the M1 to Dungannon). The north-west, though, still gets short shrift.

Or, it could be that Slugger‘s moment has come … and gone.

One reason might be, putting aside the excellent Brian Walker and occasional forays from one or two others, Slugger has become very, very limited in its range of topics. Even irrelevant. It once headlined itself as a place for politics and culture. Define “culture” (it seemed to be football and rugby). And compare and contrast (as they always say) politics.ie.

Malcolm very, very much hopes for a second coming, a coalition of the willing, a gathering of the All-sorts:

There was Barney McGee from the banks of the Lee,
There was Hogan from County Tyrone,
There was Johnny McGurk who was scared stiff of work,
And a chap from Westmeath named Malone.
There was Slugger O’Toole who was drunk as a fool,
And fighting Bill Tracy from Dover,
And yer man Mick McCann, from the banks of the Ban
Was the skipper on the Irish Rover.

Yeats reprised and ignorance recognised

As he has mentioned previously, Malcolm’s “other” bedside book is John Stubbs’s Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War. Boy! Is this a good ‘un!

A Malcolmian aside

One of the best (in all senses) reviews of Stubbs was that by Adrian Tinniswood’s in Literary Review. Malcolm insists on quoting the first two paragraphs:

When I was an Eng Lit student back in the early 1970s, a time when deconstruction wasn’t a proper word and everyone thought critical theory had something to do with physics, any attempt to mix history and literature was regarded with deep suspicion. Mightn’t it help our reading of ‘Easter 1916’ if we knew a bit about the rising itself, we asked tentatively? No, said our teachers: that would ‘lead us away from the poem’. Then didn’t Yeats help to explain Irish history? No: literary sources were unreliable. In any case, we weren’t there to study history. We were there to study ‘the Text’.

No matter what the work was or who produced it, that text existed in its own sealed world. Literature fed on itself, and external narratives, whether they involved Tudor politics or Wilfred Owen’s war or Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, were off the menu.

From which perspective, Malcolm recognises in himself, from  way back, a proto-deconstructionist. Or is that just an Irish, even a TCD kind of thing?

Taking that most glaring exemplar given by Tinniswood, Malcolm finds it impossible, even incredible, to dissociate Yeats from his historical and political context. Easter 1916 exists in a precise moment, even instant of time. Consider the dates:

• Back in February 1915 Henry James, who was editing a fund-raising anthology along with Edith Wharton,  had asked Yeats for a war poem. What James got was something between a bit of flannel and a flea in his ear:

I think it better that at times like these
A poet’s keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He’s had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

• Over the Easter weekend of 1916, Yeats was staying with Sir William Rothenstein at Far Oakridge, near Stroud. On Easter Monday (24th April) Yeats heard of the Rising. It seems that Yeats was a trifle miffed. He was a sworn IRB-man, and — in his own eyes, if none others — the Greatest Living Irish poet , so he felt aggrieved that he had not been consulted (as if Yeats could ever keep a secret). This was, though, a Great Irish Happening; and it required the Yeatsian touch, one way or another.
• Any remaining initial and subjective distaste was swept away when the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were dispatched by firing squads. He had affinities with Tomás Mac Donnchadha, who had paid his dues by dedicating a book of verse to Yeats. James Connolly, a fellow antagonist of William Martin Murphy, had stood along with Yeats on a number of issues. Yeats had known the Gore-Booths since 1894 on his first awkward visit to Lissadell — and now Constance Markiewicz, who had been Connie Gore-Booth, was under sentence of death. The most direct link was the execution of John MacBride, the estranged husband of Yeats’s enduring love, Maud Gonne.
• If that wasn’t the motivator, then came revulsion at the summary murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and a consensus of national outrage shared by Lady Gregory and Yeats’s own family. On 11th May 1916 he wrote to Lady Gregory that he was trying to write a poem on the men executed — “terrible beauty has been born”.
• In all Yeats’s collections the poem has the subscription of a key date: 25th September 1916. Stephen Gwynn edited Scattering Branches, Tributes to the Memory of W.B.Yeats (1940), where Maud Gonne MacBride supplied its significance:

Standing by the seashore in Normandy in September 1916, he read me that poem: he had worked on it the night before, and he implored me to forget the stone and its inner fire for the flashing, changing joy of life, but when he found my mind dull with the stone of the fixed idea of getting back to Ireland, kind and helpful as ever, he helped me overcome political and passport difficulties and we travelled as far as London together.

Quite frankly, how one comprehends Easter 1916, outside of those contexts, escapes Malcolm completely.

Back to Tinniswood, en route to Stubbs

Sure, royalist stalwarts like Henry Jermyn, Endymion Porter and the archetypal cavalier Prince Rupert do put in an appearance. But the real focus of Stubbs’s book is the cavalier poets, that motley collection of royalist writers who gathered around the aging and irascible Ben Jonson in the late 1620s and 1630s and went on to seek their fortunes at court, simultaneously memorialising and mythologising its decline. The self-styled ‘Tribe of Ben’ – William Davenant, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling and the rest – remain resolutely minor figures, both in literature and in history. Most are remembered for a single poem, like Sir John Denham and ‘Cooper’s Hill’, or even a single line, like Richard Lovelace’s ‘Stone walls do not a prison make’ or Robert Herrick’s ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’. Some aren’t even remembered for that. Can you recall anything Suckling wrote?

Err, yes, murmurs Malcolm:

Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings
Ere he shall discover
In such whole wide world again
Such a constant lover.

Which, sadly, goes to make Tinniswood’s point.

Dancing to the Drum

In the fastnesses of last night, Malcolm was embroiled in Stubbs’s Chapter 4, in which Suckling is off with Sir Henry Vane’s embassy (1631-2) to the wars in Germany. Marvelling at the rolling names of the protagonists — Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, Oxenstierna — suddenly  a tsunami of guilt flooded over Malcolm.

He had “done” the Thirty Years War as a paper for the Irish Leaving Certificate, 1960. This required hours in a dusty classroom, having outlines and details drummed in by an excellent teacher. That was when the High School was at number 40, the top end of Dublin’s Harcourt Street: a totally unsuitable but magnificent building — rather than the present very suitable, but unprepossessing complex at Danum. Malcolm learned enough to take “honours” in the examination. And now? He cannot recall any of it. There are fifty-eight (fifty-eight!) battles and sieges of the War listed on wikipedia: at a pinch, Malcolm could name just the one — Lützen, and that because it involved the death of Gustavus Adolphus.

Deconstruction

To return whence we departed, nine hundred finely-chiselled words ago, Malcolm wonders about two aspects (other than his fallible memory):

• How did a protestant school in the Irish system manage to teach such religiously-loaded topic as the Thirty Years War? For Malcolm dimly recalls that, if there were a hero of that whole mess, it was the King of Sweden.
• How and why was the war in Germany taught in isolation, as a clinical experiment almost? Why were the wider, European dimensions — and the even more limited local perspectives — not better explored? Was it not made clear that perhaps 30,000 Scots were fighting the protestant cause in Germany, and when the rump of them returned they formed the hardest men of the Covenanters’ resistance in the Bishops’ Wars? Was a conscious link (if so, Malcolm cannot remember it, or he was too dim too perceive it at the time) made to the wars in Ireland that were about to explode?

Stubbs manages a sidelight on all that:

The death of Gustavus at Lützen — even more, all the more unbearably, at another moment of victory — was shattering to the militant Protestant cause; but also, less tangibly, hugely dispiriting to the admirers and followers of the direct, chivalrous approach the king had embodied. Sweden had been out-manoeuvred in the council chamber rather than outfought in the field. It is an irony that so many in the pro-Spanish element at the English court would belong to the side branded ‘cavaliers’ in the British and Irish civil wars, since their cold political realism in the early thirties had very little of the cavalier about it. It was a strong sense of irony, in fact, which saved Suckling from the excesses of grief for the fallen hero seen in other quarters. he had seen a little too much of statecraft to take the cause, or the blow it suffered in losing Gustavus, to heart. 

Devious diggers and curious curators

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement is a wall-to-wall Dickensian extravaganza. Then there’s the main article  — page three of the TLS is a major event, any week.

It is a Richard Clogg’s review of Susan Heuck Allen’s Classical Spies. For the record, Clogg is a historian with a Grecian bent and Allen an archaeologist. So, can the twain ever meet?

Whereas the book’s subtitle suggests an exclusively American perspective, Clogg spends a lot of useful time considering what the Brits, dispossessed to Cairo and elsewhere, were up to for the duration. We come to a different view to the norm of the WW2 activities of the archaeologists and Hellenists:

 the classicists and archaeologists appointed to the American and British schools were indeed engaged in intelligence work, while their counterparts in the German, Italian and Vichy-controlled French schools carried on digging on behalf of the German occupying forces.

Digging, that is, in the broadest sense of the word.

Clogg drops names who were SOE types:

C.M.Woodhouse, N.G.L.Hammond, Anthony Andrewes, Stanley Casson, J.M.Cook, T.J.Dunbabin, Peter Fraser, Eric Gray, T. Bruce Mitford, David Talbot Rice, J.D.S.Pendlebury and David Wallace.

In the ’60s you didn’t get very far reading (or, in Malcolm’s case, barely scanning) Classics or early History without hitting hard against many of those names.

• Bruce-Mitford, for example, was a fixture at the British Museum for four decades — and wrote the definitive study of the Sutton Hoo burial.
• If anyone needs a right-wing hero figure, Monty Woodhouse (there he is, right, in full Greek mountain fig) might qualify. Straight out of New College, Oxford (with a double first, to boot), he was into the Royal Artillery. By 1941 he was in Crete, liaising with the resistance, then onto the mainland with the Harling Force, and by 1943 (still in his mid-20s) a full Colonel in charge of the British Military Mission in Greece. After the War he was still spooking: first in Athens (machinating as Second Secretary against the Muscovites), then in Tehran overthrowing the Mosaddegh government and establishing the Western-friendly Pahlevi régime (a certain Kermit Roosevelt was doing his bit for the CIA). Oh, and in between Woodhouse was a Tory MP for two terms and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. And was among the first to finger Kurt Waldheim, sometime secretary general of the United Nations and President of Austria, as a Nazi executioner, ignorant of Jasenovac concentration camp and deaf and blind to summary executions of Titoists outside his office.

Nearer home

Let’s change the location to Dublin, well out of the climactic events of the wartime period (By the way, when will “historians” recognise that, unlike Switzerland, Ireland seems never to have formally declared “neutrality?)

Surely, there’s no parallel?

Mahr, not less

Well, there was Adolf Mahr, an Austrian whose dedication Nazism predated the Anchluss. In his spare time from being Director of the National Museum he quite openly ran the Nazi Auslandorganisation in Ireland, complete with its own Hitler Youth. That involved him with the strange ménage around Maud Gonne, which included her daughter Iseult and son-in-law Francis Stuart. Mahr’s reports back to Berlin had identified certain Germans as “Juden”, thus guaranteeing their ends. A cynic might also go looking for a rationale of the remarkable Goethe-Plakette in 1934 to WB Yeats, soon after Mahr’s appointment as Director of the Museum.

At the outbreak of War in 1939, Mahr was — conveniently for the Irish government, which then didn’t need to expel him — “on holiday” back in Germany (and, in 1945, when he came looking for his job back, made him extremely unwelcome). `Marooned in wartime Germany,  Mahr went to work for Goebbels’ propaganda radio and Irland Redaktion. By 1944 Mahr was running Ru IX and Ru II, which broadcast to Britain, Ireland and the British Empire, usually immediately after “Lord Haw-Haw”.

Nice guy: the dirt on him and Ireland’s other Nazis was well dished by David O’Donoghue for History: Ireland. A small detail: even with Mahr in Berlin, Nazis were running the Turf Board and the ESB, with a niche in the Department of Finance.

The extraordinary Richard Hayes

Passing Mahr regularly, and probably on nodding terms at least, would have been Richard Hayes, the director of the National Library. Take care here: there are two Richard Hayes around at this period: the other one was censoring films, and not every writer (and even fewer indexers) has sorted the one from the other.

Librarian Hayes was another of those polymaths made extinct by ever-greater specialisation in higher education: he had three honors (correct spelling, Malcolm assures you) degrees from Trinity — in Celtic Studies, in Modern Languages, and in Philosophy. By the time of the Emergency, Hayes too had a sideline. Having polished off the administration at the National Library, daily he bestrode his sit-up-and-beg bicycle up to Collins Barracks in Arbour Hill. There he devoted himself to the systematic decoding of all and anything that came his way. He was Ireland’s one-man equivalent of Bletchley Park.

The National Library hold a remarkable collection of Hayes papers, relating to his crypto-analysis. We can see he worked on double-folio broadsheets, ruled into harlequin squares. Clearly, as early as 1939 Hayes was breaking the German and American diplomatic cyphers. The “approved” version is that Hayes was into the British cypher by late-1941. That may well be true, except it is a very useful date for “previous offences” not to be taken into account. Equally, it may be that Colonel Dan Bryan, who became head of G2 in 1942, was felt by some to be too close to the British MI5; and not all the material Hayes accessed crossed Bryan’s desk. We must also be aware that the Hayes papers we have have probably been “weeded”. In any event, the British were extremely impressed by Hayes’s results: he had a hand in the arrest of all of the dozen German spies during the Emergency. If there is one particular success, it must be the cracking of the code used by Hermann Goertz, who managed to stay “on the run” in Dublin for nineteen months (another suspiciously convenient arrangement: in that time Goertz was repeatedly face-to-face with the greatest in the land and in the Irish military).

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.

Plook

Following the matter of Shite Shirts (still a topic of passing wind amusement at Redfellow Hovel), we need to move on to Linwood:

Linwood has been named as Scotland’s most dismal town in the annual Carbuncle awards.

The Renfrewshire town has become the latest recipient of the “Plook on a Plinth”, awarded by Urban Realm magazine.

Oddly, when we turn to the actual article in Urban Realm, there is no immediate mention of “plook”. It’s only when we see the “trophy”, we recognise the implication (as above, right).

Linwood’s problems are that it is yet another town that has outlived its usefulness. It grew after 1961 when Rootes established the factory that churned out the Hillman Imp. The town was a natural: it had a main railway line to distribute its product; and the Pressed Steel Company next door to produce the body panels. When Rootes went down, to be absorbed into Peugeot Talbot, the Ryton plant got the nod, and Linwood got the chop. When Linwood closed in 1981, some 18,000 were condemned to unemployment.

Quick switch to Malcolm’s pre-teenie American grand-daughter, who — for some reason — has taken to an Elton John song and brightens her New Jersey days by singing along:

Quite. As with Linwood, so Barnsley, Grimsby, Wigan, West Belfast and Derry and many other places — all conveniently distant and out-of-sight of Chelsea and the Cotswolds.

It’s “progress”, y’know: get used to it. The “price worth paying“. As of yesterday’s unemployment figures, another 128,000 were paying it in the last quarter — 2,640,000 of us. Just like those good old Tory times of Thatcher.

But … “plook”?

A worm-hole of Malcolm’s memory opens and he recalls, from those Irish classes at the High School, Dublin, the word pluc ( = “a bulge, knob, lump”). Oddly, most of the Irish he does recall is offensive, insulting or — as here — somewhat on the cheesy side.

When the Scots got hold of it, through the Gaelic, it acquired this secondary meaning of “a pimple”.

A while back, in a fit of spleen, Malcolm decided Boris Johnson was a suppurating pustule. An understandable sentiment, if a trifle extreme. Perhaps the term he was reaching for is before us right now. It is, after all, an expression in the literary tradition, employed so effectively by Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting:

Billy, ma contempt for you jist grew over the years. It displaced the fear, jist sortay squeezed it oot, like pus fae a pluke.

Wish you all adieu

There is a world out there, beyond spats about immigration.

For the next couple of weeks, Malcolm will be elsewhere.

The elsewhere will be via JFK, NYC, DC and Thanksgiving in Noo Joisey.

With luck it will involve substantial sampling of craft ales, book-stores, diners (the US’s gracious gift to international cuisine, and rarely matched), decent music (Mona’s in the East Village is inked into the agenda), a bit of family familiarity, along with the odd novel (real and literary) experience. In there somewhere will be thirst-slaking at  the Old Town Bar  — if only because, one celebrated afternoon, unshorn and weary, sitting beneath the image of Frank McCourt and other worthies, Malcolm was accosted by a pasty and insipid youth and asked was he Famous Seamus.

Redfellow Hovel will be left in full charge of he who answers to the code number of 1690: the password is “No Surrender”. That’s no joke: his name is Ken. He left just that message on the Redfellow answerphone when “The Troubles” were at their height. For months afterwards, there were strange clicks and quiverings whenever anyone else ‘phoned. Can’t think why.

So, this evening, Malcolm has been filling the iPod to get him from here to there and back. Just let’s hope that he doesn’t disgrace himself on AA107 if the iPod spills out Phil Coulter’s Scorn Not His Simplicity — 

Or (as is more likely) Luke Kelly’s angstier rendition:

It cracks him wide open every time. For a good reason.

For all sorts of reasons …

… the following quotation gives an old member of the Irish Labour Party (Dublin, North Central branch) reason to be satisfied: —

Arriving at Dublin Castle shortly before 9pm, Mr Higgins said he was “very happy with the vote and the support”.

Here’s to you, Mr President.

Some bigotries never go away

Try this:

A FORMER leader of the SNP has called on ministers to hold a referendum on same-sex marriage.

Former MP Gordon Wilson, who led the party from 1979 to 1990, said same-sex marriage would “undermine” the traditional Christian understanding of the institution.

He argued that if the issue of the 300-year-old Union with the rest of the UK is worth a referendum, so is over a millennium-and-a-half of Christian teaching and he called on ministers to hold one instead of simply consulting on same-sex marriages.

Now Malcolm has been married to a good Northern Irish (ex-) young Unionist (with good Clydeside connections) for … ummm .. well into five decades. Oddly enough, Malcolm does not need anyone to define for him what that mutual commitment involves. He suspects that all other members of the “happily-married” fraternity and sorority would concur:

• It’s not divinely ordained.
• It’s nothing to do with deism or vows in a place of worship.
• Or even legalistics.
• It’s good old-fashioned understanding and tolerance.
• It’s a four-letter word, my friends: l-o-v-e.

Every couple — whatever their gender(s) — have to find their way to consensual endurance together.

Definition

Malcolm’s (alas, long-dead) headmaster (at the High School, Dublin) was a classical scholar.

On special occasions the great-and-good Dr Ralph Reynolds wore what he himself referred to as his “Grand Vizier” outfit — the full-fig gold-and red doctorial gown of Queen’s University.

Malcolm particularly recalls a dusty classroom in the High School, then at the top of Harcourt Street. Dr Reynolds discoursed on the Greek terms for “love”. The bit Malcolm recalls went something like:

• Agápe (ἀγάπη) is what you feel for for parents
• Philia (φιλία) is what you feel for your friend
• Éros (ἔρως) is what you fell for your friend’s sister.

Malcolm doubts that many who went through the route of classical eddikashun didn’t get something similar.

So, let’s return to Gordon Wilson.

Wilson represents the years when the SNP was in the wilderness, between  the froth-and-fury of Billy Wolfe and the Machiavel “Wee Eck” Salmond. Let it be understood that Malcolm, not without qualification, was a Wolfe-man. Well, to be honest, since a youthful Bo’ness evening which involved amounts of heavy and many, many improvised verses of the Ballad of the Learig Bar.

Now, what — in any name of reason — is Wilson doing here?

If nothing else, the SNP — if it is to achieve a plurality — cannot afford to identify with any faction. And the religious elements in Scotland are just a wee bit too puissant and divisive to have as affiliates.

So: Shut up, Gordy!

A vice-regal lodging

Good to see the spirit of Roy Brooks still persists among the provisional wing of the estate agent profession.

As among today’s Irish Times property porn:

For newbies, Roy Brooks operated out of the King’s Road, Chelsea. He died in September 1971, having made a reputation for himself with unmissable advertising in the Sunday Times and the Observer. For example, this gem:

Wanted: Someone with taste, means and a stomach strong enough to buy this erstwhile house of ill-repute in Pimlico. It is untouched by the 20th century as far as conveniences for even the basic human decencies are concerned. Although it reeks of damp or worse, the plaster is coming off the walls and daylight peeps through a hole in the roof, it is still habitable judging by the bed of rags, fag ends and empty bottles in one corner. Plenty of scope for the socially aspiring to express their decorative taste and get their abode in The Glossy, and nothing to stop them putting Westminster on their notepaper. Comprises 10 rather unpleasant rooms with slimy back yard, 4,650 Freehold. Tarted up, these houses make 15,000.

Desmond Wilcox was a friend of Brooks, and used him to sell his house. The friendship survived Brooks’s ad, which described the corner of Wilcox’s sitting-room:

… a white painted brick feature for holding exotic drinks. Rather theatrical and in keeping with the pretentious style of the owner.

The wit and wisdom of Roy Brooks is still available in two booklets (The successor firm’s web-page includes a further example of the inimitable Brooks style).