covid-19

freeirishpoems

Day 27

swans at lough begSocial Distancing

(Those second two are less than 2m apart, surely?)

My Icelandic swans have left me. This is not a euphemism for ‘I’ve lost my marbles’ by the way, but neither is that, as I actually have lost my marbles, particularly the big, blue, cloudy Booler one I won off Aidso in p7. I would like to blame it on part-time wife’s vindictive practice of throwing my things out, or ‘tidying up’ as she calls it, but I am only approximately 98.2% certain that I did not mislay them myself, so I’ll keep that one off the charge sheet for the time being. When the first in line to the throne (not a position in the queue for the facilities in the hacienda) was young(er) and innocent(er), he once asked for marbles as a Christmas present. Pretty easy job for Santa, you’re thinking, but these had to be special marbles, to wit, they were to have miniature, 3D figures of Cú Chulainn encased within the glass. I wonder was that the same year he found out about the non-existence of Father Christmas?

The same boy has recently found out, due to the GCSE Religious Studies course he used to be following, about (what he believes to be) the non-existence of God. Illogically, he is very angry with God, even though He doesn’t exist. This takes part-time wife to the fair, but I actually enjoy the crack of engaging with what teenager 2 thinks are irrefutable arguments about why we should blame all the inequities and problems of the World on a deity that doesn’t exist. It’s not really a fair fight, as son and heir has only the one O Level so far (one he picked up before the meltdown) and it doesn’t look like he’ll be getting any more ‘real’ ones according to the latest fiction from the Department of Education. On a practical matter, he inquired as to when his new-found faith in the non-existence of God would result in his excusal from the (previously) weekly, family trundle to Mass. ‘When you’re paying rent,’ I replied, which both of us understood as a euphemism for ‘when you leave home’ as the notion of resident wage-earners actually handing over any dosh to their poverty-striken parents seems to have gone the way of all flesh. When he then produced the standard teenage whine that that wasn’t fair, with admirable patience and good grace, I explained to him, again, that nobody ever said life was going to be fair. He’s a good guy really, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have prayed (illogically – he is a teenager) for something like Covid-19 in order for him to get out of going to Mass. But I don’t wish to saddle him with complete blame for the Kerfuffle in case he gets Twitter-shamed.

In yet another silver lining to the pandemic currently sweeping the World and causing countless deaths, Toome Fair was called off yesterday. Actually, it was called off a couple of weeks ago, but yesterday was when it didn’t take place. Which is a blessing without parallel for me, in particular, but also, I suspect, for most of the residents of Greater Toome. Because the whole thing is a crock of shite: Nutt’s Corner goes to the country for the day sort of affair, stalls selling plastic on both sides of the main street, a funfair with only about two good rides in it, more fast food-poisoning outlets than you could shake a stick at and, down a side street off the main drag, a herd of straggly, knackered horses and ponies whose proper, humane habitat should be the inside of a can of dog food. But, because it is there and within the carrying distance of one of the sounds a type of hunting dog makes if the wind is in the right direction ( a beagle’s gowl, for newcomers to the blog), the annual debate about to go or not to go plays out for about two hours on Easter Monday before I eventually force the resident teenagers into the car and drive in the direction of the nearest village to the extensive estate where I have been living for thirteen years now in social isolation – this lockdown stuff is old hat to me. The debate occurs because the teenagers are never actually sure whether or not they want to go, when they get there refuse to go on either of the two good rides in the crappy funfair, do not want to risk a trip to the hospital by trying any of the fried delicacies on offer and generally slouch from one end of the town to the other as if it is the last place in the World they want to be and are there against their will. Which they generally are, as it ends up being me who physically stuffs them into the back seat of the car before driving off in a mood that can best be described as not holiday. The part-time wife, being a local and having had her fill as a teenager of drunk, Lent-freed, old farmers passing comments on her nubility outside the one hotel in the half-horse town, waves us off from the front entrance to the estate with a smile bordering on the malevolent but firmly in the vindictive region. She’ll get hers later when she has to deal with the returned teenagers traumatised with the embarrassment of having been present when their father drew attention to himself by speaking in public – the second worst crime in the teenage faults of parents book. Work out the worst crime for yourselves; I shouldn’t have to do all the work.

My presence is a sort of community service to my disadvantaged neighbours. (Their main disadvantage lies in not being me.) It affords them the opportunity of pulling their one joke out of their dry well of humour [well of dry humour? – Ed] (I know what I meant – me) as they meet us on our derogatory slump past the nearly dead equines. ‘Gonna buy her a wee pony, Philip?’ they mock-inquire, one after the other like it is the wittiest line known to mankind. Some of them, though, are obviously spouting the line out of near maniacal desperation, having themselves fallen for the line one year and actually purchased a pony for wee Jacinta, now finding themselves saddled (did you see …?) with the expense of hay, building a stable and a good field ruined by being churned into mulch by the hooves of the death row escapee. Like your first mate who gets a mortgage, the only way out of their Hell that they can imagine is by dragging everyone else into the same pit of pestilence they are in. Sorry lads, I did not come down the Lagan in a bubble and you would need to get up earlier in the morning, or later at night, to catch me out with that one.

So, yeah, the swans. Upped and left with not so much as a ‘Thanks for all the grass, Phil. See you next year!’ Gone just like they came, akin to a practitioner of larceny during the hours of darkness. You can read more about them here, but be warned, there are more inaccuracies in that article than there are Icelandic swans on the shores of Lough Beg. I might come back to them, but one of the main ones is in the first sentence: Lough Beg is not in County Derry; neither is it in County Londonderry, wherever that is. My semi-private lough is the border between Antrim and Derry, and so, like hailstone accents à la Graeme McDowell, MBE, it is neither one thing nor the other, neither here nor there.

I have no idea what prompts the swans (Whopper swans they are called, as opposed to their disabled cousins) to leave so suddenly. I would advise them that two sunny days in a row here is not a reliable indicator of a change of season. In fact, I would further advise them to stay the odd year and enjoy the severity of an Irish Summer if it is blue-knuckle cold they are after. But, there they are, gone, just like les neiges d’antan. They always piss off in the middle of the night though. Maybe there is less air traffic between Lough Beg International Airport and Iceland at that time of the day and this means fewer traffic jams on their way home. Or maybe they are just a bit embarrassed about all that free, Irish grass (will only our grasses grow free?) they have been stuffing into themselves for the past six months or so without express permission from the owners of the amphibious fields. I am pretty sure some of the fat fuckers will have to pay an excess baggage fine when they arrive in Reykjavik airport, and good enough for them, I say. (For clarity’s sake, I will point out that I am referring to the overweight swans, not to the fat fuckers of farmers who own the watery fields.)

I will miss them, though. But they’ll be back. And so, worse luck, will Toome Fair.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 24

I called round to see Seamus Heaney this morning. He’s doing all right, since you ask, still in the same place I left him (have you got that pic, Mal?) but somewhat embarrassed now about his whole ‘there is no afterlife’ stance. But no doubt he’ll be forgiven for that, after an appropriately lengthy period in Purgatory (a place where there is no time by the way, as far as I understand eternity, which is pretty far, actually; to the Moon and back, maybe).

It being Easter and all (but not Easter Saturday, cf yesterday’s diatribe), for reasons best known to myself, I was also going to call in on two of our successful hunger strikers (ie they died) who are buried in the new annex to Bellaghy Cemetery. It needed an annex because it is a very popular cemetery: people are dying to get into it! (That ‘joke’ is copyright this guy, who has gone viral with his rendition of a song in Irish to celebrate his own birthday; I would accuse him of vanity, but look at his hair, for Christ’s sake! When I say he has gone viral, I do not mean he has boreohnovirus, by the way, but, again, look at his hair – maybe he does?) But there was a badly-written typed notice on both entrances to the cemetery informing me that, due to the Covid-19 regulations, it was closed to ‘visitors except for burials and funerals’. Are you with me? First, can you have a burial without a funeral attached? And, more egregiously, why would there be any visitors at either? Are people that stuck for something to do during lockdown? Badly-written, as I said, but beautifully typed all the same. Credit where it’s due.

So I cannot let you know how either Thomas McElwee or Francis Hughes are getting on in the afterlife as I am very strict about obeying rules that happen to suit my personal purposes (I was already late and could not really afford three trips to the afterlife when I had only gone out for milk). And so, as there was neither a burial nor a funeral going on at the time to which I could inveigle an invitation, I will have to arrange some other opportunity to fulfill my Easter republican Duties – the Easter religious Duties have already been thrown out the window by the very organisation which instituted them. Changed times, indeed. Before I get back to the Heaney topic … do you know, I was pausing there waiting for SquarebracketHead to stick in his usual sarky comment, but I forgot it is Saturday and so his day off. Personally, I get no days off, and neither do you, gentle readers. Please remember there will be a class test after the ‘holidays’, at a time of my own choosing and on a topic off the top of my head, which will carry 31.27% of the final credit for this on-line course. Approximately. But, yes, one more interesting fact concerning Bellaghy Cemetery (both wings); there is a dead person in there sporting the spectacular first name ‘Adolf’. The surname is not Hitler, by the way. Now obviously this is not a traditional moniker in the locale as he is the only one in the place. For extra credit, the swots in the class should upload a pic of his headstone in the comments section (worked it out now, Shirleen? there is not a limit of one comment per lifetime, by the way), and add a brief note pertaining to the date of his death and, by extension backwards, his baptism.

Yeah, famous Seamus. I called round to see him to get a few hints. Not about poetry, obviously: that was never the strongest card in his hand. I noted, in passing to be sure, that there was a freshly-ploughed field next door to him, and chuckled to myself on the way up to his grave that he would have dug that. (What I have done there is too complicated to explain, but those who appreciate the fusion of misdirection, literary reference and jazz jargon should go to the top of the class … and jump off – we don’t want your sort in here.) No, I was in fact looking for hints for how to deal with the Kerfuffle, because our Seamie is suddenly, and probably quite unexpectedly for him, one of the leading world experts on the matter. Leo, the Gayshock, quoted him twice(ly) in his latest address to the half-nation (‘Take it down from the mast, Irish traitors/it’s a flag we Republicans claim/it will never belong to Free Staters/for you brought on it nothing but shame.’), and there is barely a commentator worth his salt in this neck of the woods who has not dipped into the Heaney well. So, along with the phrases ‘loved ones’ and ‘existential crisis’, I am today proclaiming a total ban on quoting Heaney in relation to Covid-19. And the great man himself is in total agreement with this ban. He told me so himself this morning during our chat, and no one can prove that he didn’t. One other point, could whoever is doing it please stop leaving coins at the foot of the headstone? He is not some sort of a secular saint, the grave is very cheap to upkeep and needs no voluntary contributions from fans and, personally, I would find notes weighted down with a stone much easier to collect and carry off with me: coins make such an unsightly bulge in an Armani suit, don’t you find?

One last hint for the speech writers tripping over themselves for pertinent and insightful quotations to stuff into the mouths of illiterate public figures: there are other writers in the world. Just by way of example and not in any way as an exercise in practising a wind instrument that I own, I will leave you today with one of the freshly-minted triads I published some years ago, as it happens in a book in Irish with a title in Latin in order to put off all but the most esoteric of readers. By the way, the school of Irish triad writing I thus founded is closed for the foreseeable future due to restrictions on funerals (it never really opened, but I live in hope), as are my network of illegal hedge schools around the country. Here is the triad; good luck with google translate!

Trí rud a imeoidh:

an ghealach is an ghrian;

a dtáinig ariamh;

an chiotaí seo eadrainn.

Slán go Phil!

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 4

As this is becoming somewhat of a sartorial advice blog (which was not my intention when I started it – when I find out what my intention was when I started it, I will let you know), I’ll kick off by letting you know that today I am wearing full Sunday best. That is, a three-piece suit (non-matching waistcoat to hint at how ‘radical’ I am), white shirt and formal brogues. As the suit is light blue (aren’t they all nowadays?), the shoes are brown – I cannot stand that brown shoes with dark suit crack: who thought that was a good look? The shirt, while formal, is collarless so that no one can demand I wear a tie with the outfit. Ties are so 20th century. Interviews and funerals, those are the only two occasions appropriate for ties anymore. One more point; the suit actually fits me. Whoever is advising the young men I see walking about in suits obviously two sizes too small for them is either having a laugh or was born blind. But are there no full-length mirrors in these young men’s houses where they do the final check before they go out the door, simultaneously tapping two pockets to check they have keys and wallet on them? Obviously not, or they would be as appalled as I am at the sight of a simian-type creature dressed in ill-fitting human clothes with bulges showing in all the wrong places.

The concept of Sunday best will probably soon join those other aspects of life like record players and film for cameras that I have to explain to my children in their weekly social history lessons. When we used to be allowed to go to Mass (-7PC), I would note the diminishing number of old men decked out in the full whistle and flute garb, straggling hair plastered down over the bald spot on the back of their heads, bright red neck bulging out over a collar starched to within an inch of its life. Mind you, having seen the state of their clothes during the week, their suit was probably the only clean thing they had left in the wardrobe come Sunday. But, for those men, after their weekly wash on a Saturday night (whether they needed it or not), Sunday Mass was an occasion marked by pulling on the fresh set of underwear that would do them for the week and clobbering up in the full suit and tie attire. Like the pint after Mass and before lunch, this band of dapper pensioners will soon go the way of all flesh, and join wrist watches, tape recorders and washing dishes by hand in the history bin. I will miss them. The men, not the dishes.

So here I am, all dressed up and – increasingly – nowhere to go. Why the suit? Well, why not? It will confuse the resident teenagers and break the monotony a bit. (An interesting – to me, anyway – linguistic side note: for Irish speakers, the teenage years begin at the age of 11 and not the 13 prescribed for the monoglot English speakers amongst us; whether or not this means that Irish-speaking 11-year-olds display those annoying traits of teenagers two years before their linguistically-challenged contemporaries is the subject of my up-coming PhD thesis, to be jointly supervised by the schools of Celtic Studies and Sociology at QUB, if it ever opens again.)

Also, and wouldn’t you know it, the plumber turned up yesterday! And me wearing a dressing-gown so tatty that Arthur Dent would have been proud of it. Yip, after six months of waiting to get the downstairs shower fixed (see references to ‘bathroom permitting’ in previous posts), we gave up on the ‘real’ plumber and asked the wee lad down the lane to do it; I am not even sure if he is fully-qualified yet, but I do not care as I now have a working downstairs shower in a room off my study and, as yet, the resident teenagers do not know it is operational again, so I can skip the queue for the upstairs one and wash myself whenever I feel like it – except on Saturdays, of course. As men are allowed to pee in the shower as well, this means my en-suite study is – nearly – fully set up for when my family ramp up the social distancing and stick me into a cocoon because of my diabetes. They can also leave food out for me on one of the windowsills if they want, so that is that sorted. As for the other thing … maybe, to be delicate about it, I can retrain my bowels to operate during the wee hours of the morning, meaning I can sneak out of my cocoon study to the toilet half a metre away along the corridor in the east wing of the hacienda and not risk catching anything off the other residents, who are not in an at-risk group. Oh the joys of this brave, new world.

So the suit covers me (do you see what I did there?) in case the electrician turns up today. But there is as much chance of that happening as there was of the real plumber turning up yesterday. If anyone is looking for career advice for their children after Armageddon, send them to one of the trades: they will never be short of work, and, with the amount of moolah they will earn, they will probably be able to afford a private tutor to teach them all they ever wanted to know about the nuclear physics/soap opera studies/comparative linguistics they thought they wanted to study at university.

The suit is also an indication that, despite it being the weekend, I am actually going to do some work work today. I have figured out that, as I know what the boss will be asking me to do, if I have it done in advance but do not tell her that, when she asks me to do it on Monday I can agree wholeheartedly and negotiate a deadline of early Tuesday morning for it, thus leaving me free to implement my next social experiment: incorporating a Spanish siesta in my working-from-home day. I’ll let you know how I get on with that.

I have just noticed that my organisation has ditched the term ‘working from home’ in favour of the new ‘remote working’. The cynic in me insists that this is because those senior managers who previously availed of the opportunity denied to us plebs did nothing remotely like work while they were working from home.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 3

It is Saturday, apparently: it is already getting hard to tell the days apart. Maybe, hopefully, we get spared the daily Boris bluster on Saturdays? Although he can be quite amusing. Yesterday he defined going to the pub as ‘an ancient, unalienable right of free-born British people’. Funny, I do not recall seeing that right in any of the international statements of human rights, nor even in the Magna Carta. And what about those British people still apparently labouring under the yoke of slavery? Are they not allowed a swift one or a drop of the cratur to temper their miserable existence?

Saturday, so. That does away with both the shower conundrum and the dressing gown enigma. Since moving to the country, I have been introduced to the refreshing concept of ‘clean dirt’. Maybe because they are surrounded by so much real – and dangerous – dirt (slurry, slurry and slurry, in that order), the natives have a fairly relaxed attitude to things like cobwebs and dust that send some city-dwellers into a frenzy of cleaning. Never take a picture off a wall in a country house: while the amorphous, grey mass sticking to the wall behind it could, at a stretch, be a class of abstract art, the bean an tí does actually get a bit embarrassed if you expose it, especially if she is your mother-in-law and already wary of your sophisticated, city-slicker ways and notions.

This notion of ‘clean dirt’ extends too to the human person. Apparently, you can ‘wash yourself too much’, and, especially if you have not been playing in enough ‘clean dirt’ during your childhood, further deplete your body’s natural resistance and immune system. I am more than game to go along with these notions as they mean I have no hoovering duties to speak of, and dusting is becoming a quaint tradition practised in that different country called The Past. In an attempt to integrate myself with the locals, therefore, a Saturday shower would be an act of rebellion and make me stand out, and for the sake of community relations, I am willing to forego the daily ablution.

As for getting dressed, you can only find my house if you get lost, so there is no real point in putting on any other attire than the tatty bathrobe as I am 99.7% certain there will be no visitors to deal with today. Sure I would only be taking the clothes off again in about 15.2 hours, so what’s the point? And, as there are no shops or pubs or gyms to go out to, clothes would seem to be an extravagance too far.

I will wash my hands though.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 2

To shower, or not to shower? That would appear to be the question. Normally – bathroom permitting – not an issue at all, but given that for the first time I will be moving a total of four metres (mostly vertically) to get from my bed to my work station, is it really worth the hassle? And then, with all this social distancing going on, personal hygiene is not the priority it once was, surely?

I say ‘for the first time’ because, although this is Day 2 of distancing myself socially, emotionally and spiritually so far from my workplace that I do not plan to go near it for the next three months, embarrassingly I had to show up there yesterday, having forgotten on the last working day PC (Pre-Covid) to take the charger for my laptop home with me.

When I was there, I went into town to get a few essentials – cigarettes, cat food, a wireless mouse – and did my civic duty by not attempting to buy any toilet roll. There wasn’t any anyway. Belfast was a bit of a ghost town, a smattering of pedestrians about the place (maybe the rest of them are still at work passing the virus on to each other?) and any shop or business I went into had weird new rules about queuing a metre behind each other and only approaching the till when summoned. As a practised eavesdropper, I can report that 99.2% of the conversations concerned bore-oh no-virus: not much material there for the novel.

Even if I do – bathroom permitting – have a shower, another quandary then presents itself: to bathrobe, or not to bathrobe? Do I really need to go to the bother of getting dressed to sit in my own study in the middle of the countryside with a laptop on my knee? But the boss might decide to do one of those video-conference calls, and the bathrobe is a bit tatty. I could probably get away with it by making sure the camera only shows me from the neck up.

I am beginning to appreciate how much Covid-19 has affected our lives. Normally I do not do any thinking at all in the mornings – late afternoon is much better for that kind of stuff, I find. It’s usually just wake up, cigarette, coffee, second cigarette, diabetic drugs, shower, second coffee, third cigarette and into the car and off to work. Oh, I usually get dressed at some point in the routine too; generally after the shower. But here I am this morning stuck in the whole shower/no shower, bathrobe/no bathrobe conundrum. As they say, life will never be the same.

Mind you, it is only 6.26am, so maybe I should just go back to bed for an hour or two? The laptop isn’t going anywhere (now that it’s fully charged) and will still be waiting for me when I re-wake up at a more respectable hour. Problem solved! See you tomorrow.