Ireland

That was the year that was – don’t stop (thinking about tomorrow)

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The prophet’s lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone
Cold the heart and cold the stove
Ice condenses on the bone
Winter completes an age
WH Auden, For the Time Being – a Christmas Oratorio, 1941

I considered using a line from the above as the title of this retrospective of 2022.  It was written during 1941 and 1942, though published in 1947, when the poet was in self-exile in the United States and viewing the war in Europe from afar – although the long poem from which it has been extracted does not in itself reflect such pessimism. A more fitting title could be taken from another long poem that was published in another (very) long poem published in 1947 – Auden’s often overlooked masterpiece The Age of Anxiety, a meditation on a world between the wreckage of The Second World War and of foreboding for the impending armed peace that we now look back on as the Cold War, with its oft-repeated mantra: “many have perished, and more most surely will”.

The year just gone was indeed a gloomy one, meriting a dismal heading. There are few indications of where it might take us in ‘23 and beyond, and my crystal ball is broken. Pundits reached for convenient comparisons. Some propounded that it was like the 1930s all over again when Europe constantly teetered on the brink of war. Others recalled 1989 with the fall of the aneroid Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, beware of false analogies. In 2022, things were more confused. The tides of history have often resembled swirling cross-currents.

Things, of course, might have been worse. There are, as I’ve noted in successive posts on my own Facebook page, many qualified “reasons to be cheerful”. The  year could have ended with Ukraine under Russian control. An emboldened China might have been encouraged to launch an assault on Taiwan. A red wave in the midterms would have buoyed Trump. And here in Australia, Scott Morrison might have secured another “miracle” election victory. The West could have retreated on all fronts.

Instead, therefore, I have selected a title that hedges its bets, because, to paraphrase the old Chinese adage, and the title of an earlier retrospective, we certainly live in interesting times and in 2023, and a lot of energy will be spent endeavouring to make sense of them – or, to borrow from Bob:

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he not busy being born
Is busy dying
B Dylan

The year in review 

Christine McVie, longtime and founder member of Fleetwood Mac departed the planet on 30th November this year. And contemplating this year’s posts in In That Howling Infinite, I could not help thinking about one her most famous songs. I recalled that it featured on newsreels of the revolution that ousted the Shah of Iran in 1979.

Why not think about times to come?
And not about the things that you’ve done
If your life was bad to you
Just think what tomorrow will do
Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
It’ll be better than before
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

The song seemed quite apposite as the soundtrack of a revolution that had overthrown one of America’s many friendly autocrats. At the time, no one could predict what would happen, but, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was a time optimistic expectation. And yet its shock waves have reverberated and ricocheted in ways unimagined at the time.

As 2022 ends, with blood flowing on the streets of Iran and in the mullahs’s torture cells as young people rise up against a hypocritically brutal theocratic tyranny, we see again and again how that which goes around comes around.

Women, Freedom, Life

If the malign hand of history has literally reached out and gripped Iran’s young women and girls by their hair, it has also endeavoured to strangle the thousand year old Ukrainian nation in the name of an atavistic irredentism. Russian troops invaded the Ukraine on February 24, causing what has since become the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Out if the spotlight of the world’s easily distracted attention. intractable conflicts lumbered mercilessly on – in Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Congo and many other “far away  places with strange sounding names”.  

On the far side of the world, the USA continued to struggle with the reverberations of January 6th 2021. Donald Trump, like Dracula, has not gone away, and whilst his 2024 presidential run is looking increasingly shaky, he continues to poison the atmosphere like radioactive dust. The unfortunate folk of the United Kingdom endured three prime ministers during the year, including the shortest ever in the history of the office, and after two years of pandemic, are facing a bleak economic winter as well as a frigid actual one.

In Australia, it was the year of the teal – at least according to those who study the evolution of language, the year we lost a queen, our long-serving foreign head of state, and a king of spin, the down-fallen and disgraced Scott Morrison. And a sodden La Nina saw incessant rain drown large swathes of eastern Australia, visiting misery on thousands. COVID-19 mutated, the Omicron variant surging from beginning of the year, ensuring no end to the pandemic – today, it seems like everyone we know has had it, including ourselves (and we were soooo careful for a full two years!). As restrictions were cautiously lifted, we as a nation are learning to live with it. 

Politically, it’s been a grand year for the Australian Labor Party. With our stunning Federal election win in May and in Victoria in November, the Albanese government’s star is on the ascendant and it’s legislative record in six months has out run nine years of Tory stagnation on climate, integrity and equality – a neglect that saw the rise of a new political force in the shape of a proto-party, the aforementioned “teal”, named for the colour of the candidates’ tee shirts. The opposition has been reduced to a bickering and carping crew, and whilst Labor continues to ride high in the polls, the Coalition bounces along the bottom of the pond.

Lismore, northern NSW, March 2023

Flooded house aflame, Lismore March 2022

Christine McVie was just one of many music icons who checked out this past year. The coal miner’s daughter, Loretta Lynn, crooned her last, as did rock ‘n roll bad boy Jerry Lee Lewis and Ronnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, who gave the boys in The Band their big break. Rock heavyweight (literally) Meatloaf took off like his bat out of hell and keyboard evangelist Vangelis boarded his chariot of fire.

Acclaimed British author Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall trilogy inspired back to back posts in In That Howling Infinite in 2020 found “a place of greater safety”, and French author Dominique Lapierre also joined the choir invisible. I had first learned about Israel’s war of independence and the Palestinians’ al Nakba in his O Jerusalem, and about the bloody tragedy that accompanied the birth of India and Pakistan, in Freedom at Midnight, both books featuring in past posts. 

Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis as Tom and Hal

One could argue that the most significant departure was that of Britain’s longest serving monarch. Queen Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost all of my life, as has the now King Charles III who was born four months before me, and of whom, as a nipper, I was jealous. I recall how I watched the queen’s coronation on a tiny black and white television in the crowded and smokey parlour of the boarding house run by a friend of our family. By happenstance, Netflix served up two over the top regal sagas to binge on: the penultimate season of The Crown, which whilst entertaining, was a disappointment in comparison with earlier seasons, and Harry and Meghan which was whilst excruciatingly cringe-worthy, was nevertheless addictive viewing. The passing of Her Maj reminded me that in my lifetime, I have witnessed three monarchs and eighteen British prime ministers (and incidentally, eighteen Australian prime ministers).  The public outpouring of grief for the Queen’s ascent to the choir invisible was unprecedented – the picture below demonstrates what the Poms do best …

The Queue along the Thames to pay respect to Her Maj

There were farewells much closer to home. My mediation colleague, aspiring author and friend John Rosley, and Beau Tindall, the son of my oldest Bellingen friend Warren, took off on the same day in May. Peter Setterington, my oldest friend in England – we first met in 1972 – died suddenly in London in March, and our friend and forest neighbour, the world-famous war photographer Tim Page, in August, after a short but nasty illness. Pete is memorialized in When an Old Cricketer Leave His Crease whilst Journey’s end – Tim Page’s wild ride,is an adaptation of the eulogy I gave for Tim in September, one of many on that sunny afternoon day in Fernmount. It is a coda to Tim Page’s  War – a photographer’s  Vietnam journey, a story we published a year ago.

Tim Page by Joanne Booker

What we wrote in 2022

The ongoing Ukraine War has dominated our perception of 2022, from the morning (Australian time) we watched it begin on CNN as the first Russian missiles struck Kyiv, to the aerial assault on infrastructure that has left Ukrainians sheltering through a cold, dark winter. Two posts in In That Howling Infinite examined the historical origins of the conflict: Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism and The Roots and Fruits of Putin’s Irridentism. “Because of …” Iran’s voice of freedom looks at the song that has become the rising’s anthem. None can predict the outcome – whether it will be a doomed intifada, the Arabic word that literally means a shaking off – historically of oppression – and figuratively, a rising up, like that in Ireland in 1798 and 1916, Warsaw in 1943 and 1945, and Hungary in 1956, or an Inqilab, another Arabic word meaning literally change or transformation, overturning or revolution.

The run up to May’s Australian elections inspired Teal independents – false reality in a fog of moralism.; and Australia votes – the decline and fall of the flimflam man. 

More distant history featured in Menzie’s Excellent Suez Adventure, the story of the Suez crisis of 1956 that historians argue augured the end of the British imperium, and the role played therein by longtime Australian prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. Johnny Clegg and the Washing of the Spears is a tribute to the late South African singer, dancer and songwriter, and a brief history of the war that destroyed the great Zulu nation, setting the scene for the modern history of South Africa. And journeying further back in time to sixteenth century Ireland, there is O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song, a discussion of the origins of a famous and favorite rebel song.

Then there are the semi-biographical “micro-histories” in In That Howling Infinite’s Tall tales, small stories, obituaries and epiphanies. In 2023, these included: Folksong Au Lapin Agile, the evening we visited Montmarte’s famous folk cabaret; Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1, the story of a café that played a minor part in my London days, as described in detail in an earlier travelogue, Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Better read than dead – the joy of public libraries; The quiet tea time of the soul, an ode in prose to a favourite beverage; and The work, the working, the working life recalling the many jobs I took on in the sixties to keep myself in music, books, travel and sundry vices. 

We cannot pass a year without something literary. We celebrated the centenary of three iconic literary classics in The year that changed literature, and with the release of The Rings of Power, the controversial prequel to The Lord of the Rings, we published a retrospective on the influence of JRR Tolkien. One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter? – a personal perspective with an opinion piece by English historian Dominic Sandbrook, an informative and entertaining chronicler of postwar British history and society which featured, in Unherd, an online e-zine that became a “must read” in 2022. A Son Goes To War – the grief of Rudyard Kipling recalls the death in battle on the Western Front in 1917 of the poet’s only son, it’s influence upon his subsequent work, whilst Muzaffar al Nawab, poet of revolutions and sorrow is an obituary for another poet, who seen a lifetime speaking truth to power.

And that was that for what was in so man ways a sad year. Meanwhile, In That Howling Infinite already has several works in progress, including a review of historian Anthony Beevor’s Russia – Revolution and Civil War, what King Herod really thought about the birth of baby Jesus, and the story of a famous and favourite British army marching song.

Best wishes for 2023 …

Death of a Son

That was the year that was – retrospectives

Life in Wartime – images of Ukraine

The quiet tea time of the soul

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Some folks put much reliance
On politics and science
There’s only one hero for me
His praise we should be roaring
The man who thought of pouring
The first boiling water onto tea

Once in a while, I go on a ramble, a stream of consciousness jaunt. The following was inspired by one of my very best Facebook friends, a resident of Oklahoma, who posted a picture of a mug of Twinings Irish Breakfast Tea, and the comments I made regarding that post.

In my opinion, I wrote, the best tea is Irish – and the best Irish tea for me is Barry’s, although Bewley’s is also excellent. Taylor’s Yorkshire Tea, from Harrogate in, yes, Yorkshire, is also very delicious. I don’t like my tea too strong or “stewed”. At home, we drink Barry’s Gold which we buy it in our local supermarket – we used to be able to buy Bewley’s, but that was before the British Shop in the Sydney CBD closed down over a decade ago. With such a large Anglo-Celtic population here, there’s a strong nostalgia market for British food products DownUnder, whether it’s for tea, McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits, Marmite or Bassett’s Licorice Allsorts.

Eteaquette

Tea is served traditionally in a tea pot (and you must heat the pot first), and drank languidly, leisurely, and ideally with the morning newspaper – online these days- and with a plain biscuit which you might like to dunk in it. Milk rather than cream is how Poms and Paddies like it. Some prefer it without – “black tea”. With or without sugar. I like it not too milky , and never with cream – cream is for coffee, though personally, I don’t like that either. And never over-brew it! The Brits call that “the barely bloody drinkable”, “barely bloody…” for short. I’ve learned that trades people generally like it strong with one lump of sugar. And on the matter of the Irish, a wee drop of whisky in the tea is nice. We used to be given it when visiting our Irish relatives.

Tea without milk is called black tea. Some take a slice of lemon in it, which some purists call poncified, and others like sugar or honey. My wife prefers her morning tea black, in a Doctor Who telephone box tea pot,  and prefers Earl Grey and Russian Caravan. But I’m not into “fancy” teas like these – and the Chinese Lapsang Souchong smells and tastes like old shoes – it has actually been banned in Europe because lapsang is potentially carcinogenic if smoked for too long (I mean smoked over a pinewood fire and not rolled like a joint). But I do drink camomile tea when under the weather or need to cut down on caffeine, and mint tea on occasion, for the same reason. But these are never my first tea choice.

I prefer hot tea to water or coke after a hard slog on the property as it is very refreshing when the weather is hot. Don’t ask me how that works. But it is very popular in high summer in the Middle East. Hot tea is also comforting when it’s very cold. In fact, any time is right for a cup of tea. With that biscuit, preferably.

Russians like it black and well-brewed. It’s an old tradition (samovars and all that). Arabs like their tea black with sugar. Indians boil theirs’ with milk and sugar. They call it shai, which is not the chai that hippies and present day wellness advocates go for – and which I do not like at all. The Chinese have their own type of tea, weak, light and fragrant, as do the Japanese – who have developed elaborate ceremonies for serving it, and indeed people have committed ritual suicide when they have stuffed it up.

George Harrison and Pattie Boyd

Eteamology

We are all floating somewhere on a full tide of tea.
JB Priestley, English Journey, 1933.

Back in the day, when I was a lad, there was whole etymology around tea, There was the English tradition of High Tea, a posh afternoon “tea” (as in “teatime”) with pots of tea and little pastries and quarter-cut salad sandwiches on white bread. One would “take tea” at places like Harrods and Fortnum and Masons – many “posh” hotels here in Australia persist with the pretentious practice. Variations on the theme are “cream teas” with scones, strawberry jam and cream (on the scones, not in the tea!) and a more downmarket High Tea of bacon and egg, baked beans and chips (that’s potato“fries” to you), described on café menus as a “mixed grill” that I used to love on Boy Scout camping excursions and on Wednesday and Saturday evenings in university halls of residence.

When I was growing up, our evening meal was called “tea time” (“dinner” was called lunch). Hence the kiddies’ refrain “what’s for tea! Mom?”. “Heinz baked beans” was the refrain in The Who’s Sell Out album, and they featured on the cover. Decades, later, I love Heinz baked beans on toast, and I still call our evening meal “tea” which irritates my wife no end because she was bring up proper!

Roger Daltrey bathes in beans

By the way, tea should not be confused with a golf tee and draftsman’s T square, or with the phrase “teed off” as in “I’m getting quite annoyed with you!” – which is a polite way of saying “you’re beginning to get on my t##s”.

Teastory

Tea is regarded as a particularly English thing. In his celebrated wartime essay on Englishness, The Lion and the Unicorn, famed, left-wing author George Orwell placed the beverage near the top of those favourite things that Brits cleave to “when the dog bites, when the bee stings” and when Mister Hitler’s bombs and rockets rained down on British towns and cities – and you can read his instructions on how to best brew it below. During the Cold War, sixties, English folk revival luminary Leon Rosselson prophesied that when the Big One dropped, we’d “stand firm” and “duck down in our hidey holes and drink cups and cups of tea”. And when Britain was locked down for months and months during the worst days of Covid-19, and tens of thousands of people perished, folk recalled that old “Blitz spirit” and I wager sales and consumption of tea went through the roof. Orwell observed that it was a palliative pleasure shared by all social and economic classes, a national characteristic on a par with the “stiff upper lip”, “shoulders to the wheel” and “seeing it through”.

It’s not just an English thing. Irish folk regard a hot cup of tae as an important social custom, indeed, arguably as as important if not more so than the bottle, and is enjoyed at all hours amongst family and friends in greater volumes  than alcohol. It has traditionally been  a symbol of hospitality, camaraderie, and friendship, and not only is it a great way to cheer up and keep warm on a bleak and rainy day, but it brings people together too. This said, the worst cup of tea I have ever tasted – and I’ve been around the figurative tea bush many times – was actually in Ireland. In New Ross, County Wexford, actually, en route from my ancestral home of Enniscorthy to Waterford and the west coast. I reckon someone must have just squezz out a dishcloth into a cup and added milk.

Predictably, the British and Irish took their tea all over the world. Here in Australia, it has long been the most popular beverage. It was a tea manufacturer who came up with the first line of our most well-known song. In the early 20th century, a copy of the song was included in packets of the popular Billy Tea, as a promotional stunt. The tea manufacturers were concerned that the song ended on a pretty grim note, so the word “jolly” was added to the opening line. To liven things up a bit. Shocking, isn’t it? That one word changes the whole feel of the thing, elevating the swag man from an impoverished, homeless man, hounded to death by police, to a happy-go-lucky bush scamp. Yet the only reason the word is there is so the song would work better as an ad.


Songs have been written in praise of tea, most particularly the English song A Nice Cup of Tea, wrttien by a member of parliament and first performed in 1937 but made famous by Gracie Fields, England’s wartime ‘sweetheart”. A “nice cup of tea”, as we’ve noted, is a traditional panacea for stressful situations – it got Brits through two world wars, and will probably do the same in the next one.

Foreigners often make fun of the English for their fondness for a “cuppa”. The French cartoon strip Asterix, set in Roman Gaul, portrays the Britons as drinking cups of hot water with milk – because tea hadn’t been invented in Roman days.

But the Poms didn’t invent it – I believe that was the Chinese who worked.out that leaves can be not just tasty but also therapeutic – but the Brits’ fondness for that nice cup of tea was one of the reasons they decided to conquer India, and they managed to rule the place for over four hundred years by drinking gallons of it – but they nevertheless they still died of malaria, dysentery, alcoholism and mutiny by the score.

Tea helped Britannia rule the waves and most of the world, but Britain lost America on account of it. Americans reckon that is why they prefer coffee, but the famous Boston Tea Party was a bit more complicated than colonists dressed in red indian garb dumping crates of the stuff overboard.and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the contemporary American “Tea Party” Republicans and their MAGA heirs. But, the first tea bag was invented – by an American, a century or so ago, and this is now the most convenient and hence most popular way to “take tea” (a peculiarly English way to describe having a cuppa). Indeed, whenever we go on holiday, we take with us a swag of tea bags “just in case ..”

© Paul Hemphill 2022.  All rights reserved

For more yarns in In That Howling Infinite, see: Tall Tales, small stories, eulogies and epiphanies

Tea sellers, Ramallah, Palestine, in traditional Ottoman garb

George’s Nice Cup of Tea

Published on the 12th of January, 1946 by the Evening Standard. George Orwell lets us all know how to enjoy hot flavored water best.

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

  • First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
  • Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
  • Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
  • Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
  • Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
  • Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
  • Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
  • Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
  • Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
  • Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
  • Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

George’s nice cup of tea

And in conclusion, here is that song in full:

And that song … 

Some folks put much reliance
On politics and science
There’s only one hero for me
His praise we should be roaring
The man who thought of pouring
The first boiling water onto tea
I like a nice cup of tea in the morning
For to start the day you see
And at half past eleven
Well my idea of heaven
Is a nice cup of tea
I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s time for bed
There’s a lot to be said
For a nice cup of tea

You can talk about your science
And your airships in the sky
I can do without the wireless
And you’ll never see me fly
The public benefactor of the universe for me
Is the genius that thought of pouring water onto tea

I like a nice cup of tea in the morning
For to start the day you see
And when I get the breakfast in
Well my idea of sin
Is a fourth, or a fifth, cup of tea
I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s time for bed
There’s a lot to be said
For a nice cup of tea

They say it’s not nutritious
But still it is delicious
And that’s all that matters to me
It turns your meat to leather
But let’s all die together
The one drink in paradise is tea

I like a nice cup of tea
In the morning
For to start the day you see
And at half past eleven
Well my idea of heaven
Is a nice cup of tea
I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s time for bed
As I think I may have said
I’d like a nice cup of tea
You can talk about your liberties
They talk of women’s rights
I don’t want to make no speeches
Because the one that does is trite
And anyone can have my vote and chuck it in the sea
But golly there’ll be trouble if they try to touch me tea

I like a nice cup of tea with me dinner
And a nice cup of tea with me tea
And when it’s getting late
Almost anything can wait
For a nice cup of tea

© Paul Hemphill 2022 All rights reserved

The year that changed literature

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

Australian literary critic and cultural studies writer Peter Craven has been described as both a “literary hack” and “one of the most prolific, erudite and opinionated voices in Australian literary circles”. In 2004 he was awarded the Pascall Prize for Australian Critic of the Year. whatever subject he applies his keyboard to, be it for iconic poets and authors or literary contemplations on the legacies of Easter and Christmas, he turns out admirable pieces that are eclectic, erudite and empathetic. We have republished two of his articles in In That Howling Infinite ; The Magic of Dylan Thomas, and  Go ask Alice. I think she’ll know,  celebrating Alice in Wonderland’s 150th birthday.

Recently, he celebrated the centenary of the publication of three works he considers to be very near the summit of the western canon. 1922, he writes, was  the annus mirabilis, the miracle year – 1922, – the year  that modernist literature, by common consent the greatest writing the 20th century and its aftermath would witness, caused its greatest splash. 

James Joyce’s Ulysses celebrated its centenary on February 2 this year. In Craven’s opinion, it is ‘the greatest demonstration of what can be done to the English language in the name of fiction’. It was also the year of the death of Marcel Proust, the French author of what would become in English the 12-volume Remembrance of Things Past, and when his English translator began the great English translation of A la recherche du temps perdu (literally, In Search of Lost Time), which Craven considers one of the greatest modern works of fiction in any language.

And in October 1922,  English-American poet TS Eliot published The Waste Land, ‘the modernist poem that sounds like nothing on earth and that is in some ways the easiest entry point to the weirdnesses and wonders of modernism because it is short but easy to be seduced by the beauty of its music and the kaleidoscope of its imagery’.

As a teen I’d read Joyce’s’ short A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, attracted by its Irishness  – my parents were from the Emerald Isle – but I gave up on Finnegan’s Wake, although I could sing by heart the song that is said to have inspired Joyce to write it, as recorded by that grand old band The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. The sheer size of Ulysses rendered this literary mountain unassailable even though the controversy that swirled about increased its attractiveness to an adolescent contrarian.

But in a boarding house in Delhi at the end of my outward journey on the Hippie Trail, I casually picked up a paperback copy of Ulysses. And for the next two months, Leopold Bloom’s figurative odyssey became my own as I journeyed back to Britain.

That dog-eared, spine-creased paperback  visited Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey as I headed westwards through the Kyber Pass, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. I finished it at last in a boarding house in Sultanahmet in Istanbul, just across from Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque, and I dip into it to this day. As Craven writes: ‘The rule with the miracle works of 1922 is to listen to them if your eyes reel. Just as Ulysses will continue to unfold its mysteries if you put on your best stage Irish and force yourself to read aloud’. And that, for me, is the best and only way to appreciate its magic – although being of Irish parentage, I don’t need stage Irish. Small wonder that folk around the world celebrate “Bloomsday” by marathon readings.

As a self-indulgent teenage poet in Birmingham, I’d already been sucked into TS Elliot’s dark universe. In reading Rhapsody on a Windy Night, I believed that, for me  personally, I’d cracked the code of poetry. The Hollow Men has long served me as a political morality play: ‘Between the idea and  the reality,  between the motion and the act falls the Shadow”. And, as a longtime student of the Middle East, I still read The Journey of the Magi to ground my conflicting thoughts about this ever-intriguing part of the world.

As for The Waste Land, to use the language we used back then in that dear, dead decade, it was, well, ‘mind-blowing’, ‘far-out’, and ‘too much’ – and a ‘great trip’. Today, young folk would call it “awesome”. Back then, in bedsits, guitar in hand, I put cantos of it to music – unfinished songs that have never see the light of day.

Craven encapsulates it thus: ‘The Waste Land, which can be read aloud in an hour, is the great circus show of modernism. The collage of languages, the snippets of Dante, and all the many death had undone  … this is an Alice in Wonderland world at the edge of madness: dislocated, disturbed and with an extraordinary dramatic power’.

Who am I to blow against the wind?

Marcel Proust, I could never get into to. As the song goes, ‘I tried, oh my god I tried’, but it went on like wallpaper and was like watching paint dry. Life is too short now, and there is too much to read and too few days to fill, so that land will have to remain unexplored.

Again, Craven comes to my aid. He adores Proust, but acknowledges that he can be hard going: ‘Think of Camus’s remark, “The monotony of Melville, the monotony of the Old Testament, the terrible monotony of Proust.”  I love Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and for all its length and digression, I consider it one of the best novels ever. The title of this blog is actually taken from it. I regard The King James Bible as one of the most beautiful books ever. But I’ll  defer to Albert Camus’ summation of Marcel.

Craven, however, loves Proust. He wrote, in The Australian on December 9th 2023, in a review if a new translation of Swann’s Way: Remembrance of Things Past is one of the funniest novels ever written as well as one with an extraordinary intellectual architecture and it’s also true that as that expert on translation George Steiner said, no one can read it without feeling a frailty at the heart of their sexual being. It is one of the most dazzling works of fiction ever written which also has a sort of spellbinding maintenance of tone which is not so much monotony as its transcendence. And although it is grounded in personal experience everything is topsy-turvy in terms of its genesis”. But he pinpoints the seminal difference between two of the greatest authors of the Twentieth Century: “… everything in the book looks back. Proust’s Recherche is a hymn to the 19th century, where Joyce sucks up the salt and sweat of the 20th”.

For more in In That Howling Infinite on books and reading, see:  Better Read Than Dead.

How to read Ulysses in 5 easy steps (according to those who have read it):

1. Read it aloud and reread it.
2. Take your time (years, not months).
3. Start at chapter four.
4. Try to read it without trying to understand it on first go. Let go of the bits you don’t understand.
5. Skip the boring parts and go straight to the racy final chapter of Molly Bloom’s sexual musings (then, if not too shocked, you can go back to the masturbation, fisting and defecating chapters).

The year that changed literature

Peter Craven, The Australian, 25th February 2021
Irish writer James Joyce. Picture: SuppliedIrish writer James Joyce

They call it the annus mirabilis, the miracle year – 1922, a century ago now, was the year that modernist literature, by common consent the greatest writing the 20th century and its aftermath would witness, caused its greatest splash.

James Joyce’s Ulysses celebrated its centenary on February 2, and it is the greatest demonstration of what can be done to the English language in the name of fiction. And 1922 was the year Marcel Proust, the author of what would become in English the 12-volume Remembrance of Things Past, died and when his English translator CK Scott Moncrieff began the great English translation of A la recherche du temps perdu (literally, In Search of Lost Time) one of the greatest modern works of fiction in any language.

On top of this, in October 1922 TS Eliot published The Waste Land, the modernist poem that sounds like nothing on earth and that is in some ways the easiest entry point to the weirdnesses and wonders of modernism because it is short but easy to be seduced by the beauty of its music and the kaleidoscope of its imagery.

But let’s stick to the three anniversaries. Ulysses was published on Candlemas, which also happened to be Joyce’s 40th birthday.

It’s called Ulysses as a kind of clandestine joke on the classicism of the world because the hero, Leopold Bloom, is an Odysseus, a Ulysses figure who wanders around Dublin brooding with his own kind of wisdom, even though he knows his wife Molly is having it off with a character called Blazes Boylan. This saddens Bloom but it doesn’t stop the “cultured all round man”, as someone calls him, of acting not only with his own kindness but courage as he distracts himself and feels the depth of his sadness. He enjoys the sight of a girl exhibiting herself for his benefit on the beach, he goes to a funeral and he confronts a benighted patriot, known as the Citizen, the one-eyed Cyclops of this quasi-comical densely encyclopedic retelling of some meta-version of Homer’s Odyssey.

No one, of course, would have cottoned on to the fact Homer had anything to do with this were it not for the title and that Joyce allowed himself to collaborate with Stuart Gilbert (later to be the translator of Albert Camus) about all the obscure parallels. At some Paris party Joyce said to the young Vladimir Nabokov that it had all been “a terrible mistake” and that it was “an advertisement for the book”.

Poet and dramatist TS Eliot (1888-1965).Poet and dramatist TS Eliot (1888-1965).

He was a great leg-puller whichever way you looked at him. What calling the book Ulysses advertised was that this was an epical endeavour Joyce was engaged on that used the fullest possible resources of language in an intrinsically if ambiguously poetic way, but it had something to do with the idea of fidelity in a woman and with the idea of a son-figure.

When Bloom confronts that one-eyed Citizen, he speaks on behalf of love: “I mean the opposite of hatred.” Bloom is a deeply civilised man in his bumbling way, but the son figure he stumbles on – Telemachus to his Odysseus – is Stephen Dedalus, whom readers may have encountered before in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is a self-portrait on Joyce’s part of his younger self, “with a great future behind him”, and Stephen is as brilliant as the day is long. Stephen is acrobatically smart, flypapered in the glories of the language of the world. He is proud and quick, and what you cop from the get go is the sheer blinding power of a mind that is Homeric in the compositional sense: this is a talent, it’s insinuated, that might rival Homer and who at first glance is likely to be Greek to anyone who tries to follow him.

“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, sought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.” Stephen’s voice, like the other two major ones – Bloom and Molly – talks to it without any concession of making things easy for the reader, but if you hang on all the main drift of the action, the innuendo and humour and sudden bits of something poignant, will be nakedly clear. It’s a portrait of a city, among other things, and the action is confined to one day. There’s a Nighttown chapter where everything is nightmarish as Stephen gets more and more drunk and where he cries, “Nothung” like a latter-day Siegfried from Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Bloom, full of kindliness, takes him back to his home where Molly (who can be a seductive witch, is also a faithful wife in a fallen world) is in bed, and Bloom asks Stephen if he wants to stay the night.

“Was the proposal of asylum accepted?

“Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.”

This second last chapter of Ulysses is in question and answer form like a Catholic catechism, and perhaps in secular terms the voice it is couched in represents the spirit that personifies the feeling (love’s too big a word) between Bloom the father figure and Stephen the son. “What spectacle confronted them?” the wholly ghostly voice asks them. And the answer?’ “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

Marcel Proust.French novelist Marcel Proust.

There is an extraordinary grace in the stiltedness of this parody of a Q&A but everything in Ulysses works by principle of parody because the book is deeply comical and it constantly sends up ways in which words fail while also being intent on the well-worn ways in which common garden language is the only language we have to express the things in the heart.

And this is all turned on its head by the grandeur of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy because Molly is also the muse and she can say anything in the most uninhibited way. She can say anything as she mixes everything together. She thinks about sex and then about lions and says, “I imagine he’d have something to say for himself, an old lion would.” And she says, “With him never embracing me except sometimes the wrong end of me.”

The great Irish actor Siobhan McKenna recorded the last half-hour of Ulysses with Molly’s unpunctuated drowsy and erotic ramblings, and she makes the syntax clairvoyantly clear and it remains far and away the finest introduction to Ulysses. A hundred years after its first publication the great climactic “Yes” remains breathtaking. “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

The rule with the miracle works of 1922 is to listen to them if your eyes reel. Just as Ulysses will continue to unfold its mysteries if you put on your best stage Irish and force yourself to read aloud, so Proust with his extraordinary long sentences (all those jewel-laden subordinate clauses) can sometimes be easier to read aloud than for the eye to comprehend. Among Proust performances the Ralph Richardson reading of Swann in Love is the parallel miracle to McKenna’s Molly Bloom.

But when Proust died in 1922 having left behind a completed (though not fully revised) text of the great work he’d changed fiction forever. “For a long time I used to go to bed early” is the first sentence of it and before we know where we are we are brought up close, with the greatest intimacy, to this exquisite sook of a child who is obsessed with being kissed goodnight by his mother and who as an adult narrator sees a lost past rising up for him simply because of the taste of that madeleine and that cup of tea.

Proust is the most essayistic but also the most lyrical of novelists and you can see why William Emp­son, one of the founders of modern criticism, could say his masterwork sometimes reads like criticism of genius of a lost masterpiece because part of the clairvoyant aspect of Proust is to make the interpretative unfolding part of the narrative drive of a book that can seem to make the earth stand still. Think of Camus’s remark, “The monotony of Melville, the monotony of the Old Testament, the terrible monotony of Proust.”

But the terrible monotony of Proust can be a chimera, an illusion. When you try to find it in any individual passage it fades away. The Proustian effect is a monumental thing created out of the book’s cumulative power.

A statue of poet and author James Joyce in downtown Dublin.A statue of poet and author James Joyce in downtown Dublin.

Yes, it’s a quest for time lost. Yes, it narrates a hero’s infatuation with the Guermantes aristocrats – no one has ever captured the besotted fascination with mindless glamour so effectively. Yes, it is also one of the greatest works to depict the power and enfeeblement of helpless, blind obsessive passion. Hence George Steiner saying, “No one could read Proust without feeling a frailty at the heart of their sexual being.”

At the same time, to read A la recherche du temps perdu is to feel you’ve experienced something like the totality of what the novel as an art form can express and represent, the novelistic power of a created world that is also blindingly and absolutely compellingly a recapitulated world.

And what a world. There’s the gay girl who spits on her dead father’s photo. There’s the fact he’s actually a great composer. There’s that extraordinary couple of lovers of the artistic, Madame and Monsieur Verdurin, and she is the greatest portrait of a vulgarian in history. There’s Gilberte with whom the hero – occasionally called Marcel – loves to wrestle. There’s his grandmother, a woman of absolute sincerity and culture and depth of love. There’s Albertine, who’s no better than she should be but can look like the abiding memory of everything. And then there’s the tremendous figure of the Baron de Charlus, gay and growling, an immense comic creation, black and brilliant and unforgettable.

Proust has a sustained treatment of the Dreyfus case that rocked Paris just as in Time Regained the characters are shadowed by the Great War. There is no greater memory of life than Proust. It falls on the reader like a revelation of what? The power of art, the power of life.

The Waste Land, which can be read aloud in an hour, is the great circus show of modernism. The collage of languages, the snippets of Dante, and all the many death had undone, the music of the Rhinemaidens, the cockney speech and the terrible dialogue of the woman who is mentally distressed and the man answering with what might be dispassionate hatred from inside his head. All that summoning up of a world where the gestures of lust are unreproved and undesired and then the kind of word salad where the French poem about the prince in the ruined tower blends with the injunctions of classical Indian precept and right at the end the repeated “shantih” is a token of peace or music or nothing.

But this is an Alice in Wonderland world at the edge of madness: dislocated, disturbed and with an extraordinary dramatic power.

If you don’t know the masterpieces of the annus mirabilis or need to revisit them, the centenary of 1922 is a good excuse

O’Donnell Abú – the Red Earl and history in a song

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

There is history in old songs, and particularly in the songs that tell the story of a nation’s resistance to invasion and occupation. Ireland’s long and troubled relationship with its powerful neighbour across the water has inspired a compendium of such songs of rebellion.

One of my favourites, Let Erin Remember, encapsulates it: “

On Lough Neagh’s banks as the fisherman strays
In the clear cold eve declining
He sees the round towers of other days
In the waters ‘neath him shining
Thus shall memory often in dreams sublime
Catch a glimpse of the days that are over
Thus sighing, look through the waves of time
For the long-faded glories they cover

In That Howling Infinite has published two essays about old Irish songs and their colourful history, Mo Ghile Mear and The Boys of Wexford. What follows is a song contemporary  to these in composition, but takes us back a century and a half to Ireland’s struggle against the Tudor crown in the late sixteenth century.

O’Donnell Abú (Ó Domhnaill Abú) is a traditional Irish song. Its lyrics were written by Michael Joseph McCann, a Fenian, in 1843. It tells of the Gaelic lord Red Hugh O’Donnell who ruled Tyrconnell (present day County Donegal) in the late sixteenth century first with the approval of the Crown authorities in Dublin and later in rebellion against them during Tyrone’s Rebellion.

Hugh Rua O’Donnell (Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill), also known as Red Hugh O’Donnell (30 October 1572 – 10 September 1602), was a sixteenth-century Irish nobleman who, with his father-in-law Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone, led an alliance of Irish clans in the Nine Years’ War against the English government in Ireland. He led an Irish army to victory in the Battle of Curlew Pass, but after defeat in the Siege of Kinsale, he travelled to Spain to in an unsuccessful effort to obtain support from King Philip III. He never returned to Ireland and he died in Spain.

There is no extant portrait or visual representation of Red Hugh though a contemporary suggested that he was “above middle height, strong, handsome, well built”. An idealised image of Red Hugh is this post’s featured image. Romantics picture the youthful Red Hugh as fiery, headstrong, quick-witted, passionate, committed to Catholicism, and to the preservation of the values, language, and culture of the Gaelic world into which he had been born and reared. Above all, he is determined to rid Ireland of its English overlords.

Though limited and often biased against him, extant historical records largely validate this portrayal. They also recapture the complexities of Red Hugh’s highly militarized world, where local lords raided for cattle and reduced neighbouring lords to submission, and show Red Hugh to be a wily negotiator, an effective and pragmatic power broker, and a brave soldier.

Hugh Rua O’Donnell
Hugh Rua O’Donnell
The Flight of Red Hugh

The title refers to the Gaelic war cry of “Abú,” “To victory,” which followed a commander’s name, and is the rallying cry for the O’Donnell clan, called to assemble at a location on the banks of the River Erne in Donegal. The Bonnaught and Gallowglass were Irish and Scots mercenaries employed by O’Donnell to guard the mountain passes. They were now summoned to join the rest of O’Donnell’s forces, who await the arrival of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and the Borderers who protect his lands.

Stylistically O’Donnell Abú draws on the romantic nationalism of the mid-nineteenth century, similar to those of Michael McCann’s contemporary Young Ireland nationalist Thomas Davis. who composed a number of songs, including The West’s Asleep“, A Nation Once Again“, and the Lament for Owen Roe O’Neill  set to an 16th Centryu compoition bt celebrated harpist  

The song’s martial melody is proud and energetic, and its descriptive imagery is striking. You can almost visualize the war wolf and the eagle, the fires of the marauders, and the serried ranks of horsemen and foot soldiers in their chain mail advancing to avenge “Erin” with trumpets and war cries. To modern ears, the neo-Gothic romanticism of the lyrics and the aggressiveness of the melody may come across as jingoistic and over the top, but passionate nationalist McCann was probably endeavouring to emulate the bards of old. A stirring rendering of the song follows in a spirited live performance by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. This world famous folk group was an especial favourite of mine back in my teenage and folkie days.

Proudly the note of the trumpet is sounding;
Loudly the war cries arise on the gale;
Fleetly the steed by Lough Swilly is bounding,
To join the thick squadrons on Saimear‘s green vale.
On, ev’ry mountaineer, strangers to flight or fear,
Rush to the standard of dauntless Red Hugh.
Bonnaught and Gallowglass, throng from each mountain pass.
On for old Erin, “O’Donnell Abú!”

Princely O’Neill to our aid is advancing
With many a chieftain and warrior clan.
A thousand proud steeds in his vanguard are prancing
‘Neath the borderers brave from the Banks of the Bann:
Many a heart shall quail under its coat of mail.
Deeply the merciless foeman shall rue
When on his ears shall ring, borne on the breeze’s wing,
Tír Chonaill‘s dread war-cry, “O’Donnell Abú!”

Wildly o’er Desmond the war-wolf is howling;
Fearless the eagle sweeps over the plain;
The fox in the streets of the city is prowling–
All who would scare them are banished or slain!
Grasp ev’ry stalwart hand
Hackbut and battle brand–
Pay them all back the debt so long due;
Norris and Clifford well can of Tirconnell tell;
Onward to glory–“O’Donnell abú!”

Sacred the cause that Clan Connell’s defending–
The altars we kneel at and homes of our sires;
Ruthless the ruin the foe is extending–
Midnight is red with the plunderer’s fires.
On with O’Donnell then, fight the old fight again,
Sons of Tirconnell, all valiant and true:
Make the proud  Saxon feel Erin’s avenging steel!
Strike for your country! “O’Donnell Abú!’

The hyperlinks in the song link specific names to their Wikipedia references, but here is a brief glossary:

Bonnaught is type of billeting or a billeted soldier. From Irish buannacht, billeting or billeting tax. A gallowglass (from gallóglach) was a Scottish Gaelic mercenary soldier in Ireland between mid 13th and late 16th centuries. A hackbut is a harquebuss or arquebus, the first long-arm gun fired from the shoulder. John Norris and Conyers Clifford were English commanders who fought O’Donnel and O’Neill, whilst Tír Chonaill, a kingdom of Gaelic Ireland, associated geographically with present-day County Donegal the home of the the Ó Domhnaill clan. It was the location of fighting during the Nine Years’ War

The Red Earl and the Dark Daughter

“It is hard to think, looking at the peaceful countryside of modern Donegal, “writes Ciaran Conliffe in an excellent post on his Scribbler blog, “that in days gone by men fought, bled and died on these hills. But the history of Ireland, up until relatively recently, was one of almost constant strife”. So begins his enthralling tale of Red Hugh and his feisty mother Iníon Dubh. Read it HERE

An impassioned ballad, entitled in the original Roisin Duh (or The Black Little Rose), was written in the reign of Elizabeth by one of the poets of Red Hugh’s entourage, and translated by nationalist mid-19th Century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. It is an allegorical address by Hugh to Ireland, represented in this and many other Irish songs as a beautiful woman, of his love and his struggles for her, and of his resolve to raise her again to the glorious position she held as a nation before the irruption of the Saxon and Norman spoilers – for that’s how the romantic poets saw it: “Sons of Tirconnell, all valiant and true: make the proud  Saxon feel Erin’s avenging steel! Strike for your country! “O’Donnell Abú!'”

Donegal, Norther Ireland

The Red Hand

Red Hugh’s soldiers had their war cry with O’Donnell Abú. That of the O’Neill clan, led in O’Donnell’s ally Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone, was Lámh Dhearg Abú! – The Red Hand to Victory!

The Red Hand symbol and the war cry are believed to have been used by the O’Neills during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) against English rule in Ireland, A contemporary English writer observed: “The Ancient Red Hand of Ulster, the bloody Red Hand, a terrible cognizance! And in allusion to that terrible cognizance—the battle cry of Lámh Dhearg Abú!”

The motif of the Red Hand is a common one in Irish and particularly Ulster folklore. It originated in in Gaelic culture and, although its origin and meaning are unknown, it is believed to date back to pre-Christian times. There is a theory that the ancient Phoenicians may have brought the symbol to Ireland. able seamen and adventurous traders that they were, the Phoenicians of the Levant did indeed venture as far as what are now the British Isles.

A story is also told that the Red Hand symbol originated in a legendary ancestor who put his bloodstained hand on a banner after victory in battle. Bards and balladeers argue its origins, harking back to real and legendary heroes and kings, and commonly relating to shedding the blood of enemies. It was adopted by the O’Neills around 1335. Whilst demonstrating their ancient lineage, they may also may have regarded it as signifying divine assistance and strength.

The Red Hand is present in the arms of a number of Ulster’s counties, such as Antrim, Cavan, Londonderry, Monaghan and Tyrone. Itt also appears in the Ulster Banner, and is used by many other official and non-official organisations throughout the province. It can be regarded as one of the very few cross-community symbols used in Northern Ireland (which makes up six of Ulster’s nine counties) crossing the sectarian political divide.

For other historical posts in In That Howling Infinite, see: Foggy Ruins o Time – from history’s pages 

Let Erin Remember

Tradional

Let Erin remember the days of old
Ere her faithless sons betrayed her
When Malachy wore the collar of gold
That he won from the proud invader
When her kings with standards of green unfurled
Led the Red Branch Knights to danger
Ere the emerald gem of the Western World
Was set in the crown of a stranger

On Lough Neagh’s banks as the fisherman strays
In the clear cold eve declining
He sees the round towers of other days
In the waters ‘neath him shining
Thus shall memory often in dreams sublime
Catch a glimpse of the days that are over
Thus sighing, look through the waves of time
For the long-faded glories they cover

Dark Rosaleen

James Clarence Mangan

O my dark Rosaleen,
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green,
They march along the deep.
There’s wine from the royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green;
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!

Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
Shall give you health, and help, and hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!

Over hills, and thro’ dales,
Have I roam’d for your sake;
All yesterday I sail’d with sails
On river and on lake.
The Erne, at its highest flood,
I dash’d across unseen,
For there was lightning in my blood,
My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!
O, there was lightning in my blood,
Red lighten’d thro’ my blood.
My Dark Rosaleen!

All day long, in unrest,
To and fro, do I move.
The very soul within my breast
Is wasted for you, love!
The heart in my bosom faints
To think of you, my Queen,
My life of life, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!
To hear your sweet and sad complaints,
My life, my love, my saint of saints,
My Dark Rosaleen!
Woe and pain, pain and woe,
Are my lot, night and noon,
To see your bright face clouded so,
Like to the mournful moon.
But yet will I rear your throne
Again in golden sheen;
‘Tis you shall reign, shall reign alone,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
‘Tis you shall have the golden throne,
‘Tis you shall reign, and reign alone,

Over dews, over sands,
Will I fly, for your weal:
Your holy delicate white hands
Shall girdle me with steel.
At home, in your emerald bowers,
From morning’s dawn till e’en,
You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
You’ll think of me through daylight hours
My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,
My Dark Rosaleen!

I could scale the blue air,
I could plough the high hills,
Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer,
To heal your many ills!
And one beamy smile from you
Would float like light between
My toils and me, my own, my true,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My fond Rosaleen!
Would give me life and soul anew,
My Dark Rosaleen!

O, the Erne shall run red,
With redundance of blood,
The earth shall rock beneath our tread,
And flames wrap hill and wood,
And gun-peal and slogan-cry
Wake many a glen serene,
Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!
The Judgement Hour must first be nigh,
Ere you can fade, ere you can die,
My Dark Rosaleen!

That was that was year that was – It’s like déjà vu all over again

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

The best thing one can say about 2021 is that it is not 2020.  i guess we’ll all be glad when twenty one is done.

There were no bushfires to entertain us like last year, but the pandemic hung like a dark cloud over our everyday lives. In this, the second year of the pandemic, economies continue to struggle, livelihoods continue threatened or destroyed, many borders remain closed, and cities, towns and homes  continue to be locked-down and isolated, and restrictions and precautions are ever-present.

There’s a sense that time has stood still, as if nothing much has really happened since the pandemic struck and that we’ve been treading water, awaiting wake if not rescue, them at least, release.

Things have changed, of course. The affairs of gods and men carry on above it all. But in our personal lives, there have been changes too – our behaviour and the nature of our interactions with others and the outside world, have indeed changed utterly. And our outlook on life, the universe and everything has changed too.

Most of all, we’re all feeling tired. Burnt out. Disengaged. Cynical.

I noticed it during the recent local government election when otherwise astute and active folk could not summon up the energy and interest to involve themselves with the issues at stake. The elections had been cancelled twice due to COVID19, and many had just lost interest. “When is the election again?” they’d ask apathetically.

A year ago almost to the day, we wrote in our our review of 2020, A year of living dangerously: “Time during 2020 has been elastic and confused. On 21st December, The Guardian asked readers to sum up how they felt about 2020 in one word – and likewise their feelings for 2021. As of Xmas Eve, the standout words were respectively (a) shit, fucked and challenging and (b) hopeful and better. My poll responses were “fascinating” and “unpredictable”.

And a year hence, I would give much  the same response. Compared to other folk here in Australia and overseas, we’ve had a “good” Covid – if that indeed is the most appropriate descriptor. We don’t have to earn a living and we live on a beautiful rural acreage that is totally stand-alone and off-grid – there couldn’t be a more congenial spot to self-isolate. But we’d love to be able to escape the padded cell – to exit the Australian bubble for a while, to visit friends and relatives in England and to reconnect with the history and geography that we love in the world outside. Perhaps in 2022, we’ll have that opportunity.

The title of this review is borrowed from the famous American baseball coach Yogi Berra. As we leave 2021, here’s another:

“Predictions are always very hard, especially when they’re about the future”

She’s a Rainbow
Paradise Park Fernmount

The World in review

It was for us personally the saddest of years. Our close friend, neighbour and forest warrior, Annette, departed our planet mid-year after what seemed like short, aggressive illness – although in retrospect, we know that it was a slow train coming for a long while. I wrote Farewell to a Tarkeeth Tiger in tribute to her. And in September, our beautiful, talented, wise friend and soul sister Krishna Sundari.

As for the world at large, COVID19 continues to dominate the news, with more contagious variants popping up all over the place lake a game of “whack a mole”. As does the ongoing struggle to reach global consensus on the need to confront climate change. Tackling both looks a little like the story of Sisyphus, the Greek King of old who was condemned by Zeus to spend eternity rolling a huge boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down as soon as he reached the top.

The year kicked off to a fine start with the January 6th Insurrection in Washington DC as Donald Trump endeavoured to cling on to office by inciting his supporters and sundry militias to storm the Capitol to stop the count of electoral votes that would cede the presidency to Joe Biden. Though he failed, and was impeached

for a second time, and the Biden administration sought to calm America’s troubled waters, the Orange One haunts The US’ fractious and paralyzed politics and the prospect of a second Trump term is not beyond imagination.

Trump’s bestie, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving Prime’s minister, also got the push in the wake of the third election in just over a year. The unique coalition that emerged from torturous negotiations spanned the political, social and religious spectrum – left and right, secular and orthodox, Arab and Jew, and promised little more than maintaining the unsatisfactory status quo, that pertaining to the occupation and the settlements, illegal migrants, and the disproportionate influence the Haredim, none of which are morally, politically, socially or economically sustainable.

China under would-be emperor Xi Jinping continues to aggressively build its military and economic power, determined to take its rightful and long overdue place at the top of the geopolitical ladder, causing consternation among its neighbours and also other powers and fears of war in our time. With Xinjiang’s Uighurs and Hong Kong firmly under its autocratic boot, it continues to expand its nautical footprint in the South China Sea and signals loudly that Taiwan’s days as a liberal democracy are numbered. Its belligerency is increasingly meeting blow-back as other nations react in various ways to what they perceive as clear and present danger. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

Russia under would-be czar Vladimir Putin continues to aggressively rebuild its military power and influence, determined to revive the glory days of the defunct Soviet Union, whist channeling memories of its former imperial glory. Whilst in no way as powerful as China, it is taking advantage of the the world’s preoccupation with the ascendancy of the Celestial Kingdom Redux to reassert its influence in its own backyard – including the veiled threat to reconquer Ukraine – and also in the world, particularly in Syria and through the use of shadowy proxies and mercenaries, in Africa. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

Turkey under would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to aggressively pull its self away from the west and towards some concept of a leadership role in the Muslim world.Its economy, meanwhile, is in free-fall, with unemployment and food prices rising and the lira tanking. At the heart of the problem is Erdogan’s attempt to take a sophisticated globalized economy and run it as an emirate does, replacing state institutions with personalized rule. You cannot run a sophisticated, modern economy on conspiracy theories and doctrines from the 7th century. But President Erdogan, having rigged the electoral system and cornered the religious and nationalist vote, and with no rivals in sight, isn’t gong anywhere soon.

America finally ended its “endless war” in Afghanistan, in a chaotic, deadly scramble that left that country’s forever unfortunate people in the hands of a resurgent and apparently unreformed and unrepentant Taliban. It’s over a 100 days since the last evacuation plane took off in scenes of chaos and misery, leaving behind thousands of employees and others at risk of retribution, and the new regime has yet to establish a working government. Meanwhile professionals, human rights workers, officials of the former regime, members if the old government’s security forces, and especially women and girls wait, many in hiding, for the worst. Meanwhile, winter is coming and the country is broke and on the brink of of starvation. A major humanitarian crisis is imminent. What happens next, everybody does indeed know. As St. Leonard said, “We have seen the future and it’s murder!”

Whilst the war in Afghanistan ended, there are still plenty to go around for the weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, the mercenaries and the proxies. The year began well for Azerbaijan when it emerged victorious from a vicious 44 day drone and missile war against Armenia for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave that saw Turkish and Syrian proxies engaged each side of the conflict. An old War was rekindled in Ethiopia as a Nobel Peace Prize winner sent his troops to rake pillage and conquer a fractious province which turned the tables and is now poses to seize his capital. Hubris extremis? Meanwhile, war went on in the usual places – Syria, Libya, Yemen, Mali, the Central African Republic, and places too obscure to mention.

Meanwhile, back home DownUnder, the story that dominated political news – apart from COVID19 and the shmozzle of the vaccine roll-out, was the delinquent behaviour of politicians and their staffers in Parliament House – commentators have likened the goings-on in there to a school yard or frat house, and more bluntly, to a Roman orgy, with tales of bullying and sexual harassment, drunken parties, mutual masturbation sessions, and even rape. The prime minister huffed and puffed and asked his wife how he should deal with the situation; commissions of inquiries were set up; and reports handed down. The motto is “we must do better – and we shall!” But as with most things these days, nobody believes what politicians say anymore.

And not just here in Australia, but all over the world. Trust is in short supply, and indeed, people’s faith in democratic traditions and processes is shaking as populism and a taste for autocracy spreads like … well, a coronavirus. The US was recently named a “backsliding democracy” by a Swedish based think-tank, an assessment based on the attempted Capitol coup and restrictions on voting rights in Red states. In the bizarro conspiracy universe, American right-wing commentators and rabble-rousers are urging their freedom-loving myrmidons to rescue Australia from totalitarianism. Apparently we have established covid concentration camps and are forcible vaccinating indigenous people.

In early December, US President Joe Biden held a summit for democracy, and yet his administration are still determined to bring Julian Assange to trial, a case that, if it succeeds, will limit freedom of speech. The conduct of the trial also poses a threat to the US’s reputation because it could refocus attention on the ugly incidents during the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were exposed by WikiLeaks. There is a strong humanitarian and pragmatic case to look for a way out of Assange’s Kafkaesque nightmare, but the bastions of freedom, America, Britain and Australia show no interest in doing so notwithstanding the harm it does to their democratic credentials.

I chose these invigorating times to stand as a Labor candidate for Bellingen Shire Council in those elections I referred to at the beginning of this review. What we thought would be a short, sharp two month campaign extended to an exhausting five month slog as the Delta variant necessitated delaying the elections for a second time.

Few in the Shire can remember the last time Labor candidate stood for council, so we began with a very low public recognition, but we ran a good, honest campaign and raised our profile.

But alas, we were outgunned, outspent and outnumbered by the well-funded, professionally organised chamber of commerce independents coordinated, advised and directed by the National Party, who played to a disengaged and cynical electorate by gas-lighting us with the claim that we were “infiltrators” from mainstream political parties, bankrolled by big party money, and dictated to by Macquarie Street (the NSW Parliament), and thence, with no entitlement to represent the Shire – even though we were long-standing residents well-known in the community. Progressives on council are now but two against five, and the Nationals have reclaimed the Shire for business, development and traditional values. Back to the future. There will be buyer’s remorse for many ho voted for them without checking their credentials. And meanwhile, I’m quite happy not to have to sit in the council chamber with a bunch of neo-Thatcherites.

And finally, on a bright note, in the arts world, there was Taylor Swift. Fresh from her Grammy award for the sublime Folklore, she released her re-recorded version of her copyright-purloined album Red. How can anyone improve on the fabulous original?  Swift does! It’s brighter, shinier, sharper, bigger, beatier and bouncier (I stole the last alliterations from the Who album of yonks ago), and her mature voice is a pleasure. Released just over nine years ago, when she was 22, it feels as fresh today, and for all the gossip and innuendo that surrounded its conception and reception and endure to this day, even in the hallowed habitats of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone (the Economist hasn’t weighed in yet), I find it refreshing and encouraging to listen to an artist so articulate and audacious, precocious and prodigious for one so young. Tay Tay also delivered one of the pop culture moments of the year, beguiling us all with the adventures of her old scarf. It out that not only did actor Jake Gyllenhall take her innocence, but he nicked her scarf too, and for one weekend in November all the internet cared about was its whereabouts. Safe to say it was a bad 48 hours to be Gyllenhaal.

Our year in review …

True to its mission statement, In That Howling Infinite reflected the events of the year with an eclectic collection. But, curiously, deliberately or by mere circumstance, we published nothing about the plague that had dominated our lives.

In a year when the treatment of women dominated the Australian news, and Grace Tame and Brittany Hughes became household names, we look at the status of women and girls in less fortunate parts of the world. Facing the Music – no dance parties in Palestine tells the story of a young Palestinian DJ and her confrontation with social conservatism and religious orthodoxy. In Educate a girl and you educate a community – exclude her and you impoverish it, we discus how countries who exclude women from political, social and economic life are the worse for it.

Schoolchildren in Gaza

 

Inevitably, a decade on, we revisit the events in Egypt in January and February of 2011: Sawt al Huriya (The Voice of Freedom) – remembering the Arab Spring. Tangled 2 – Libya’s bloody circus rolls on examines the torturous dynamics of one of the many conflicts that emerged from the Arab Spring, whilst the humiliating and chaotic end of America’s “endless war” in Afghanistan in Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow – coda in Kabul. One of the many consequences of the unravelling of the Middle East was the wave of refugees that sept into Europe. Ghayath al Madhoun – the agony of an exiled poet looks as the life and work of a Syrian-Palestinian poet now living in Sweden, whilst Exit West – a hejira of hope reviews a work magical realism that charts the refugees’ journey.

As always, this blog has a strong history focus. I spent a lot of time conversing with our friend and forest neighbours, acclaimed photographer Tim Page about his adventures in Indochina during the Vietnam War. I’d edited his unpublished autobiography, and written a forward to open it. It ended up in Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey. This was accompanied by a story told by Ken Burns in his excellent documentary The Vietnam War about a young man who went to war and did not return: The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy. Part memoir, part memory lane, i recall the story of my own youthful travels in Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days

A Celtic heartbeat inspired Over the Sea to Skye, the story of the famous folk song and  of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald, whilst a continuing interest in The Middle East saw the completion of a log-standing piece, a contemplation on the Crusade: Al Tarikh al Salabin – the Crusader’s Trail. Our Israeli friend and guide Shmuel Browns explored the Anzac Trail in the Negev Desert and discovered a forgotten battle that had a direct connection to our own neighbourhood and the ever-evolving story of Chris Fell of Twin Pines: Tel al Sabi’ – Tarkeeth’s Anzac Story.

The Crusades

 

Our own Kalang River was the subject of the latest in the Small Stories series, Crossing the South Arm – how that wide river was first spanned back in the day. On Christmas Eve last year, a koala took up residence on our property and stayed for several weeks – the only koala we have actually seen in forty years (we do hear them often). This led to a historical and contemporary commentary on the parlous predicament of our much-loved marsupial: The Agony and Extinction of Blinky Bill. Last year, we exposed the alarming reality that Tarkeeth Forest wood was being chipped and used to generate electricity. Our earlier The Bonfire of the Insanities- the Biomass Greenwash was followed by The Bonfire of the Insanities 2 – the EU’s Biomass Dilemma.

And finally to poetry and song. In  Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land – a poet’s memorial to a forgotten crime, we looked at “the great Australian silence – what historian Henry Reynolds called “this whispering in the bottom of our hearts” in the context of a famous poem by Judith Wright and the almost forgotten secrets of our own hinterland here on the “holiday coast”. On a brighter note, we revisit the history and legacy of Banjo  Paterson’s iconic poem Waltzing Matilda with Banjo’s not to jolly swagman – Australia’s could’ve been anthem.

In Rhiannon the Revelator – in the dark times, will there be singing?, we present an uplifting song of defiance from American folk and roots diva Rhiannon Giddens. And finally, I was delighted to discover an amazing song by Bob Dylan that I’d never heard before even though it was some four decades old: Cross the Green Mountain – Bob Dylan’s Americana.

Goodbye the old year – welcome the next!

Dark Girl In The Ring
Kingston, Jamaica 1983

Read  reviews of previous years: 2020; 2019, 2018; 2017; 2016; 2015

 

That was the year that was – the road to nowhere

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Well we know where we’re going
But we don’t know where we’ve been
And we know what we’re knowing
But we can’t say what we’ve seen
And we’re not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
The Talking Heads

To borrow from Boz, these were the worst of times, these were the strangest of times. So disillusioned were we with our politics and our politicians, so dispirited by the sad state of the plant, so fissured and fractured as a society, with our intractable culture wars, we retreated into own private Idahos, pulled up the drawbridge and settled in with our iPads and iPhones and our Foxtel with the vino collapso and watched all the fun of the fair.

The mellifluous but perennially entertaining Donald Trump had a bad year, and a resolute Theresa May likewise. Confounding critics, she endeavours to persevere as she steers her foundering shipm of State towards Brexit and China’s Uighur Muslims. Barbaric Da’ish had a bad year (which was rather a good thing) , as did the unfortunate Rohinga of Myanmar, and the long-suffering people of Gaza.. Resilient Bashar Assad had a good year, with a little help from his Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah friends, but the wars of the Ottoman succession grind on. Vladimir Putin and the fat conductor Kim Jong Un had an excellent year, courtesy of POTUS. Angela Merkel lost her sparkle but royal Markle sparkled, and the luminous Taylor Swift, all legs and lipstick, emerged from her apolitical closet to swing the vote against the Donald in the US midterms. Her trim gluteus maximus starredin a court case that typified a year that saw women stand up strongly against years of aberrant male behaviour.

The Australian parliament devolved into a circus of tantrums and turncoats as the Liberal and National coalition devoured its own in a year book-ended by smutty sexual scandals, whilst canny Labor kept its powder dry for what bodes to be an whopping electoral victory in 2019. We wished that our rulers and representatives would stop behaving like children and start running the country and governing it for all of us.and then the children walked out of school en mass and told us that when they grew up they’d do a better job. The circus clowns huffed and puffed and denigrated the young ones – which only served to embarrass them more for their paucity of vision and partisan division.

And so, to the year in review:

During what was to many observers a dispiriting year of division and destruction, In That Howling Infinite maintained its  watch  with an eclectic mix of commentary, commemoration, culture and comedy. It was a big year – some forty posts in all. So many indeed that decided to reposted my favourite top five – those that I most enjoyed writing – on In That Howling Infinite’s Facebook page. See these at the conclusion of this review.

In a December post, Free Speech, One Each, we expressed disappointment with the ignorance, naivety, and self-absorption of electorates, left and right: their lack of historical knowledge and of curiosity, an unhealthy and self-defeating habit of accepting facts, narratives and theories based upon their preconceptions and prejudices. Nowadays, it often seems as if the reasonable middle has been excised from political discourse, drained out by the shrill voices of the extremes with their identity politics, virtue signalling, and vested interests. Social media has exacerbated the situation as folk lock themselves into their own echo chambers, listening only to those with whom they agree, ignoring or even avoiding contrary opinions and perspectives. It is a self-defeating, delusional, zero-sum form of groupthink that erodes trust and goodwill and prevents the development of consensus and cooperation. Meanwhile, opportunistic politicians and commentators build their constituencies by appealing to the particularistic, even atavistic wants and fears of their followers. Too often this reduces things down to atavistic lowest common denominators. They literally seize the low moral ground. Peoples problems and fears are real enough, and do need to be solved or allayed, but too often they are gulled, manipulated and recruited by modern-day snake-oil salesmen and show-tent shysters.

It was with this in mind that we caste a weary and cynical eye over Australian politics and society, particularly the ongoing history and culture wars, beginning in January with the self-explanatory We’ve Got The Australia Day Blues , and continuing with Conservatism in Crisis, Milo Downunder, an alt-right love story, and the ongoing angst about the Ramsay Centre and its proposed university course on western civilization. Never in recent memory have so many words been printed about so little – at least not until the right’s last holy war. And so, there is The long, dark teatime of The Australian’s soul and its sequel The Oz’s lonely crusade. By year’s end, both sides appear to have run out of puff and the course will most likely end up in small regional campuses rather than the prestigious halls of Sydney and Melbourne.

Southern Discomfort.

The year’s leitmotif was the ongoing fiftieth anniversary of 1968, a tumultuous year for the world, and a formative one for myself personally. Stories of the events of that year are interspersed my own recollections – what I was doing at at the time, and what was going through my youthful head.  In Encounters with Enoch, I revisit English politician Enoch Powell’s controversial ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Then it’s Springtime in Paris as I recall les Évènements de Mai. And thence to Prague and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia with Tanks for the memory – how Brezhnev changed my life. Finally, there was the year in review with Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited.

2018 was also the centenary of the armistice that ended The Great War. November 1918 – the counterfeit peace discussed how for many countries and peoples in Europe and beyond, the conflict and the bloodshed continued. We also shared a poignant, fitting tribute by Gerry Condon  to all the “doomed youth” of all wars with Dulce et ducorem est – the death of war poet Wilfred Owen

There were other anniversaries. The Wild Wood and the Wide World revisited Kenneth Grahame’s riverbank pastorale The Wind in the Willows 110 years after it’s publication. Ghosts of the Gulag, which followed on from an earlier discussion of film The Death of Stalin released earlier in the year, looked at the contribution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the fiftieth anniversary of The Gulag Archipelago. The Russian theme continued with Whoar! And Peace – a light look at the BBC’s recent racey adaptation of Tolstoy’s celebrated house-brick.

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of John Steinbeck inspired The last rains came gently – Steinbeck’s dustbowl Blues. This featured the complete first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, describing the unfolding of an environmental disaster. Two other posts also covered ecological bad news stories: The return of the forest wars in Australia, and Losing Earth – the decade we almost stopped climate change.

As always, the politics and people of the Middle East feature prominently in In That Howling Infinite. January kicked off with Ahed Tamimi – A Family Affair, a discussion about the young Palestinian activist and the first family of the resistance. Out of season, we visited the birthplace of the Christ child with O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie and tell the story of a border town that has existed since the beginning of recorded history. We considered whether an Israeli-Palestinian confederation was possible, and republished Israel author David Grossman’s A Fortess But Not Yet a Home, and a review of author Amos Oz’ Dear Zealots – letters from a divided land. Sadly, Oz passed on 28th December, his death and that of the indomitable Uri Avnery (see last September’s Seeing through the eyes of “the other’) in August saw the passing of two of the most forthright intellectual proponents of the receding ‘two state solution’. We also reviewed  the intimations, imperfections and implications of Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal”, an ostensible end to the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict but which is effectively Throwing Abbas under the bus. The wider Arab and Islamic world features in Islam’s house of many mansions, and, in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Yemen war, we consider the possibility of Sanctioning Saudi -1973 revisited.

Our history posts were as eclectic as ever. We continued our series of Small Stories with a profile of The Monarch of the Sea, Prince Roy of Sealand, the smallest country in the world, and The Odyssey of Assid Corban from a tiny village in Lebanon to a wine dynasty in Auckland, New Zealand. A video of University College Dublin’s celebrated Choral Scholars inspired a look at an old Jacobite song  Mo Ghile Mear, whilst the anniversary of the Irish rebellion of 1798 recalled another song and a host of personal memories: The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. We reviewed two historical novels. In Cuddling up to Caligula, we discovered a soft side to the controversial Roman Emperor; whilst melancholy Martin Sparrow’s Blues shone fresh light on the travails of Australia’s early white settlers. And a review of Ulrich Raulff’s Farewell to the Horse, a history of man’s long relationship with our four-legged friend, galloped away from me as we sang the song of the horse with The Twilight of the Equine Gods  – part history, part memoir, part prose-poem.

And that was the year that was.

And the top five?

Number five was that slap that resounded around the world – the story of young Ahed Tamimi and her family. Four, the tale of melancholy Martin Sparrow. Three, the Jacobite love song Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody. Two, the reverie of 1968. And, number one, my very, very favourite and indeed, a labour of love, The Twilight of the Equine Gods

Happy New Year. See you on the other side.

Our reviews of previous years: 2017; 2016;  2015

Songs to drive the cold winter away

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

I am not one who makes much of the festive season, but inspired by the example of my favourite blog, Thom Hickey’s Immortal Juke Box, here are five favourite Christmas songs. No Neil Diamond or Mariah Carey here.

Five

The King, sung here by Canadians Loreena McKennitt and Cyril Smith, from Loreena’s Christmas album To Drive the Cold Winter Away, hails from a long tradition of “Wren King” songs. The king of the title is the wee wren, “the king of all birds”, as many old songs tell it. Through December until Twelfth Night (the sixth of January), it was common among Celtic-speakers in Brittany, Wales, Manx, Scotland, and Ireland for children and adults to cruise their neighbourhoods cadging food, money or booze in return for seeing a Wren that they had captured. This particular “King Wren” song dates from the eighteenth century, although the heavy weaponry was added in the nineteenth.

Health, love and peace be all here in this place
By your leave we shall sing, concerning our King
Our King is well-dressed in silks of the best
In ribbons so rare no king can compare
We have travelled many miles over hedges and stiles
In search of our King unto you we bring.
We have powder and shot to conquer the lot
We have cannon and ball to conquer them all.
Old Christmas is past, twelve tide is the last
And we bid you adieu, great joy to the new

Four

Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.  Northumbrian Kate Rusby’s rendering of the old English carol The Holly and the Ivy is gorgeous. I reblogged Thom Hickey’s tribute to this lovely song earlier this month. It is worth another look and listen. The lyrics are so bucolic, so timeless:

The rising of the sun
The running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing in the choir

Three

Loreena sings a lovely version of The Wexford Carol on her Christmas album. But Christmas songs don’t get much more beautiful than this beautiful version by American bluegrass diva Ali Krauss and cellist virtuoso Yo Yo Ma. The carol is believed to have originated in twelfth century Ireland in my mother’s home town of Inis Córthaidh.

Two

In 1961, Dusty Springfield was but a young lass, but even back then, she had a fabulous voice! I was twelve years old and this was the first time I’d heard the Springfields, the Americanesque folk trio founded by her brother Tom. It was the beginning of unrequited puppy-love that ended when I heard the Bobster’s Love Minus Zero No Limit – see my reverie What’s Bob Got to Do With It?  Dusty went on to become one of the greatest soul singers of all time, and Tom gave the world The Seekers. He adapted Bambino from a traditional Italian carol, just as he was later to transform a Russian folk-song into The Carnival is Over.

Santo natale bambino mio…
To you and all mankind,
To you and all mankind, maybe,
And from strife we shall be free.

One

It’s been voted the best Christmas song of all time – in the U.K, that is, because Americans don’t get it, as The Independent discovered – and, yes, it’s my number one because it IS the best Christmas song of all time. And yet, it seems, the “bah humbug!” straighteners and virtue signallers are out to get it, as reported recently by Aussie writer Mark Mordue: Sanitize Clause would rob a Christmas ballad of its soul.

The irascible, untuneful, dentally-disadvantaged Shane McGowan and his hot ceilidh band hit the big time with this “Christmas Eve in the drunk tank” shanty, wonderfully aided and abetted by the gorgeous and doomed Kirsty MacColl, who could’ve been famous but for a rich Mexican in a speedboat. The repartee between these loser-lovers is up there with Burton and Taylor:

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you…

You’re a bum
You’re a punk
You’re an old slut on junk
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it’s our last

When it comes to a Christmas song, how low can you Go? And, as the band kicks in with the accordion and pipes, how high can you fly?

Happy Christmas.

The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir

Paul Hemphill 10 Comments

We are the boys of Wexford, who fought with heart and hand
To burst in twain the Saxon chain, and free our native land!
The Boys of Wexford, RD Royce 1898

Glory-o, Glory-o to her brave men who died
For the cause of long down-trodden man.
Glory-o to Mount-Leinster’s own darling and pride
Dauntless Kelly, the boy from Killane.
Patrick Joseph McCall, 1898

It was on this day in 1798, during the first great Irish rebellion against British dominion, that the Battle of Vinegar Hill took place at Inis Córthaid, now the second-largest town in County Wexford.

The Rebellion of 1798 (Éirí Amach) also known as the United Irishmen Rebellion, was an uprising against British rule in Ireland during the summer of ‘98. The United Irishmen, a republican revolutionary group influenced by the ideas of the American and French revolutions, were the drivers of the rebellion. It was led by Presbyterians irate at being shut out of power by the Anglican establishment whilst Catholics became increasingly involved. Plans called for significant French support, which never eventuated. The uprising was poorly organized, uncoordinated, and quickly suppressed by much more powerful British forces. Both sides indulged in bloody reprisals. Between 10,000 to 30,000 souls perished, most of them Irishmen and women of all denominations.

The rebellion raged Ireland-wide, but County Wexford was its heart. Overlooking the town, Vinegar Hill was the site of the largest camp and the headquarters of the Irish rebels who held County Wexford for thirty days against vastly superior English forces; and it was there, after inflicting several defeats upon the insurgents that the English sought to finally destroy the rebel army. Battle raged on Vinegar Hill itself and in the streets of Enniscorthy with considerable loss of life among both rebels and civilians. It marked a turning point in the rising, being the last attempt by the rebels to hold and defend ground against the British military.

The famous statue in the market square of Enniscorthy shows the doomed Father Murphy, a leader of the ’98, pointing the way to Vinegar Hill for a young volunteer, ‘The Croppy Boy’.

Father Murphy and The Croppy Boy

The Battle of Vinegar Hill, Enniscorthy

History – and indeed, our lives – have a way of echoing across the world and down the years. In 1804, Irish convicts in the far-away penal colony of New South Wales, raised the flag of rebellion against the British soldiery and the colonial masters they served. It was the only convict rising in Australia. Many of those convicts would have been involved in the ‘98, and transported to Botany Bay for their part in it. Their quixotic Intifada was crushed at a place they called Vinegar Hill after the Wexford battle. In 1979, having migrated to Australia, I visited what is believed to be the site of the convicts’ revolt, the Castlebrook lawn cemetery on Windsor Road, Rouse Hill, where a monument commemorating the revolt was dedicated in 1988, Australia’s bicentennial year. Once open farmland, a place of market gardens and horse riding (back in the day,we would canter across its  gently rolling paddocks), it is now a suburban sprawl of McMansions.

The Battle of Vinegar Hill, New South Wales

Myth and memory often embellish the stories and the glories of oppressed people rising up against the power, but when we recall these oftimes forlorn hopes, from Spartacus to the Arab Spring, it is difficult to imagine ourselves, in our relatively comfortable, free and democratic countries, in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consquences of heroic failure.  We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:

Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.

And ponder Seamus Heaney’s poignant Requiem for the Croppies:

The pockets of our greatcoats, full of barley
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people, hardly marching on the hike
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

Father Murphy and me

I’ve always felt a connection with Vinegar Hill and “the boys of Wexford” who fought there.

In Birmingham, back in the early fifties, we lived with our aunt in a cold-water, back-alley walk-up on the border of Balsall Heath (just inside Moseley, a ‘better’ suburb). Aunty Mary was my mother’s mother’s sister. Her family had lived through Ireland’s war of independence and the civil war that followed, and she carried with her the memory of those times when she migrated to Birmingham before the Second World War – after her husband had run off “with another woman” (these things happened in Catholic Ireland). She lived in that same old house right through the Blitz when German bombers regularly targeted The Second City’s engineering, motor and arms factories, and not a few public buildings including the Piccadilly and Waldorf cinemas on nearby Stratford Road which were destroyed with considerable loss of life. Mary would serve tea to the bomb-disposal lads as they carried out their dangerous work. When her sister died and daddy Paddy (Patrick Joseph, my middle names) had decamped – he’d found a new Love – Mary brought their six children over to Birmingham from Enniscorthy one by one.

I never met nor learned what became of my grandfather. My aunt and mother would say that if Paddy Whelan died, the devil himself would come and tell us. Old Nick never did, but my brother Robert recently chased down the records. Paddy also crossed the water, passing on in Leicester – not that far from Brum – in 1985 at the age of eighty.

My father arrived in Brum by another road. He was born in Castlederg in County Tyrone. An Ulster man, indeed, and Protestant too, He and several of his brothers has likewise crossed the water in search of a new life. Most Ulster ‘Proddies’ migrated to Glasgow in those days – the original homeland of the the Protestant settlement of Ulster initiated by King James I of England and consolidated with Orange King Billy’s victory over the forces of catholic ex-king James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. you can read more about all that here, and its legacy in Northern Ireland here. How he and my mom got together is another story and quite unrelated to this one. But it had a lot to do with the times. geography, coincidence, miscommunication, innocence – and romance.

I was born in Mary’s house. She had a friend who had once given birth so that friend was the midwife. My brothers followed over the next two years. By then, the National Health Service had kicked in, and they were born in hospital. Childbirth, forever dangerous, was now rendered less life-threatening. There we all lived, three kids, our folks, Aunty Mary, three uncles, two aunts, a pekingese called Monty, named for the famous field Marshall, and an ancient white cat called Gorgee. Monty was flattened by a bus on Moseley Road, right outside our home.

Three bedrooms, girls in one, boys in another, and our family in the third. Outside loo and coal shed, no bathroom or hot water (we kids bathed in the kitchen sink and grown-ups went down to The Baths). Cold and damp, and close to the shops. And there we lived until 1956 when a council house in Yardley Wood became our first family home. Cold and colder running water that froze in winter, but it was at least inside the house; a bathroom with hot water heated in a big gas boiler; and an outside flush lavatory that was nevertheless immediately adjacent to the backdoor and not down in the garden. A big garden it was too, for winter and spring vegetables, snowmen and summer camp-outs.

There we grew, with free medical treatment for all our ailments, and free optical and dental care. I still have crooked teeth – no fancy orthodontics on the NHS – but I have all my teeth still. And my eyesight. We were educated for free. This came in during the war with the Butler Act. So, thanks to the Welfare State, we were housed and healthy enough to get to primary school and beyond. Once there, we had free books, free pens and paper and compulsory sport, and doctors and nurses would turn up on a regular basis to check our vitals. And thus, we were able to reach the glorious ‘sixties ready to rock ‘n roll.

In 1956, my uncle took me “across the sea to Ireland” to meet our family – my mother’s, that is. Dad was a proddie from County Tyrone, and we didn’t talk about them. We stayed in the tiny terrace house in Patrick Street where my mother was born in 1928, a crowded place with an outside toilet and a whitewashed back wall that looked out onto windswept fields beyond.

Uncle Sonny (Philip, really, but knicknamed for Al Jolson’s famous song), took me to the top of Vinegar Hill, and it’s lonely ruined round tower, used then as a shelter for cattle. We visited the statue of Father John Murphy and the young volunteer, and I learned the story of The Croppy Boy. Today, the term “croppy” is used derogatively to refer to a country bumpkin. Back then, it also referred to the young patriots who answered to the call “at the rising of the moon”. Their name came from their cropped hair – interpreted by some at the time as symbolic of the rejection of the powdered wigs of the gentry and also of the style popularised by French revolutionaries. Sonny took me to The Bloody Bridge on the outskirts of town where Father Murphy was tortured and executed by the English soldiers, the ‘yeos’ (or yeomen). I put my fingers in the groove in the  bridge’s stone parapet, said to have been made by the dying priest himself. We walked across the bridge in Wexford Town where so many martyrs perished at the hands of the foe – and, alas, so many innocents were murdered by the rebels. Little matter that the bridge we now trode was the third built there since those fateful days.

History was alive, and it was black and white. People remembered, as if it was yesterday, how Oliver Cromwell cut a bloody swathe through Catholic Ireland and massacred the innocents of Wexford town. It was said that people hung Cromwell’s picture upside down in their living rooms, and turned his face to the wall for good measure. Relatives would recount how the Black and Tans, the English paramilitaries raised to terrorise the populace, held their bayonets to women’s throats demanding “where’s your husband?”…or father…or son…Even the English teachers at my English grammar school would remark that the ‘Tans were war veterans who’d survived carnage of the Western Front and wanted more.

In the summer of 1969 my brother and I and an old chum spent several weeks in an Enniscorthy that looked and felt felt like it had not changed since Aunty Mary’s day – so well portrayed in the academy award nominated film Brooklyn. Dressed as we were in hippie garb and sporting long locks, we cut incongruous figures in the pubs and at the local hop, and were so unsuccessful hitchhiking around the county that we walked many a long Irish mile. We hiked to Killane, Sean Kelly’s country, and inspired by the song, climbed upwards though heath and hedge to the top of Mount Leinster. We stayed at 13 Patrick Street, and spent a lot of time sitting up on Vinegar Hill, beneath its round tower, looking down on the River Slaney and the town beyond. My brother was a keen photographer, and he took the following pictures:

The Croppy Boy 1969

Enniscorthy from atop Vinegar Hill August 1969

Enniscorthy Sunset August 1969

Fast forward into another century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more”. Adèle and I attended the wedding of an old pal and cosmic twin (born on the same day as me at about the same time, in English town beginning with B) we were the only Brits in a seminar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Back then, SOAS was known to many Arabs as the school of spies, a status I was reminded of by the owner of our hotel when we all visited Damascus in 2006. But I digress.

The wedding was held at an old pub in right in the heart of Ireland, and in getting there, we did a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Enniscorthy, Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion. When I first visited Enniscorthy, you could lie down in the middle of the Main Street and not be disturbed by traffic. This time, you could still lie down in th middle of Main Street – we were stuck in a traffic jam as we wound up the hill past Saint Aiden’s Cathedral to Patrick Street, which was no longer on the edge of town. The old house was still standing, as the song goes. Clean and crisp and pebble-dashed. As we stood outside number thirteen, a young goth girl in a multicoloured hoodie with tattoos and piercings opened the door. I told her how my mother and her brothers and sisters were born in this very house a long, long time ago, and that we’d come all the way from Australia to see it. “You don’t say!” she said.

13 Patrick Street, August 2004

Vinegar Hill August 2004

I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee. When I was little, mother Mary would march us up and down the parlour as she sang Enniscorthy’s songs of rebellion: Kelly the Boy From Killane, Boulavogue, and the eponymous Boys of Wexford.  “In comes the captain’s daughter, the captain of the Yeos …” – I’ve always wondered what became of that young rebel lass. Transported to Australia with hundreds of others, maybe? The songlines of my Celtic twilight.

We were told that such songs were banned in Britain, and that we must never sing them in public. There’s nothing so tempting as forbidden fruit. A relative brought us over Irish Songs of Freedom, sung in a sweet tenor by Willie Brady – a daring deed indeed, listening to it was,   and perhaps my first act of rebellion. We know now that this was all a cod. The Clancy Brothers were singing those rebel songs to packed houses the length and breadth of the British Isles and North America. And today, of course, you lose count of the collections and anthologies of Irish songs of freedom, rebellion or resistance, sung with vim, vigour, and nostalgic gusto from the Clancy Brothers and Dubliners back in the day to Sinead O’Connor and Celtic Woman.

In true men, like you men – songs of ‘98

So, on this, the two hundredth and twentieth anniversary of Vinegar Hill, let us remember the patriot men with a few of those old songs.

At Vinegar Hill o’er the pleasant Slaney
Our heroes vainly stood back to back
And the yeos at Tullow took Father Murphy
And burnt his body upon the rack
God grant you glory, brave Father Murphy
And open heaven to all your men
The cause that called you may call tomorrow
In another fight for the green again
Boulavogue Patrick Joseph McCall 1898

The song commemorates local parish priest Father John Murphy, he of the statue in he market place, who led his parishioners into battle in Wexford. Father Murphy and the other rebel leaders were captured and executed. He was hanged, decapitated, his corpse burnt in a barrel of tar, and his head placed on a spike as a warning to other rebels.

Enniscorthy is in flames and old Wexford is won
And tomorrow the barrow will cross
On the hill o’er the town we have planted a gun
That will batter the gateway to Ross
All the Forth men and Bargy men will march o’er the heath
With brave Harvey to lead in the van
But the foremost of all in the grim gap of death
Will be Kelly, the boy from Killane
Patrick Joseph McCall 1898

Sean Kelly was one of the leaders of the ‘98, celebrated for his role in then Battle of Ross, where he was wounded. After the fall of Wexford on 21 June, he was dragged from his sick bed, tried and sentenced to death and hanged on Wexford Bridge along with seven other rebel leaders. His body was then decapitated, the trunk thrown into the River Slaney and the head kicked through the streets before being set on display on a spike as a warning to others…Bad times for brave men.

Some on the shores of distant lands
Their weary hearts have laid,
And by the stranger’s heedless hands
Their lonely graves were made;
But though their clay be far away,
Beyond the Atlantic foam,
In true men, like you, men,
Their spirit’s still at home.
Who Fears to Speak of ‘98, John Kells Ingram 1843

See also, Irish Rebel Music, and A Selection of songs of ’98.

And in In That Howling Infinite, see Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

Easter 1916 … a Wexford postscript

History might not repeat, but indeed it sometimes rhymes. The republican tricolour flew for a week over Enniscorthy in April 1916. A month before, Padraig Pearse, who would be one of the leaders of the Dublin insurrection, visited Enniscorthy for the commemoration of Robert Emmet, the Republican leader hanged for his rising of 1803, and told officers of the town’s republican Irish Volunteers that orders for an armed uprising would come soon. One of the Volunteers’ active supporters was actually a local priest called Father Murphy!

This article by John Dorney in The Irish Story website recalls these little known events.

“County Wexford is famous in Irish nationalist folklore as the site of the 1798 rebellion. In that year the republican Society of the United Irishmen proclaimed a “Wexford Republic”, which operated for a month before it was bloodily suppressed. What is less well-known is the role of the county in the Easter Rising of 1916, when the town of Enniscorthy was taken over for a week by the local units of the Irish Volunteers. Although much less bloody than the celebrated events of ’98, or of the Rising in Dublin, in which almost 500 people were killed within five days of fighting, the Wexford rebellion of 1916 does provide a fascinating look at reactions to the insurrection in provincial Ireland”. 

The Easter Rising in County Wexford

That was the year that was

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

Reviewing 2017, I am reminded of Game of Thrones‘ Mance Rayder’s valedictory: “I wish you good fortune in the wars to come”.

On the international and the domestic front, it appeared as if we were condemned to an infernal and exasperating ‘Groundhog Day’.

Last November, we welcomed Donald Trump to the White House with bated breath and gritted teeth, and his first year as POTUS did not disappoint. From race-relations to healthcare to tax reform to The Middle East, South Asia and North Korea, we view his bizarro administration with a mix of amusement and trepidation. Rhetorical questions just keep coming. Will the Donald be impeached? Are we heading for World War 3? How will declining America make itself “great again” in a multipolar world set to be dominated by Russia Redux and resurgent China. Against the advice of his security gurus, and every apparently sane and sensible government on the globe (including China and Russia, but not King Bibi of Iz), his Trumpfulness recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Jerusalem. Sure, we all know that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel – but we are not supposed to shout it out loud in case it unleashed all manner of mayhem on the easily irritated Muslim street. Hopefully, as with many of Trump’s isolationist initiatives, like climate change, trade, and Iran, less immoderate nations will take no notice and carry on regardless. The year closes in, and so does the Mueller Commission’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election and the Trumpistas’ connivance and complicity – yes, “complicit”, online Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year, introduced to us in her husky breathlessness by the gorgeous Scarlett Johansson in a spoof perfume ad that parodies Ivanka Trump’s merchandizing.

Britain continues to lumber towards the Brexit cliff, its unfortunate and ill-starred prime minister marked down as “dead girl walking”. Negotiations for the divorce settlement stutter on, gridlocked by the humongous cost, the fate of Europeans in Britain and Brits abroad, and the matter of the Irish border, which portends a return to “the troubles” – that quintessentially Irish term for the communal bloodletting that dominated the latter half of the last century. The May Government’s hamfistedness is such that at Year End, many pundits are saying that the public have forgotten the incompetence of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and predict that against all odds, his missus could soon be measuring up for curtains in Number Ten.

Beset by devilish twins of Trump and Brexit, a European Union written-off as a dysfunctional, divided bureaucratic juggernaut, appears to have found hidden reserves of unity and purpose, playing hardball with Britain, dismissing the claims of Catalonia and Kurdistan, rebuking an isolationist America, and seeing-off resurgent extreme right-wing parties that threaten to fracture it with their nationalist and anti-immigration agendas. Yet, whilst Marine Le Pen and Gert Wilders came up short in the French and Dutch elections, and centrists Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel hold the moderate middle, atavistic, autocratic and proto-fascist parties have risen to prominence and influence in formerly unfree Eastern Europe, driven by fear of a non-existent flood of refugees from the Middle East and Africa (these are headed for the more pleasant economic climes of Germany, Britain and Scandinavia), and perhaps, their historically authoritarian DNA. Already confronted with the Russian ascendency in the east, and the prospects of the Ukrainian – Donetsk conflict firing up in the near future, the EU’s next big challenge is likely to be reacquainting itself with its original raisin d’etre – the European Project that sought to put an end to a century of European wars – and addressing the potential expulsion of parvenu, opportunistic member states who fail to uphold the union’s democratic values. As a hillbilly villain in that great series Justifed declaimed, “he who is not with is not with us”.

The frail, overcrowded boats still bob dangerously on Mediterranean and Aegean waters, and the hopeful of Africa and Asia die hopelessly and helplessly. Young people, from east and west Africa flee poverty, unemployment, and civil war, to wind up in Calais or in pop-up slave markets in free but failed Libya. In the Middle East the carnage continues. Da’ish might be finished on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, with the number of civilian casualties far exceeding that of dead jihadis. But its reach has extended to the streets of Western Europe – dominating headlines and filling social media with colourful profile pictures and “I am (insert latest outrage)” slogans. Meanwhile, tens, scores, hundreds die as bombs explode in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan, with no such outpourings of empathy – as if it’s all too much, too many, too far away.

Bad as 2017 and years prior were for this sad segment of our planet, next year will probably not be much better. The autocrats are firmly back in the saddle from anarchic Libya and repressed Egypt to Gulf monarchs and Iranian theocrats. There will be the wars of the ISIS succession as regional rivals compete with each other for dominance. Although it’s ship of state is taking in water, Saudi Arabia will continue its quixotic and perverse adventures in the Gulf and the Levant. At play in the fields of his Lord, VP Pence declared to US troops in December that victory was nigh, the Taliban and IS continue to make advances in poor, benighted Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Africa will continue to bleed, with ongoing wars across the Sahel, from West and Central Africa through to South Sudan,  ethnic tensions in the fragile nations of the Rift Valley, and further unrest in newly ‘liberated’ Zimbabwe as its people realize that the military coup is yet another case what The Who called “meet the old boss, same as the new boss”.

This Syrian mother and her child were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard.

In our Land Down Under, we endured the longest, most boring election campaign in living memory, and got more of the same: a lacklustre Tory government, and a depressingly dysfunctional and adversarial political system. Politicians of all parties, blinkered by short-termism, and devoid of vision, insist on fiddling whilst the antipodean Rome burns. All this only accentuates Australians’ disenchantment with their representatives, warps their perception of the value and values of “democracy”, and drives the frustrated, disgruntled, fearful and alienated towards the political extremes – and particularly the Right where ambitious but frustrated once, present and future Tory politicians aspire to greatness as big fishes in little ponds of omniphobia.

Conservative Christian politicians imposed upon us an expensive, unnecessary and bitterly divisive plebiscite on same-sex marriage which took forever. And yet, the non-compulsory vote produced a turnout much greater than the U.K. and US elections and the Brexit referendum, and in the end, over sixty percent of registered voters said Yes. Whilst constituencies with a high proportion of Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Chinese cleaved to the concept that marriage was only for man and women, the country, urban and rural, cities and states voted otherwise. The conservatives’ much-touted “silent majority” was not their “moral majority” after all. Our parliamentarians then insisted on dragging the whole sorry business out for a fortnight whilst they passed the legislation through both Houses of Parliament in an agonizingly ponderous pantomime of emotion, self-righteousness and grandstanding. The people might have spoken, but the pollies just had to have the last word. Thanks be to God they are all now off on their summer hols! And same-sex couples can marry in the eyes of God and the state from January 9th 2018.

Meanwhile, in our own rustic backyard, we are still “going up against chaos”, to quote Canadian songster Bruce Cockburn. For much of the year, as the last, we have been engaged in combat with the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales as it continues to lay waste to the state forest that surrounds us. As the year draws to a close, our adversary has withdrawn for the long, hot summer, but will return in 2018, and the struggle will continue – as it will throughout the state and indeed the nation as timber, coal and gas corporations, empowered by legislation, trash the common treasury with the assent of our many governments.

And finally, on a light note, a brief summary of what we were watching during the year. There were the latest seasons of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. The former was brilliant, and the latter left us wondering why we are still watching this tedious and messy “Lost in Zombieland”. Westworld was a delight with its fabulous locations and cinematography, a script that kept us backtracking to listen again to what was said and to keep up with its many ethical arcs and literary revenues. and a cavalcade of well cast, well-written and original characters. Westworld scored a post of its own on this blog – see below. The Hand Maid’s Tale wove a dystopian tale all the more rendered all the more harrowing by the dual reality that there are a lot of men in the world who would like to see women in servitude, and that our society has the technology to do it. To celebrate a triumphant return, our festive present to ourselves were tee-shirts proclaiming: “‘ave a merry f@#kin’ Christmas by order of the Peaky Blinders”.  And on Boxing Day, Peter Capaldi bade farewell as the twelfth and second-best Doctor Who (David Tennant bears the crown), and we said hello to the first female Doctor, with a brief but chirpy Yorkshire “Aw, brilliant!” sign-on from Jodie Whittaker.

Whilst in Sydney, we made two visits to the cinema (tow more than average) to enjoy the big-screen experience of the prequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien and the long-awaited sequel to our all-time favourite film Blade Runner. Sadly, the former, Alien: Covenant, was a disappointment, incoherent and poorly written.  The latter, whilst not as original, eye-catching and exhilarating as its parent, was nevertheless a cinematic masterpiece. It bombed at the box office, just like the original, but Blade Runner 2049 will doubtless become like it a cult classic.

This then was the backdrop to In That Howling Infinite’s 2017 – an electic collection covering politics, history, music, poetry, books, and dispatches from the Shire.

An abiding interest in the Middle East was reflected in several posts about Israel and Palestine, including republishing Rocky Road to Heavens Gate, a tale of Jerusalem’s famous Damascus Gate, and Castles Made of Sand, looking at the property boom taking place in the West Bank. Seeing Through the Eyes of the Other publishes a column by indomitable ninety-four year old Israeli writer and activist Uri Avnery, a reminder that the world looks different from the other side of the wire. The Hand That Signed the Paper examines the divisive legacy of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The View From a Balcony in Jerusalem reviews journalist John Lyons’ memoir of his posting in divided Jerusalem. There is a Oh, Jerusalem, song about the Jerusalem syndrome, a pathology that inflects many of the faithful who flock to the Holy City, and also a lighter note, New Israeli Matt Adler’s affectionate tribute to Yiddish – the language that won’t go away.

Sailing to Byzantium reviews Aussie Richard Fidler’s Ghost Empire, a father and son road trip through Istanbul’s Byzantine past. Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion juxtaposes Khalil Gibran’s iconic poem against a politically dysfunctional, potentially dystopian present, whilst Red lines and red herrings and Syria’s enduring torment features a cogent article by commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen.

On politics generally, we couldn’t get through the year without featuring Donald Trump. In The Ricochet of Trump’s Counterrevolution, Australian commentator Paul Kelly argues that to a certain degree, Donald Trump’s rise and rise was attributable to what he and other commentators and academics describe as a backlash in the wider electorate against identity and grievance politics. Then there is the reblog of New York author Joseph Suglia’s original comparison between Donald Trump’s White House and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But our particular favourite is Deep in the Heart of Texas, a review of an article in The New Yorker by Lawrence Wright. His piece is a cracker – a must-read for political junkies and all who are fascinated and frightened by the absurdities of recent US politics.

Our history posts reprised our old favourite, A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of the West, whilst we examined the nature of civil wars in A House Divided. Ottoman Redux poses a hypothetical; what if The Ottoman Empire has sided with Britain, France and Russia in World War I? In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie, Deconstructing Dunkirk looked at the myths surrounding the famous evacuation. On the seventieth anniversary of the birth of India and Pakistan, we looked at this momentous first retreat from Empire with three posts: Freedom at Midnight (1) – the birth of India and Pakistan, Freedom at Midnight (2) – the legacy of partition, and Weighing the White Man’s Burden. Rewatching the excellent sci-fi drama Westworld – one of the televisual gems of 2017 –  we were excited to discover how the plays of William Shakespeare were treasured in the Wild West. This inspired our last post for the year: The Bard in the Badlands – Hell is empty and the devils are here, the title referencing a line from The Tempest.

Happy Birthday, Indiaekkent

Our continuing forest fight saw us return to Tolkien’s Tarkeeth, focusing this time around on fires that recalled Robert Plant’s lyrics in Ramble On: In the darkest depths of Mordor. The trial in Coffs Harbour of the Tarkeeth Three and the acquittal of two of our activists were chronicled on a series of interviews recorded by Bellingen’s Radio 2bbb, whilst other interviews were presented in The Tarkeeth Tapes. On a lighter note, we revisited our tribute to the wildlife on our rural retreat in the bucolic The Country Life.

And finally to lighter fare. There was Laugh Out Loud – The Funniest Books Ever. Poetry offerings included the reblog of Liverpudlian Gerry Cordon’s selection of poetry on the theme of “undefeated despair”: In the dark times, will there also be singing?; a fiftieth anniversary tribute to Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, Recalling the Mersey Poets; and musical settings to two of our poems, the aforementioned Oh, Jerusalem, and E Lucevan Le Stelle.

And there was music. Why we’ve never stopped loving the Beatles; the mystery behind The Strange Death of Sam Cooke; Otis Redding – an unfinished life, and The Shock of the Old – the Glory Days of Prog Rock. Legends, Bibles, Plagues presented Bob Dylan’s laureate lecture. We reprised Tales of Yankee Power – how the songs of Jackson Brown and Bruce Cockburn portrayed the consequences of US intervention in Latin America during the ‘eighties. And we took an enjoyable journey into the “Celtic Twilight” with the rousing old Jacobite song Mo Ghille Mear – a piece that was an absolute pleasure to write (and, with its accompanying videos, to watch and listen to). As a Christmas treat, we reblogged English music chronicler Thom Hickey’s lovely look at the old English carol The Holly and the Ivy, And finally, for the last post of this eventful year, we selected five christmas Songs to keep the cold winter away.

Enjoy the Choral Scholars of Dublin’s University College below. and here are Those were the years that were : read our past reviews here:  2016   2015 

In That Howling Infinite is now on FaceBook, as it its associate page HuldreFolk. Check them out.

And if you have ever wondered how this blog got its title, here is Why :In That Howling Infinite”?

See you in 2018.

 

 

Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

Paul Hemphill 11 Comments

     Sé mo laoch, mo Ghile Mear,
    ‘Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
    Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
    Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear

The song begins as the camera focuses on the face of the singer. A soft and confident tenor, he gently leans into a long-gone poet’s Gaelic verse. The camera pulls back to reveal a phalanx of young people behind him. They are dressed plainly. The lads in dark suits and open-neck, white shirts, and most sport five o’clock shadows. The lassies in dark dresses, blouses and pants. They join the soloist, quietly at first, but rising soon in unison. A bodhran kicks in, sharp and deliberate. The young folk stand still, yet their heads nod almost imperceptibly to the bodhran’s driving beat, and the song lifts off and soars. The camera pans across the choir, focusing on their faces, and particularly, their eyes – almost all of them clear and blue. The joy in the eyes, their smiles, and their voices is there for all to see and hear. Their voices rise, and then gradually fall, as if to glide to a gentle landing. The choir hums softly as the singer gently repeats the last line. Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear – “since my darling went away”,  And it is done.

Mo Ghile Mear is a paradoxical, quixotic song that is at once romantic and political. If you have but a drop of Celtic blood in your veins or a rebel heart in your breast, you will fall under its spell.

Variously translated as “my gallant hero”, “my gallant star”, and “my dashing darling”, Mo Ghile Mear is a Jacobite love song that is as much about politics as about romance. Inspired as it was was by the Jacobite Rising against Protestant England’s rule in 1745, romance and politics do indeed unite in heroic, insurrectionary failure.

it was written in Gaelic by poet Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill after the battle of Culloden which dashed for two and a half centuries the Scots’ dreams of independence. Composed in the convention of Aisling (Gaelic for “dream” or “vision”) poetry, it is a lament by the Gaelic goddess Éire for Bonnie Prince Charlie, Charles Stuart, the “Young Pretender” to the Protestant Hanoverian English throne that once belonged to the Roman Catholic Stuart clan, and who after the bloody failure of the ’45, fled into exile in France. And that’s where he remained, although his last resting place is in the crypt of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome – an ironic ending for this could’ve been champion of Catholic hopes.

Bonny Prince Charlie had many romantic and rousing songs written about him. But in reality he wasn’t the dashing, gallant leader that the songs portrayed and that the Scots and their Celtic Irish allies yearned for – most certainly not the Caesar of this song. He was an indecisive and vacillating leader, who thought himself much cleverer and popular than he actually was, and when the going got rough, he got going – and left the the Scots and Irish who supported him with blood and treasure to the tender mercies of the Sassenach foe.

And yet, the songs live on to this day, most notably in The Skye Boat Song, Will Ye No Come Back Again. The old and well-recorded favourite Óró sé do bheatha ‘bhaile has also been associated with the Jacobite cause as Séarlas Óg (“Young Charles” in Gaelic). The poet Padraig Pearse, leader of the doomed intifada we know as the Easter Rising of 1916, added new verses, and so the song entered the rebel canon.

Mo Ghile Mear differs from more conventional Aisling poems in which the poet is asleep or otherwise minding his own business when he experiences a dream or vision of a fair maid. In this cerebral wet dream, the poet personifies Éire – Ireland, the country itself – as a woman who once was a fair maiden but is now a widow. Her husband, the “Gallant” whatever is not dead but, but he is far away. As a consequence the land is failing and nature itself is in decline.

Popular since the 18th century, song has come to international attention in our own drear times – largely due to a host of recordings, and accompanying You Tube interest.

Iconic chanteuse Mary Black presents the song as a gentle, sad air. Sting famously recorded it with the renowned Celtic ensemble The Chieftains, and they give an understated and fair account of themselves, although the reinvented English lyrics turn “Our Hero” into a dashing cavalier”, swords and harps and all, far removed from original dream song. It is an easy song to overcook,  but Sting managed to resist the temptation. Not so that be-kilted posse Celtic Thunder who ramp up the Celtic bombast, reinventing the English lyrics as a curiously anachronistic, latter-day “rebel song” – “Hail the Hero”, the Battle Hymn of the Irish Republic, with a massive Irish flag waving o’er them all. What would The Minstrel Boy have thought about this?

Then there is the overreach of the much-loved and very popular, kitsch-laden, outings of Celtic Woman, invariably staged to maximum visual effect and capacity audiences at fantastically photogenic Irish castles. These handsome, well-dressed colleens do not crimp on the gowns, choirs, drums and bagpipes. Their Gaelic rewrite, transforms our “dashing darling” into a lovelorn mariner, replete with waves and tides, sails and sunsets. The ladies’ latest outing, with a relatively new lineup, sustains the razzmatazz with the eponymous “gallant star” resurrected as a martial beacon for “freedom’s sons”. It would seem that maritime motif of the girls’ original rendering was superfluous on an album that included My Heart Will Go On, from that damp, tear-jerking,   blockbuster, “Titanic”. Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes the pipes are calling!

That such liberties are taken with the lyrics is no big thing, however. Old Seán Clárach would probably agree that his original Aisling poem would be a wee bit archaic in this day and age, and that the undefeated despair, hope and longing of Éire’s dream were no longer relevant in a free, democratic and relatively prosperous (that is, post GFC) Ireland. He would no doubt have updated his verse, just as Padraig Pearse did with his song in 1916, substituting a 16th Century Irish pirate, the “great sea warrior” Gráinne Mhaol for the foreign born Charlie (so the ladies of Celtic Woman were not that far off-track with their nautical rewrite after all). But this mythologizing of Ireland’s heroes too often comes across as self-reverentially corny.

Cynics might blame the atmospheric, anthemic stadium rock of Bono and U2 for this commercialization of Irish music. Others blame Enya’s symphonic, new age outings once she put  behind her the Celtic mist and moodiness of her Clannad siblings. But I reckon that hitherto timeless, soulful and folksy Irish music has been like this since the Riverdance crew first stamped their collective hard shoes during the intermission of the Eurovision Song Contest and stole the show. But most Irish folk blame Michael Flatley, as the authoritative Waterford Whisperer made clear.

Meanwhile, in my opinion, the most sensitive, beautiful and indeed, rousing rendition of Mo Ghile Mear is the one described at the head of this post. No naff English lyrics are required. The original words of the Gaelic poem resonate powerfully through the hall.

It is sung by the Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin, an amateur, mostly acapella bunch of Irish students. These young folk formally audition for a scholarship with the ensemble. There is little glamour or artifice, no fireworks or vocal gymnastics. Plainly dressed, they look like folk you would pass on the streets of Dublin or Galway. Mark Waters, the portly lead singer would never get a gig in an Irish boy band, but wouldn’t look out of place in a church choir. The drama is achieved by inflection, modulation and tone, the lighting and way the choir is physically arranged in an eerily martial wedge, their only movement being that almost imperceptible nod of their heads in time with the lone bodran’s beat as the song builds momentum.

Listen, and listen again. It is a gem.

© Paul Hemphill 2017  All rights reserved

For more on Irish history and Irish songs of rebellion, see The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir, Irish Rebel Music, and A Selection of songs of ’98.

Also, in In That Howling Infinite, O’Donnel Abú – the Red Earl no history in a song, and .Over the Sea to Skye.

And here are the Choral Students again:

TheChoral Scholars of University College, Dublin

Here is  Brendan Graham’s achingly beautiful song Orphan Girl with the  Choral Scholars featuring  Abby Molloy. Sung from the perspective of one of Ireland’s famine orphans, on the eve of her inspection, which would decide whether she could travel to Australia, to escape the workhouse which had become her life.

And here are the recordings I referred to above. Enjoy.: