Relics of auld decency

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The cherry bun: Just not the same

I GOT laughed at again in Dublin this week. This happens whenever I visit the capital, and it’s usually for technological reasons (although not always – sometimes people laugh at you simply for asking for a dinner menu in the middle of the day).

Let’s be clear: I do have a mobile phone. I’m not a complete troglodyte. However, my phone is around seven years old. It doesn’t have a camera. It doesn’t know what day it is, and tends to keep assuming it’s the First of January 2005. (I’m sure we can all agree, the wish is probably father of the thought there… Imagine if we didn’t know now what we didn’t know in 2005?)

Naturally, my phone doesn’t know how to connect to the internet. If it’s honest, it thinks this whole smartphone business might turn out to be nothing more than a fad. Also it has a cracked screen, behind which a tiny piece of loose glass rattles around noisily.

But I refuse to replace it. I’m fond of it mainly because the keypad happens to be in Arabic. This – the consequence of nothing more than a happy geographical accident – conveys the impression that I understand Arabic and therefore might be secretly (and despite appearances) a thrillingly important person. I might have influential connections in assorted emirates; I might go around airports shouting “I’ve got to get back to Bahrain tonight!” at the ground crew. I love conveying that impression and would be very sorry to give it up. (Of course my Arabic keypad might also hint that I’m a closet jihadist who entertains murderous thoughts towards Jedward. I’m OK with that too.)

So anyway, I visited a mobile phone shop in the capital to see if they could fix the broken screen. To be fair, I did have the good grace to be a little bit embarrassed. It isn’t as if I don’t know my phone is an anachronism. As soon as you get off the train, you are surrounded by city people pointing and laughing; you get the message soon enough.

The shop assistant – Emmet, no doubt, or Shane, or maybe Fionnán? – took one look at the phone and issued a complicated sound involving mostly vowels. Then he gave me a searching look to make sure I wasn’t taking the mickey. Then he laughed. Another shop assistant – Chloe? Emily? Aoibheann? – came over, saw my phone, and regarded me for a moment or two with a look that I understood to be sincere, benevolent concern. It was crushing.

Under a gaze like that, you suddenly become aware that it’s not just your phone that’s out of place. You’re what might be charitably described a “relic of auld decency”. For instance, you notice that nobody else – absolutely nobody else – has frizzy hair in Dublin. How do they do that? Is it something in the water? And look at your clothes – they’re a classic example of what happens when you repeatedly hug a white cat while wearing dark colours. And is that – oh God – could that be a trace of cow dung on your boot?

Later, you notice that you’re the only person in your hotel lobby who doesn’t have an iPad. In fact, now that you come to think about it – and this is a little weird – you seem to be the only person in the hotel lobby who’s not having some sort of script meeting. Seriously, are there three or four script meetings going on in the lobby of every hotel in Dublin at any one time? If so, why isn’t television better?

You’re the only person in the cafe who’s reading the print edition of a newspaper. You just want a coffee, just an ordinary coffee, please. You still think in terms of Bewleys. You mourn the almond bun. You’re a bumpkin. You’re not quite wandering around the city, with a drip on the end of your nose, looking for someone to play the banjo with, but you’ve become an out-and-out culchie all the same. When did that happen?

Irish Rail has introduced free wi-fi on the Dublin to Cork train. But if you’re heading west of the Shannon, you have to change at Limerick Junction, where you lose the wi-fi (together with the will to live, but that’s another story). Thereafter, you’re on a train with one electrical socket per carriage.

The woman opposite me on the journey home – a middle-aged, ‘traditionally-built’ woman with a decent, rural bearing – was all amazement. “Imagine that,” she marvelled, seeing me plug in my antediluvian phone charger. “We really have come up in the world. They have sockets on the trains now.” I laughed at her. That’s how it works – you transfer the ridicule to someone else.

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 15th April 2012

Unpleasantness about the seabass

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DINE in Dublin week ends today, not a minute too soon. The intention was to encourage us to spend our way out of recession, or eat our way out of recession, or pretend-to-know-something-about-wine our way out of recession, or calculate 12.5% of our way out of recession, or whatever.

The very idea is a penance. What if you loathe eating out, and passionately dread those occasions that make it necessary – a first communion, or a work thing, or someone having yet another sodding birthday? (Didn’t you have a birthday just last year? I could swear you did. I remember distinctly that  unpleasantness about the seabass.)

The first thing that happens, when you get seated behind a restaurant table on one of these obligatory occasions, is that you realise at once, with a sickening lurch of the stomach, that you’re not going to be able to leave until everyone has finished their main course – and that’s at the earliest, assuming nobody fancies the tiramisu. You’re immobilised, stuck there, a prisoner. Instant panic attack.

Then they bring the menus and, to your dismay, someone begins contemplating a starter. Starters are going to add at least 20 minutes to this ordeal. “Garlic mussels might be nice,” they muse happily. “I wonder are they local. Ow. Why are you kicking me?”

The waiter comes with the wine list, and some thoughtful person thinks it necessary to canvass the opinions of the entire group on medium- versus full-bodied. Everyone duly tries to remember which grape variety is fashionable at the moment, and dredges up the few oenological buzzwords they carry around for these occasions. “Oh I don’t mind at all,” you say, when it’s your turn. “Whatever way it comes, ha ha.”

Perhaps for that very reason, the waiter chooses you, above anyone else, to enact the ludicrous dumb show of examining and sniffing the wine. “It’s fine, it’s lovely, ha ha,” you say, hoping no one will suspect the truth, which is that the sommelier could have urinated in it for all you care.

The worst part, though, is when the food arrives. Someone (usually the starter person – they’re a type) has to send theirs back for some reason. Everyone is obliged to wait while they carefully explain to the waiter, using many hand gestures, the subtle difference between what they wanted and what they got.

Meanwhile, you have somehow accidentally ordered the entire carcass of a fish, complete with flaccid tail and cold, staring eyes. But as you would rather swallow a whole live jellyfish, in public, wearing a pink tutu, than spend a minute longer than necessary in this private hell, you say nothing. You pick around the eyes.

Being someone who hates restaurants has several obvious drawbacks. For one thing, people tend to assume you’re a little odd. They couple it with the fact that you also don’t enjoy shoe-and-handbag shopping and realise that you’re hopelessly excluded from the modern, urban feminine fantasy. You’re a bit agricultural on the whole, aren’t you, poor thing.

Then there’s the fact that, should you happen to be single, you can never have a first date with anyone, ever. You can’t countenance the prospect of going out to dinner with a stranger, so you have to say no, but obviously you can’t tell them why you’re saying no or they’ll think you’re a fruitbasket and be thankful for their escape. And even agricultural types hate to be thought less of, especially unjustly.

Because what could be worse than eating with someone you don’t know? You’re supposed to look elegant while trying not to spill food on yourself. You’re supposed to make conversation while not talking with your mouth full. And if your date turns out to be that most self-satisfied of bores, the food bore, you’re supposed to feign interest in the exhaustive details of his prandial preferences, while trying to quash mutinous, old-fashioned thoughts about the starving children in Africa.

But those problems are nothing – nothing – compared to the danger of discovering that your companion eats with his mouth open. The horror. It’s enough to make you commit yourself to solitary basins of thin gruel in your own kitchen for the rest of your days.

You try to concentrate on what he’s saying but the sensory assault is overwhelming. You can see nothing but the boggy contents of his mouth. You can hear nothing but the wet, slapping sound of his chewing. Your fight-or-flight response kicks in. You toy with the condiments under a cloud of imminent violence. You find yourself blaming the parents.

To distract yourself, you count his fillings. “Hmm, mercury,” you notice with relief. “With any luck he’ll be dead before they bring the dessert menu.”

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 1 April 2012

Interesting departures

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ASK anyone living on the Atlantic seaboard, and they will have a story about Shannon airport. It is the setting for some of the most dramatic moments in the West of Ireland life. We’ve all begun adventures there, and ended them, and we’ve all cried there – waving someone off, not knowing when we’ll see them again, or welcoming someone home forever, in a casket.

That’s one of the reasons why the decline of Shannon is so sad. This is not just another of those silly commercial airports that sprang up needlessly all over the country and are now surplus to requirements. This is not some glorified field in the boondocks. This is Shannon, Ireland’s first transatlantic airport. Charles Lindbergh, no less, was instrumental in its foundation.

This week, I tried (unsuccessfully) to get a flight out of Shannon to anywhere interesting. You can get to Puerto Rico, but that’s as exotic as it gets. You can’t even fly to Dublin from Shannon any more (not that Dublin qualifies as interesting to anyone outside Dublin).

The feeling of raw nostalgia was almost painful, because there was a time when you could get to Havana, or Moscow, or Luanda, by boarding a flight there.

When the first Aeroflot flight landed at Shannon in September 1975, the captain was presented with an Aran sweater. Witnesses say there was a brass band to greet the flight as it landed. The chief stewardess, who looks a little embarrassed in the photos, was given a nice bit of Waterford crystal.

This was the middle of the Cold War. America was aghast, but that didn’t bother Shannon. Throughout the 1980s, while relations between the USSR and the United States got progressively worse, Aeroflot breezed in and out of Shannon without a diplomatic care in the world. This was a neutral country then.

Nerdier-than-average children in the west plagued our mothers, as they drove past Shannon, to take us in to see the planes. You might catch sight of a giant Ilyushin beast, with Aeroflot’s hammer-and-sickle livery, and wonder at the lives of those on board. Would any of them defect this time? Or you might see a Boeing belonging to TWA, the airline once owned by Howard Hughes, imagine. (As I said, you had to be nerdier than average.)

Shannon was once run by enterprising, spirited people who were unwilling to let the airport decline simply because the jet age had made refuelling there unnecessary. Now it’s run by the Dublin Airport Authority. Enough said. The clue is in the name.

The world’s first duty-free shop opened at Shannon in 1947; it was the first airport in Europe to introduce immigration pre-clearance for US-bound passengers, in 1986; it led a joint venture establishing the first duty-free shop in the Soviet Union, at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow; and if it’s not the birthplace of the Irish Coffee, it’s at least the birthplace of a long-running, fertile dispute about the birthplace of the Irish Coffee…

But the most brilliant wheeze for drumming up revenue at Shannon was undoubtedly the fuel deal with Aeroflot struck by the airport’s chiefs, Liam Skelly and Michael Guerin, in the late ’70s.

Under the deal, Aeroflot avoided the energy-crisis cost of aviation fuel by storing its own fuel at Shannon. With Aeroflot’s agreement, Shannon then began selling Soviet fuel to other airlines.

In an interview in the Moodie Report publication ‘The World Rovers’, Guerin described how tense things became after a Korean Air passenger airliner was downed by the Soviets in 1983.

“Not long after the Korean Air tragedy, we had a US military transport coming through to refuel. They were parked next to an Aeroflot jet, and the US personnel were shouting abuse over at the Russians about their terrible regime, and their awful country. The irony was that they were being refuelled by Soviet aviation fuel supplied by Aeroflot,” he recalled.

Shannon is now better known as an American quasi military base. After the US invaded Iraq, you were always elbow-to-elbow, airside, with juvenile American soldiers who inspired as much pity as resentment. And it’s now losing €8m a year.

But despite its intriguing past and lamentable present, Shannon has always been an easy-going, mannerly place. Lately I parked my car in the set-down area, ignoring the signs warning me it would be towed. Sure enough, ten minutes later I heard my registration number over the PA system, and a command to return to the vehicle immediately. An anxious-looking steward was standing beside my car. “You left your lights on,” he said.

If you have to emigrate, that’s the sort of place you want to leave from. That’s the sort of place that would make you want to come back. That’s why we can never be asked to do without Shannon airport.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 18th March 2012

Dog bites man, and other stories

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Jarlath Burke, precious inner critic

 

ONE of the first skills you learn in journalism – that is, if you learn journalism the old-fashioned way (but more on that in a moment) – is how to make a story out of nothing.

‘Man Bites Dog’ may be the conventional test of newsworthiness, but in the provincial press, ‘Dog Bites Man’ is what your readers want. It would be a serious dereliction of duty to let a bitten man go unreported – but only if he’s a local bitten man, naturally. Dogs (and men) from far-flung counties can do all the biting they like.

Provincial newspapers are continuing their steady decline, according to the latest ABC figures. Readership is falling at almost all of the regional titles, with the eerie exception of the Roscommon Herald, whose circulation has risen 0.1%. This means the Roscommon Herald gained approximately 8.6 readers last year, but don’t mock it till you try it. Losing eight readers would be a calamity; gaining eight readers is just local news at its best.

So once again we’re contemplating a world without a regional press. It’s unthinkable. How would you find out who won the handball, or when Brendan so-and-so was retiring, or which daughter of the parish died outside in America, or when there was a cake sale, or which county councillors were pressing for new road markings?

Where else would you go to find brilliant photojournalism illustrating comically substandard reporting? Where else to see the word ‘refute’ misused so often that eventually lexicographers, their spirits broken, will have to allow it to mean ‘deny’?

What if you’ve clean forgotten to return your sheep census forms and there’s no local paper to furnish the helpful headline: ‘Farmers Urged to Return Sheep Census Forms’? What if an old industrial gas cylinder is washed up by the tide, and there is no local paper to fly into a hysterical panic and scream ‘Bomb Found On Lahinch Beach!’?

Until recently, provincial newspapers also supplied another useful service, which was the training of journalists. Nowadays, people seem to pick up enviable jobs in the national press equipped with nothing more than a rinky-dink “Master’s” in journalism and a record of vanity blogging. Young people today, grumble, grumble.

But there was a time when no career in journalism began without the proper initiation rites, such as covering district courts (where you learn everything worth knowing about human society), and of course council meetings. You weren’t a proper reporter until the expression “I’d like to be associated with those remarks” had begun to sound almost normal. Drunk with nascent power, you punished councillors you didn’t like by not associating them with those remarks in print. Flinty stares were exchanged in civic offices.

In the past, of course, local newspapers tended to be owned by well-dressed local families, with idiosyncratic editors who, in the fine tradition of the Skibbereen Eagle, “kept an eye” on things they had no business keeping an eye on. But during the boom era, bloodthirsty media conglomerates began forking out millions for parish newsletters in every two-horse townland in the country. (Yes, slight exaggeration is another art that you hone in the provincial press. Thank you for noticing.) So now your local paper is likely to be a mere nag in the stable of some glass-and-steel corporate monolith many miles away.

In contrast, I worked for a time in a rat-infested building in Cavan, for a tiny newspaper that’s long since gone. Cavan is a place where people’s acute sense of – well, let’s call it privacy – makes it almost impossible to get any journalism done. I was once despatched to interview an elderly woman who had won first prize in a knitting competition. Having introduced myself and explained my business, I began my inquiries. “No comment,” she said. This is what you’re up against as a regional journalist.

The first provincial newspaper editor I ever worked for, Jarlath Burke (pictured), late editor of the Tuam Herald, would bellow furiously at you for making a grammatical error, but was forbearing to the point of tenderness when you made a complete dog’s dinner of the story and all but libelled somebody. This is because everyone has to learn the craft of journalism, but if you don’t already know your own language there’s no hope for you.

You never forget these lessons, even years after being superannuated as a reporter. You store teetering piles of notes (in shorthand) in a cupboard somewhere, long after the statute of limitations has kicked in for the Defamation Act; you can’t break the habit of disbelieving everything you’re told; you keep your long-dead first editor inside your head as a precious inner critic; you understand that everything – literally everything – is of interest to someone; and you uphold a studied indifference towards old ladies who knit.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 4 March 2012

I spy with my little imagination

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THE magic seems to have gone from the world of international espionage. We’ve lost cigarettes, interesting hats, Venetian blinds (which once cast such flattering noirish shadows and are now démodé) and analogue technology.

Espionage equipment should feature at the very least a clackety qwerty keyboard and, ideally, some sort of rotor-and-spindle arrangement. Instead, it now involves mobile phone software. This week we learned that the Assad regime in Syria has attempted to curtail the rebellion by using Irish-made software to censor text messages. We also learned that this technology is so opaque that even its makers claim not to have been able to foresee how it might be applied. I ask you, where’s the intrigue in that? Who’s Eve Marie Saint playing in that picture?

It makes you long for the halcyon days of espionage past – farther back even than the cheesy Ian Fleming/ Cold War era, because no self-respecting woman would cast herself in an imaginary James Bond film. No, if you daydream about being an International Woman of Mystery, it will be Alfred Hitchcock-style.

You are all smooth-haired finesse, with perhaps just one interesting scar. You light your imported filterless cigarettes at the end with the brand name, so the sinister figure tailing you won’t be able to identify you by your trail of distinctive butts. You use all your fast-talking ingenuity to elude Peter Lorre, while affecting to be unpersuaded by the manful seduction techniques of Humphrey Bogart. Sigh.

Between the two worlds of people who are spies and people who are not spies lies a vast demimonde of people who wish they were spies but aren’t. It usually consists in having within you the soul of a ten-year-old boy, even when you’re decades too old and the wrong sex.

Aspiring spies find even the words associated – espionage, clandestine, quisling, cipher – to be evocative almost to the point of melancholy. We have learnt the Morse code, in preparation for a day when we might have to tap out the details of an assignation, using only an espresso cup and a teaspoon, across a crowded café in Beirut.

We also know by heart the international radiotelephony spelling alphabet, which almost never comes in handy. However, if you’re of a bullying bent, it can be used to scare off persistent offshore telemarketers, for whom names like Eithne require an Enigma decryption machine. “Ezra?,” they say. “Extra? Spell it please.”

“Echo India Tango Hotel November Echo,” you bark, in a crazed voice. The line goes dead, and with that you forgo any chance of being able to purchase the only product you will ever need, which comes with this complimentary DVD and this complete set of attachments totally free not to mention a questions-asked money-back guarantee.

Pretend spies are lingeringly fascinated by radio generally, and shortwave radio in particular, and few things excite us as much as the numbers stations – those shortwave radio stations that broadcast streams of numbers or letters thought to be aimed at spies. It is said there are some pretend spies who can’t sleep unless ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ – the interval signal broadcast from the MI6 numbers station on Cyprus – is playing on a loop.

But the life of a pretend spy can be chancy. Have you ever approached someone at a bus stop and said, “The hen flies at midnight.”? It can go either way. Sometimes people study their feet in an embarrassed way, or offer you money, or search frantically for an authority figure.

But other times you get the reply you want: “You are wrong. The hen does not fly.” And then you know your mission has been a success: the code has been understood, and you can retire to some bar somewhere, where you will blend in seamlessly over a shot of Wild Turkey straight up and a Lucky Strike. (There’s no smoking ban. There just isn’t. You can have a smoking ban in your vivid-interior-life-as-a-spy if you want, but there’s none in mine.)

It can be dangerous too. The pretend spy always suspects her car is being followed, especially on motorways, and is usually right. When you slow down and speed up, the car behind does the same! The only remedy is to make an unannounced U-turn, drive into the car park of a garda station and begin honking your horn repeatedly. The guards always know what to do.

The sad part is that despite all this studious preparation and catlike alertness, pretend spies never get asked to do any real spying. What was the point in getting a second passport, memorising the Russian alphabet and learning to say “Give me the papers! Quickly!” in 17 languages? Espionage has moved on, and the thought of learning to programme spam filters for mobile phones doesn’t have the same cachet.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 19 February 2012