The girl who read while walking

My pal Djerzi urged me to read Milkman by Anna Burns . . . as well as Memoir by John McGahern. After Memoir , I duly read Milkman: despite getting weak with a sense of dread about 100 / 350 pages in. Wot next:  Matrix? Memoir, Milkman, Mountolive? Mudbound? .

The narrator is MiddleSister, younger than FirstSister SecondSister and ThirdSister; but older than three WeeSisters who are creepily & engagingly knowing and precocious at 6, 7 and 8. There are three brothers in the sibship, at least one already dead from The Political Problems. The book is fiction but it is true that Anna Burns grew up in the Ardoyne, a Nationalist ghetto in North Belfast. Burns adopts peculiar euphemisms or alternative reality to distance her tale a bit from the primitive, repressed, sectarian reality that were her lived experience in the late 70s. Renouncers [of the State] and Defenders [of the state] live "on the other side of the road" from each other and have long ago stopped talking. But they are over there to be demonized by parents and paramilitaries as dangerous boogie-men. The archaic coded formal language and designations in Milkman conjure up Old Order Amish if not The Handmaid's Tale: handles like SecondSister, FirstBrotherInLaw, MaybeBoyfriend emphasise that nobody is an individual but each is defined by their relationships. This web of relationships form the community. Endogamy is as normal as it might be in a remote village in Uttar Pradesh with no cars but surrounded by wild beasts.

The fact that the narrator is dating Maybe-Boyfriend from another Renouncer ghetto is viewed with suspicion when there are so many suitable boys round the corner.  But she has already weirded out her community and set in train a firestorm of rumour, fantasies and lies because of her habit of reading while walking [it's often 19thC classic fiction, incl Walter Scott R]. In real life, our Dau.I the Librarian did this from the age of six into adulthood but nobody in Renouncer circles would dream of doing so. It's basic self-preservation: while reading, your situational awareness is damped to nil. In a world riven by car-bombs [whc prev], razzias [whc prev] and sit-in-judgmental nut-jobs from your own side: dreaminess can be fatal. 

At one point two of the older girls try to warn their wee sisters about a family member who is known [but not acknowledged - that would make life too easy] to be a bit pervy " . . . if he tries to lure you in on the pretext of anything - science, art, literature, linguistics, social anthropology, mathematics, politics, chemistry, the intestinal tract, unusual euphemisms, double-entry book-keeping, the three divisions of the psyche, the Hebrew alphabet, Russian nihilism, Asian cattle, twelfth-century Chinese porcelain, Japanese unit . . . [don't be fooled and try not to stay in the same room]". If this seems a rather broadly eclectic catalogue of wee sisters' interests, note that Narrator reads bedtime stories to them from Hardy, Kafka and Conrad. In a way the Wee Sisters are a metaphor of hope for a different future: despite having grown up under the same strictures and all under the age of 10, they are free-thinkers and curious about the world beyond their own ensiloed people.

As in McGahern's childhood, a generation earlier and South of the border, gender=sex and their binary lives and tasks are rigidly coded. Boys don't cook, unless they're gay; girls have to take it on the chin, fist-style; women may be the sole-bread-winners but none of the men at home will hoover through. Everyone drinks though, which doesn't help in matters like respect & dignity . . . nor a balanced budget. Men are In Charge, as they think, until they transgress into the domain of women. Then a delegation of outraged Lysistratas will soon tell them to fuck right off and go back to playing with their guns and tonka toys put them right. It sure is hard to Other your own Mother.

Spoiler: some of the Principals find their true selves and true love in the end. But so much collateral damage along the way.

Mission Custard-possible

In the run up to Christmas, I was tasked to "Get custard, Dunne's Own will do", so I did; indeed I bought 2 cartons because who's counting?. Turns out we didn't need custard over Christmas but pies were made in January and soon enough both cartons had been consumed. As old people with better than average discretionary income, we don't have to behave like impoverished students anymore: when the choice was either a Christmas tree or one bottle of Ruffino chianti. This last Christmas, in a crowded and getting crowdeder Dunne's stores, I snagged 2x Dunne's Own TetraPak Custard which was piled high-and-deep beside the dairy section. With better quality control, less stress, and 20/20 hindsight, I would obvs have bought Dunne’s Sweet and Creamy Fresh Custard [as R] instead . . . at 6x the price but what the heck it's Christmas. Here's the price + ingredient data comparison:

Ingredient	Bird’s Tetra	Dunne’s Tetra	Dunne’s Fresh
Such much?	€6.00/kg	€1.00/kg	€6.00/kg
Milk, skimmed	✓	✓ Reconstit	✓ Irish
Buttermilk	✓	✓ Reconstit
Cream			✓ Irish 10%
Sugar	✓	✓	✓
Water		✓	✓
Starch	✓ Modified	✓ Mod maize	✓ Mod maize
Palm oil	✓	✓
Milk Powder	Whey	✓	✓
Flavoring	✓	Natural	Vanilla
Guar Gum			✓
Rapeseed Oil			✓
Carotenes	✓	✓	✓
		Paprika	Exhaust. GVB

Apart from the price, Bird's and Dunne's tetrapak custards look very similar. Dunne's save transport costs at some stage by shipping in powdered milk and buttermilk and reconstituting it with factory-local water.They also bling up the carotene colour with a few drops of paprika extract. Dunne's Fresh otoh go patriotic with Irish skimmed milk and a good jolt of Irish cream (rather than by-product bulker buttermilk). And none of that furrin [and ecologically disastrous] palm oil. Although the rapeseed oil is not Irish there is less of it than in Tetrapak Palmland. I guess the guar gum [a stabiliser found in ice-cream and other processed foods] compensates for rapeseed oil's food-engineering deficiencies. And it's also got "Exhausted Ground Vanilla Beans" which sounds a bit like roadkill.

Another late entry in the custard stakes [I'm not going to rejig my table!] is Avonmore Luxury Fresh Custard - which apparently we did eat at Christmas. It is yet more pricey at €7.00/kg and doesn't have guar-gum or palm oil: (Milk; Cream (34%); Water; Sugar; Skim Milk Powder; Modified Maize Starch; Natural Colour (Mixed Carotene); Flavouring; Vanilla Beans). Gotta say that sounds worth the 18% €xtra in the fresh custard stake.

But heaven-a-mercy how hard can it be to, like, make custard from a carton of last-forever* Bird's custard powder? For starters it has waaay fewer ingredients: Maize starch; Salt; Colour (Annatto = Norbixin); Flavouring. If you follow the instructions (heat 2 tbsp of powder, ditto sugar and a pint of milk) it comes in at ~€1.60/kg: more expensive than Dunne's Tetrapak at €1.00 but much cheaper than branded or fancy custard. Still cheaper if you're think you're on minimum wage in your own kitchen and add the 5-10 minutes extra prep [mix mix stir stir heat heat] time. [* for some definitions of forever: I made up a generous double portion of Bird-dust-cust from a container marked Mar 2023 - it was fine]

Purists can make 'custard' using corn-flour at €2.60/kg rather than custard powder at €8.10/kg but that will only bring down the cost to ~€1.30/kg for an off-white sweet paste the consistency of custard but the wrong colour and no vanilla notes.

It's been a while, but I've done many prev of these food engineering ingredient comparisons - Mince Pies -  Cakes - Pot pies - Powdered milk - Pizza - Tarte au Chocolat - Sausages - Sou'wester cake - Spice burger.

Arrangement in Grey and Gray

We have tried adulting, accommodation division, before. Last time [late Nov 2024] it was left to me to book a room in a hotel, I assumed there would be a bath-tub and was disappointed. Hotels are so eye-watering expensive that y'have to squeeeze them for value. And soaking in a hot bath is one way to Win. 

In mid-Jan we were short-noticed [as always by such events] by a funeral in Dublin. It turned out that the Talbot Hotel Stillorgan runs a Sunday special "dinner bed and breakfast for two @ €190". We could have done it cheaper: getting up in the dark, driving 160km, the last part of which would be in the rush-hour, finding somewhere to park. But we chose to adult it with Talbot. That meant driving up country on a sunny(ish) Sunday afternoon "hello trees, hello sky." The funeral mass was an 8 minute walk from the hotel, so we solved the parking problem also.

I wasn't going to get caught w/o tub a second time and was re-assured to see a🛁emoji in the small print of the Sunday Special. Gotta say that the corridors upstairs have a First Person Shooter vibe. The only coloured objects were a pair of fire extinguishers where the corridor jinks L and then abruptly R and then again left L. I noted that the extinguishers were of two different shapes/sizes. Do I feel any confidence that I would know how to operate either? I do not! I did notice quite a lot of small print but reading the instructions when things are hotting up seems too little too late. I guess the answer is run like buggery leave the premises as smartly as possible without promoting panic.

We dropped our bags, shook out our funereal duds, and repaired downstairs for our "free" dinner. Which was fine. We tipped based on the full value of the meal, not just the extras [dhrink!] for which we paid the servor. Then I drew my bath:

Which was A Task, equivalent to making a strange rental car Go. At home we have a bath with a plug, on a chain, and a hot tap and a cold tap. A child of seven can manage it. This child of seven-ty was Baffled @ Talbot. Clearly the silver disc at the bottom of the bath was the plug . . . but how to open /close the orifice? Wearing my BigBoy ManOfTheWolrd pants I recognised the top disk as a hot&cold mixer tap. _Eventually_ without calling Reception [✓]; but not without pulling the front of it clean off in my hand [χ] - ooops; I worked out that the middle disk was both the water inlet AND the plug-cover opener [quarter turn anti-clockwise does the trick]. Very stressy, I needed a long hot bath after my exertions. If you are wearing your Antonioni's BlowUp pants you'll see me reflected in the tap disk.

Title a reference to Whistler's Mother. Also: gray is darker than grey [prev].

Right from Wrong

 I started my first academic job in October 1983 = a long time ago. As with other work, I was usually at my desk some time before 0900hrs. This gave me time to chat to Eileen the woman who cleaned the rooms on my corridor. Over the next couple of years we got to be good friends although I also got to know rather too much about her circumstances and family. Her son Stephen was working as a lorry-driver and happy-out to set his own times and make good money. By Eileen's account, he had been precociously brilliant in primary school particularly with maths but he was also a handful: always jigging around in class and being mildly, sometimes charmingly, disruptive. Years later, Stephen and Eileen were watching a TV documentary about the epidemiological connexion between ADHD and tartrazine = E120 = Yellow 5b. "Blimey Mum, that was me!?!" If there'd been less Fanta in the fridge he might have gone to college like me and be driving a particle accelerator not a truck. The stars had to align for a working class kid to get a BSc; but those were the days when third level education was effectively free to users.

Jacob Dunne grew up on an estate in Nottingham with even fewer advantages than Stephen. We met him a month ago talking about Prison Reform, Masculinity, Restorative Justice . . . and killing a random chap with an unlucky punch. After that interview, I reserved his book Right From Wrong (2021) in the library and read all 200+ pages on Twelfth Night. The advantages of being retired include being able to spend a Monday on the sofa reading a book pausing only to get more logs for the fire and tea for concentration.

I dithered about starting the book for a couple of weeks because a) I had other library books to read b) I had the 1 hr exec summary of his life story already c) there's only so much gritty Northern working class grind a chap can handle. But once I started, it was hard to put it down. Despite many failings on the copy editor front: p.3 "Widford has a more gentile, village feel . . ." p.63 "that wasn't not the case". And some tired repetitive phrasing: rumours / news always spreads like wildfire and on the weekends everyone lets their hair down. 

As a child in primary school Jacob was bright and engaged when he chose to be. But, like Stephen, he was easily bored by school and tended to be distracted and drifty. Things plunged into the abyss academically in secondary school but got exciting, and not in a good way, out on the streets: drink, bare-knuckle fights, vandalism, theft, dealing. 

Remarkably, after jail, with help from the probation service and social services and some lucky breaks with the media, he restarted secondary schooling ten years late. He is smart and articulate, so aced exams and was sponsored to University by The Longford Trust; getting a 1st class honours degrees in . . . Criminology. Twelve years on from prison, he's elbowed a rung on the property ladder, and married with two kids. He's learned from his journey and is determined to give back to the community with raised (and failed) him. Talking a capella to schools, TEDx, prisoners, prison officers, the telly: initially pro bono, latterly for money like all the other experts / pundits / grifters [pick whatever suits your prejudice] on the circuit. 

One of his points is that education and training is largely irrelevant to the skills needed to thrive in life and in the workplace. A bit like me being ace at The Calculus in school and college but never using those tools at any time during 40 years as a professional scientist! You can get a permanent pensionable job as a prison officer after only eight weeks training. Only half a day of which explicitly addresses mental health! The square logo is an aide memoire for those in an asymmetric relationship: officer/prisoner;  teacher/student; parent/child. 

• to is when power tells the dispossessed how things will be.  
• My way or the highway thinking gets people's back up and is therefore counter-productive
• for is when power tries to be kind by helping people to the correct answer / behaviour / solution
• but cutting the apron-strings is an essential part of adulting  
• with is usually better: through example, empathy and tough love, the dispossessed are given the chance of sorting it out for themselves
• it can be work and requires a long game to break the cycle of learned helplessness 
• not is worse than everything: when power walks away with "I taught them but they didn't learn" and "they're too ugly, disrespectful, stupid, angry, other to learn anyway".

I had a rush of aha! with this characterization: in class at The Institute we all learned more and better when I, nominally the adult in the room, professed to know-not the answer. And every year on my watch, every kid in the room got to be autoclave liaison officer ALO at least once.

Victim-blaming is much easier and cheaper than fixing the systemic societal issues that generate victims. Breaking generational cycles (of anger, despair, violence and disrespect) is hard. 

Éirigh a Naomh Manchán!

Arise St Manchán! For reasons, which may become clear, I've been fossicking among the bones of Irish saints since my annual devoirs upon St Fursey's Day. There are A Lot of Irish Saints: incl 25 of them canonized in a single swooosh by Pope Leo in 1902. There are more RC saints than there are days of the year, so there is a mort o' doubling up for Feast-days. Perhaps the most notable being the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul celebrated with panache on 29 June each year. Peter Paul Rubens [R] was so named b/c born on the Eve of that day in 1577. If there was a Pope of Woo, they would have already elevated Manchán Magan, who died cruel young last October to their list of Alternative Saints.

There are [at least] two St Mancháns stalking the calendar of Irish saints, the more famous is Manchán of Mohill who doubles up with St Valentine on 14th February. But Saint Manchán mac Silláin (died 664) is venerated locally [Lemanaghan, between Ballycumber and Ferbane in King's County] on 24th of January. [sharing the day with many other saints and martyrs incl St Francis of Sales]

Last year, you may remember, Storm Éowyn blasted through Ireland for a shortcut on the morning of 24th Jan 2025 felling out a few trees for us [Darragh in December 2024 was more damaging] but generally felling more across the country and recording record wind-speeds. Some people were still without electric power two full weeks after the storm and insurable damage reached €300 million.

When the wind abated in the evening, as every year, Offaly woman Aoife Phelan took herself and the kids to the Holy Well at Lemanaghan. The childer were delirah because Éowyn had uprooted 4 substantial trees in the compound and they had a whoopin' and hollerin' climbing frame to play on instead of just a splash of holy water. As you do "We took some pictures of them climbing them and it was only looking back on the photographs later, that they saw that there could be something there," Ms Phelan said. Closer inspection revealed a skull and so Heritage were called and they've spent some time excavating the site previously unregistered as a graveyard.

Among other protocols, the archaeologists sent some of the human bones off to QUBelfast for radiocarbon C₁₄ dating. That test is known for giving quite large error bars - it's better at 000s of years than 00s. But the dating range for at least one skeleton just includes the best guess for the death of Naomh Manchán.  Phelan and other devotees are making much of the good saint lurching himself from the earth on his own feast day. Resurrection? 'tis the end of days, my friends, shrive yourselves as soon as convenient . . . and No More Sinning.

Stabbed in the bathtub

9 y.o. me was entranced by a quip in Mad magazine "Caesar was stabbed in the forum . . . also the duodenum and the heart".  That was a satire on the glib pubquiz-level 'knowledge' most of us have about the classical tales of the Western Canon. We are legitimately confused because classical and modern authors have mangled the characters and their interactions to suit the plot. The relationships - who is related to whom - are more generally agreed; but the motivations and moral standings are up for grabs. Because Sophocles and Shagsper are wrestling with difficult ethical problems. One of the tragedies of our current age is that too many people are certain that they are right . . . and that Others are wrong. Not enough Metanoia, lads!  [changing your mind].

For Christmas I was given a signed-by-author copy of House of Names by Colm "Enniscorthy's own" Tóibín. It is another reworking of the Orestia a tangled tale of faith, bad-faith, betrayal, loyalty, incest, justice and murder. My last encounter with a modern version of a Classic tale was compelling my lab-mates to watch Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Antigone in the Abbey Theatre 22 years ago. Like everyone else, Tóibín takes what he wants from the old story to give it his own twist. Hopefully, he and we-the-readers can make the result relevant to our lives today and come out the better for it. I bet you sixpence that he had a particular Wexford garden, with stone steps, in mind when he wrote the scene for the climactic matricide. 

Agamemnon, the Patriarch at the centre of the tale, is a) a mighty warrior b) the brother of Menelaus c) married to Clytemnestra. When Menelaus' wife Helen runs off to Troy with Paris, Agamemnon is obliged (with other Greek chieftains - 1,000 ships are launched) to voyage to Troy to get her back. Whoa problem!: none of the ships can leave Greek ports because of contrary winds. It is announced that [note passive tense] a favourable wind can be achieved IF Agamemnon sacrifices his elder daughter Iphigenia. The girl's mother Clytemnestra is pissed off at this [peculiar to modern eyes] bargain but, as a woman in a world of testosterone-driven blokes, she cannot avert the outcome: neither slaughter-daughter nor coincident wind.

Clytemnestra hesitates before killing the sleeping Agamemnon; Aegisthos pushes her on. Pierre-Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) [see L]. While Agamemnon et al. have been battering at each other and the walls of Troy, Clytemnestra has shacked up with her husband's first cousin Aegisthos. Of Iphigenia's siblings, Elektra is hanging out, somewhat enigmatically, in the Palace; but Orestes, the son-and-heir, is somewhere off stage. Troy having been sacked and Helen parcelled up and returned to her husband, Agamemnon is ready for a triumphant return to his patrimony. Clytemnestra more or less immediately murders her husband in the bath and cements her relationship with Aegisthos. Orestes feels obliged to avenge his father's death by killing his mother. Just as his father felt obliged to kill his own daughter.

That's never going to end well. Reciprocal atrocity has not promoted universal well-being: not during The Troubles, not in WWII, not in Gaza. It's after the end of Tóibín' verrsion, but in ancient versions of the Orestes tale has him judged for his matricidal tendencies . . . rather than revenge-killed out of hand. This is said to indicate evolution in society towards a system governed by agreed rules of law rather than right-of-might and blood-debt. But sensitive moderns might also note that the outcome is much harsher when women kill men, than when men kill women. The part played by Elektra in the matricide is more ambiguous: different authors give her more or less destructive agency.

dramatis personnae and further scandalous behaviour below the fold:

Heart of Darkness

John McGahern has been aired on The Blob because banned for scandalizing the theocracy which was running Ireland at the time. He was not the most prolific of the pantheon of Irish writers but his short list of novels sold well [if not in the Republic]and won literary prizes. I've read a few; coming back for more even though they tend to black-dog rather than pink-fluffy. Djerzi, one of my oldest pals came to stay for a tuthree days and he insisted I read McGahern's 'Memoir' which was published 20 years ago. We're both a bit institutionalized so I can obey orders. Our local part-time mini-library had a copy, so I added Memoir to our pile of something for the weekend and sacked out for most of a rainy Sunday to read it.

McGahern grew up in Co Leitrim, the oldest of a family of seven created by a school teacher and her Garda Sergeant husband. She contributed sparkle, ideas, cookies and unconditional love; he contributed the starting teaspoonful and a pervasive bullying sense of his own importance. The family would have been larger if the poor woman hadn't sickened and died, from breast cancer, when she was 42 and John/Sean was 10.  Even before the mother died, the household supported a succession of young girls to help with the children and housework. Boys were never taught how to sew on a button, let alone how to get ingredients together and cook a nutritious meal. After the mother's death, the Help was required to step into her place with assistance from any girl-childer as they became competent (before their time in a foreshortened childhood?). The rest of their childhoods were endured in the Garda Barracks in Cootehall [R].

I'm a generation younger than McGahern and grew up in a different country. When I was 6/7, my sister and I attended a primary school in Portsmouth. Towards the end of the one academic year we spent there, I boasted that I had never been beaten. Aha hubris, in that final fortnight, for trifling transgressions I was hit with a stick, by an adult, on five (5!) separate occasions. Over the next 12 years until I was old enough to vote [in 1972] that form of punishment was completely scrumpled up and thrown away . . . in England. The McGahern siblings witnessed the normal [cripes! for some definitions of normal] round of beatings in school. Some teachers more depraved than others. But at home they were subjected to savage beatings with slaps, fists, sticks . . . a shovel - by their father. They protected each other as best they could and got to read the room and act together to minimize the unpredictable unstable assaults.

McGahern the writer spend the rest of his life trying to understand, and excuse, and come to terms with the psychic destruction lashed out by the damaged savage who engendered him.

Many years later, he goes to visit with the longest-serving of the Helps. "Katie's husband was over six feet, slow and sure of movement, remarkably handsome and strong; he belonged to that generation of men who had no consciousness of their good looks other than as a form of strength". Which says much more about McGahern than the man he's just met for the first time. It's a [clunk clunk] feature of the book that the narrator wants us to know if such-an-one is symmetrical or not. I don't look in a mirror from one year's end to the other, but I know men who do: maybe assessing people's value as function of how attractive they are is part of your normality. But for me, at this point in my development as a human, it's [clunk clunk] with frankly racist / sexist /otherist overtones.

Another quote "She was walking with us past Brady's pool and Brady's house, and the house where the Mahon brother's lived, past the deep dark quarry, and over the railway bridge and up the hill past Mahon's shop to the school".  One of McGahern's (more attractive) stylistic devices is to use this sentence repeatedly through the book. As if in old age he is playing and re-playing a silent home-movie clip of the together times before Loss flushed the happiness from his young life.

The John McGahern Barracks is a community voluntary project - tours, archives, hot-desk hub and seminar rooms. Barracks, like for soldiers? Last week.