Monday Miscellany
Poetry in Pavements - Honor Molloy
I grew up in a house filled with music and jokes and song. A robust language rang off the walls as the family freely quoted Synge, O’Casey, Shakespeare, or Bubbles, one of the Dublin characters my father, John Molloy, collected. Both of my parents were theatre artists dedicated to preserving a Dublin vernacular that split a two-syllable word into ten, giving it a hundred new meanings. Back in the 60s, there was lively poetry to be heard on the streets and in the markets that was rapidly fading. So, the two of them took material straight from the mouths of the Moore Street dealers, buskers, down-and-outers with extraordinary language and stories.
My mother, Yvonne Voigt Molloy, listened in while propped up in bed in the Rotunda after the latest baby, over coffee in Bewley’s on Grafton Street, or she wandered through the market stalls pretending to check off items when she was really scribbling on the back of her shopping list. Earwigging, she called it. She typed these notes into short scripts which aired on Radio Éireann. These pieces focused on women’s lives, domestic scenes, and are a fascinating glimpse into common-day Irish experience.
So What Do You Do? - Lorraine Griffin
Yuck. The dreaded question.
But we all get asked it - in the pub, at weddings… in fact any social occasion where we meet new people.
Invariably, sweeping assumptions are made when you utter your reply.
An accountant? No way she could understand poetry, wear bright colours or ever belt out a boisterous Wham! number. An art teacher? Ah sure he’s hopeless with money, a bit dithery and into that whole Green thing. A builder? Uh-oh, watch him –you’ve got a total lad there, mad about football and beer.
It is human nature, and it’s a particular characteristic of this Fair Isle that we categorize and label people based on how they earn their daily bread. We slot them into the category and status that our perception of their profession allows. With speedy precision, we can guess what they earn, where they live and how they socialise. All neatly boxed-up, categorised and filed away. Job done (so to speak).
However, by only focussing on people’s jobs, we’re seeing only a tiny percentage of what they’re about. Such a simplistic view overlooks the fact that everyone has a set of interests, motivations and passions. And if they get to indulge these passions, and even better earn a crust from them, then they are truly the lucky ones.
Roots and Ribbons - Clar Ni Chonghaile
My seven-year-old daughter tried to “do” me the other day. “That’s how you talk, isn’t it, Mummy?” she said, all proud and punchy after imitating my accent. She did a fair job too, despite her own distinctly English tones. Her cheekiness got me thinking about roots and identity and what it all means now that I am so grown up I am growing down. I was born in London to Irish parents. We moved home to County Galway when I was about three. The next 17 years were Angela’s Ashes-lite. My childhood was ordinary but it seems the stuff of history books now.
We were seven children in a bungalow surrounded by fields of sinister cows and hawthorn bushes that rustled with robins. In the evenings, we lit turf fires, said the Rosary and watched an hour of telly. We were taught by nuns, we walked to school or, if it was raining, we watched from the sitting room window and when we saw a car coming down the hill, we rushed out to the gate. The driver would have to give us a lift. We walked for hours along the river; played camogie in lumpy fields mined with cow dung, moved cows from one stamp-sized field to another and went to the bog to make mini-wigwams out of drying sods.
It Never Rains But It Pours - Kirk Horton
“So …you want to be an accountant?” my office mentor shouted over the Friday lunchtime exuberance. It was my first week as a trainee and my first time out of the office. After watching our client fight his way through the swelling crowds of O’Donoguhes pub and disappear into the rain outside, my mentor fixed his eyes on mine, as if searching for an answer that he himself had been unable to find during his eighteen years in practice. I nodded, unconvincingly, and he rubbed his Guinness rouge cheeks before leaning his substantial weight towards me.
“The bottom line is liquidity …and asset management,” he pointed across our small corner table and I looked up at the misted Georgian windows where the autumn light was fading, “and there’s plenty of liquid out there …it’s pissing down. You’ll soon see that in Dublin it never rains …but it pours!”
Fathers and Sons by Ferdia Mac Anna
You are standing with your 12 year old son in a field with 70,000 people. A small hyperactive 53 year-old Australian with wild hair plays a storming 20 minute guitar solo in teeming rain on a podium in the centre of the crowd while his bandmates stand on stage, dry as sticks. It is the climax of a wonderful concert by AC/DC. You feel exhilarated, delighted to have had such a joyous communal experience and proud that your boy has had a good time as has nearly everyone in the mixed, all-ages crowd – from teens to bikers to Dads with their kids.
Afterwards, you trudge along heading towards the buses. The crowd from Slane had a terrible time getting home a couple of weeks back but the word is that all that has been sorted. You take your place in the zig zag queue like a good responsible heavy rock citizen and wait your turn to board a bus home…and wait…and wait…and wait…
In front of you packed bus after packed bus leaves yet the queue doesn’t move. Overhead comes the whirr of departing helicopters ferrying the artists and the privileged. An hour and a half later, the queue hasn’t budged. Few stewards in sight. No police. No anouncements. No news about delays. No news about anything. People are fed up. The mood changes to anger. Suddenly, the crowd at the far end breaks through the barriers and gallops for the buses. Now the crowd at the other end follows suit. You and your son along with thousands of others, are cut off, trapped inside a series of steel barriers. The crowd surges forward but there is nowhere to go.
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