On Renouncing Swearing for Lent

An Spailpín Fánach has decided to conduct an experiment, and is renouncing swearing – or cursing, if you like – for Lent.

It’s been quite some time since your faithful chronicler of contemporary Irish life gave up anything for Lent. The priests of Ballina in the County Mayo in the 1970s still glowed with the reforms of Vatican II, but your narrator and his fellow urchins had the black hearts of schoolboys everywhere, and we knew soft boys when we saw them.

The sandal-wearers told us that loving God in a positive way was just as good as that nasty old self-sacrifice. We nodded assent eagerly, and then off to Brennan's sweetshop with us to gorge our fat little faces on blackjacks, curly-wurlys, catch bars, gobstoppers, sticks of Eniscrone rock and, best of all, the 1970s equivalent of the asphodel that blooms in the Elysian fields, super refined sugar marketed as sherbet, sold in yellow paper packets and consumed by dipping a stick of liquorice into the powder and sucking away. Good times.

An Spailpín is not necessarily in the process of a religious conversation; my Lenten resolution has a practical aspect. Like most Irish countrymen An Spailpín swears like a sailor. The blog stays clean – someone seems to have already cornered the swearing market there – but in his private life your faithful narrator almost unconsciously embellishes every remark with a frightful curse, rich in scope and intent.

And I don’t want to be that guy any more. I hear parents swearing at their children in town in the most vile way and feel sick to my marrow. I don’t want to be on that side any more. It was the same with giving up smoking; eventually, you realise that while it was cool for Bogie and Bacall in the forties, right now smoking is very much a Lee and Nat’lee pastime.

Swearing is a loss to the language on both sides; everyday discourse becomes cheapened as it’s run through with qualifiers that don’t really mean anything any more, and then in moments of extremis when there’s only one word that can describe something, that word’s meaning and impact is lost from overuse.

Perpetual swearing can let you down. One of the greatest philosophers I have known – from the rebel county of Cork, of course – told me once that he had a swear switch in his head, that allowed him to converse in one language with his dear mother, and in quite another with myself. I know what he means, and I seldom cross those circuits myself.

But all the same; you never know when you’ll be sitting in traffic, and someone cuts across you, and you get out of the car and make certain remarks pertaining to uncertain ancestry and unlawful carnal knowledge and all manner of stuff, and some little five thousand year old nun gets out of the car – a 1983 Austin Metro, or some similar chariot – and starts apologising to you, and the ground does not open up and swallow you. It never does.

The chief problem with swearing denial, of course, is what to use to fill the gap. Nothing ever seems to quite replace the oomph. The writers of Battlestar Galactica delight in using the neologism “frack” but it sounds rather too close to the root; a lot like Norman Mailers use of “fug” in the Naked and the Dead. How odd it seems now that the publishers baulked at the original. It wouldn’t surprise me if people were Christening their kids with that word now.

A friend of An Spailpín delighted in using the word “crikey” for a week or two five years ago. It was charming, but it didn’t stick. She enjoyed a week as a visitor from Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers, but she’s very much back to herself since.

An Spailpin was always charmed by the pouting Scarlett O’Hara, and her expression of “fiddle-dee-dee” when she found out that the big dance had been cancelled because the Yankees were rampaging through Dixie. Myles na Gopaleen cooked up some marvellously baroque insults in the fifties, such as thoorlramawn and goshcogue, most of which he hurled at the misfortunate Doctor Alfred O’Rahilly of UCC (“he may deny he is a thoorlramawn, but he cannot deny that he is Cork”).

The rugby against England will be the first big hurdle, of course, and it won’t be easy to watch Mayo play Westmeath in Charlestown next month with no stronger injuction to calm the nerves than “for goodness’ sake, referee!” but if a man can see those challenges through he is ready for the greater challenges ahead. Wish me luck.





Technorati Tags: culture, people, manners, Lent, swearing

The Hare of Timahoe

A friend of An Spailpín Fánach ran in the marathon yesterday, and it seemed only meet to write a ballad in his honour. His time was four hours twenty-six, which has been extended in the text to four and a half, for reasons of metre - this is what you call poetic license. This can be sung to the tune of The Wild Colonial Boy, should anybody feel the need.

Deep inside the counting house
Among the piles of gold
There lived and worked an Irish boy
Whose story must be told
The gochi berry replaced dry sherry
As he counted out the dough
Then he went and ran the marathon
The hare of Timahoe

The runners lined up in a bunch
With no heed of the bitter chill
Six and twenty impe'ral miles
Stretched out between flat and hill
The starters gun began the run
The streamed up Westland Row
And the foremost in that gallant field
Was the hare of Timahoe

They passed O’Connell’s statue
And also the great Parnell’s
They tore up through the NCR
Past Mountjoy’s lonely cells
At Inchicore their feet got sore
Some hit their first plateau
But he drove on regardless
That hare of Timahoe

The pace picked up at Dolphin’s Barn
For reasons best unsaid
And the KCR and Dartry sweet
Saw the first contenders shed
His teeth he clenched, he never flinched
His arms went to and fro
Sure I’m only warming up
Said the hare of Timahoe

Stillorgan now after twenty miles
The home of the bourgeoisie
The lesser men, they fell to the earth
Like the price of property
The credit crunch has left a bunch
Of prices wan and low
I’ll come back and buy a place
Said the hare of Timahoe

The fanlit streets of Merrion Square
Were hosts to the finish line
The hare sped through the waiting throng
Four thirty was his time
He didn’t pause but set his jaws
As for porter he did go
Just a hundred yards to Toner’s! cried
The hare of Timahoe





Technorati Tags: people, Dublin, marathon, Hare of Timahoe

Support Guide Dog Training at this Weekend's London Marathon

Roy Keane is not the only Irish celebrity with a grá for the guide dogs. In a synchronous moment, as the Sunderland manager was here in Dublin last week, An Spailpín’s friend and heroine Orpha Phelan was yet again stomping out the hard training yards to raise money for guide dog training.

Orpha is running the London marathon on Sunday to raise money for the Guide Dogs Association. I can think of no more noble charity, as I can think of few things more terrifying than being blind. John Milton said that eyesight was “the one talent which is death to hide,” and he found out the hard way. Milton himself went blind in 1652, at the age of forty-four, having seen the light fade for many years before that. That’s what writing by candle-light will do to you.

There were no guide-dogs in Milton’s day. These extra-ordinary animals are a twentieth century invention, and it’s horrifying to think of what life could be like without them. Consider making your way home from the office today without being able to see – how do you turn off the computer? Get out the door? Navigate the streets?

The idea is beyond terror, and yet people do it, every day, thanks to these extraordinary animals. In a civilised society, guide dog training would be part of social services, and would not be reliant on big hearted people like Orpha running marathons; perhaps we have a few steps of evolution to go yet.

But we haven’t evolved that much yet, unfortunately, and so Orpha will assemble early on Sunday morning with the other competitors at Greenwich, south of the Thames, with the twenty-six mile course stretching out before them. The course follows the great river itself, as in the lovely Ewan McColl song covered so beautifully on teh first Planxty album, Sweet Thames Flow Softly. First, the runners must face to Woolwich, turn, then back to Greenwich, and then cross the river after the half-way stage at Whitechapel and Limehouse, where Holmes and Watson found the game afoot so many times. Into Millwall then, where the congregation at Cold Blow Lane used to delight chanting “where’s your handbag, Dunphy?” at Roy Keane’s erstwhile biographer every Saturday in the 1970s.

Down and around by the Isle of Dogs then, before turning back east, smashing through the Wall at twenty miles and charging on back into Whitechapel, Holmes and Watson having successfully solved mysteries concerning specked bands, red-headed leagues and smashes statues of Bonaparte, before finally staggering into the great City of Westminster and collapsing, exhausted, at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Mrs Windsor should come out with a tray of tea and cakes; it would be the least she could do.

Reader, close you eyes, and imagine never opening them again. Then feel relieved and grateful, and click here to donate now to Orpha Phelan’s campaign to raise money for Guide Dogs. Best of luck M.






Technorati Tags: people, Orpha Phelan, London Marathon, guide dogs

How Not to Park the Car

Doesn't this take the biscuit? An Spailpín damn near put his own car up on the ditch in a popular multi-story parking lot in Galway over the weekend when he saw this attempt. It left two questions: Is it a display of Olympic incompetence, or of monumental selfishness? Astonishing.