Between Times: Advent

 I nearly miss it in a sudden rush to get things done.

The quiet low light and deep peace of early December that is Advent in the Christian calendar and my favourite time of year.  The rush is less about truly preparing for the festivities ahead than about panicking that I may not do so in time. Then I reassure myself: that my Christmas preparations have usually been last minute; if I’m going to panic it might as well be at the last moment - having first allowed myself to feast on quietude, low light and forthcoming solstice images of the sunlight entering the passage tomb at Newgrange.
See http://www.newgrange.com/winter_solstice.htm

It is not a recipe for a well-prepared Christmas time and the conflict is familiar at all times of year. 

Christmas reminds me of the inspiring Child in the manger of my childhood and the gathering of gifts, going to church and to grandparents on Christmas day and to the other side of the family the Sunday before. Then there was the total magic of first visiting Dublin’s Olympia theatre and seeing sparkling ballet dancers in the pantomime on Boxing Day - more regularly known in Ireland as St. Stevens’ Day. The conflict in my Irish identity begins early. I find the material rush and hype from mid-November antithetical to everything Christmas once meant to me.

I’m a natural contrarian. 

I’ve only to know I must do something to be equally sure there are a thousand reasons not to and while I like to dream of creating something wonderful, involving myself in the necessary actions to bring it about is altogether another matter. It’s not helped by wanting to attend:  to listen and connect - rather than get on with managing, doing and administrating.

One year I began my December alone in a cottage beside the sea and bare trees reading Harry Potter. 

That was a magical time. The sojourn informed an early poem written in response to a brief piece by the poet Paul Durcan that appeared in The Irish Times Magazine one Christmas. Despite it being a poem susceptible to evoking cringes, I enclosed it in a letter of appreciation I wrote to him and he was good enough to reply with a Christmas card wishing me a flurry of snow that did indeed appear on the big Day. A few years later I made it to having a permanent home across the field from that magical small house.

A Woman’s Prayer for New Year

After Paul Durcan

Waiting for the tides to turn, I am held by the soft touch of trees and blessed by holy water from the well in a fairy wood. I dance on the shoreline and swim in the deep.

In silent prayer I wait for a compatible man who can bear the pain of touch. He will be a man of prayer and consideration who loves to have fun.

My laugher and shouts of joy at the sparkling stars and the morning sun on the rising tide will rouse him. He will not be afraid to hold my hand as, with listening and full hearts, we entrust ourselves to the ocean.

He will see the way at times when waves submerge me, carry turf when I’m weary of the burden of understanding. Sometimes he’ll proffer soothing touch and defer solutions and I will revel in the warmth of his shining light and be saved by the clarity of its beam touching land across water.

He will stay awhile before returning to his cave, more of a home now he’s free to come and go and I will savour solitude the more for knowing

he will return.

2016 has been all about taking my leave of that home on the shores of Galway Bay that verges on the Burren.

 The home that Gordon D’Arcy says in his gorgeous new book, The Breathing Burren (Collins Press 2016), is at the end – or head of a sleeping giant. I can’t remember which and my books are still, much lamentedly, in storage while I further make space for them so I can’t immediately check. But you can buy his book in most bookstores. It would make a great gift to give – to others or youself.  

The year has also been about taking my leave of so many of the artefacts of family history. 

I moved into the house the year after my mother died, my father had done so nine years earlier. It became the repository of so much. I lived there alone yet experienced it as the family home I formerly yearned. In my last days there it occurred to me it has been a kind of archetypal family home fulfilling the fissures of earlier desire and longing and having done so, leaving me free now to enjoy new terrains that appear more suitable for the next stage of my life.

As an apprentice verse-maker the process has seen me visited by Kali

The Goddess Kali is the destroyer  but also the other side of the Lord Shiva, the giver, of life inspiring one of the longest poems I’ve attempted.

Today, published in Spontaneity

I see that the poet Aoife Reilly, both a former fellow Skylight poet and a more recent incumbent of that first magic cottage, has a poem Spontaneous Love published in the new edition of the online magazine Spontaneity. There’s one of my own there too. I submitted The Line in response to an interview with Kate Dempsey talking about her book The Space Between from Doire Press http://www.doirepress.com/  Doire also published my poetry collections Whispering the Secrets and  Fear Knot. 

You can read the poems Spontaneous Love and The Line in Spontaneity  

and follow the link to Kate Dempsey and enjoy the spectacular artwork and images and follow further Spontaneity links here at http://spontaneity.org/ 

Open Letter to Deputy John Halligan and Others lobbying for change in the health services.

You might be most effective backing Consultant's Report and ensuring Government act on its recommendations.

The Consultant's Report that more staff, back-up and increased opening hours in the existing cardiac unit in Waterford rather than a new cardiac unit would most effectively improve the lives of Waterford citizens probably make sense and could be by far the most effective in bringing about change in the short term. This should be good news for public representatives who could now negotiate to ensure such relatively easy-to-implement actions take place immediately. The Independents are in a strong position, given their negotiating leverage in the current government.

Building units takes time and involves a range of possible obstructions down the road when your negotiating position may not be so strong. The National Children's Hospital project might be a warning.

Long term budgets for adequate service provision not capital projects should be paramount

On a recent course (Spring 2016) with FLIRTFM in conjunction with the community radio CRAOL Programme - Speaking Up For A Change for over 50’s - it became clear, talking with retired administrative and social staff and patients who had been at the coal-face of the HSE over a long time, that when administrators are asked to find cuts - and that’s pretty much every year - the first budgets cut are those for pay and services. This could be changed relatively quickly if we had the will. Buildings and capital expenditure budgets are less easy to cut but also are for projects that take much longer to provide.  The real outcome wanted is for access to good enough service.

Maximise what we have

In the conversation it became really clear that staff and adequate resources to maximise the use of the buildings and expensive machines and to make them work are what continually get cut. This problem could be solved most easily were the will there to do it - which there isn’t. We say we want improved community care and to maximise the use of hospital resources and then cut the budgets for every initiative put in place to make it work. We were talking about mental health budgets but it was clear the finding was true across the board. We need long-term ring-fenced budgets for this first and foremost. (The resulting programmes from the Speaking Up for A Change will be broadcast on community radio across the country over the autumn/winter season).

Deputies, do you want to cut the ribbon on a new unit or ensure your constituents get the service they are desperate for? 

You may be in a position to choose the best option to get them the service it needs. Deputy Halligan, it your case it will mean retaining your position to ensure whatever you can get agreed actually happens.

The New Politics is Looking Good in Ireland this Week So Far

     An arrow of political accountability was shot across the bows of an announced ‘government’ decision before it could leave the safe harbour of the minions at the Department of Finance.

 It scores well for collective decision-making at cabinet and the right of the elected Members of Dail Eireann to have their say on an issue that could be particularly important to Ireland’s future – both economic and political.

    The Minister for Finance announced Ireland will appeal an EU decision that makes Apple liable to pay back tax to the Irish government for particular earnings. The issues involved are complex. By appealing the decision the Irish Government – if not the US government who might argue the tax should belong to them instead - could theoretically be cold shouldering significant funds.

     Such funds, as could for example, house the ‘more than at any time since the Famine’ being made homeless  

     ... and described as such by housing activist Peter McVerry  on a late night television show on Newstalk last night (1.9.2016). These are the citizens who have been and are being made homeless in the wake of the banking crisis and the nation’s bailout and the dearth of houses available – even if they could afford them. This is only part of the underbelly of Ireland’s supposed great economic turn-around.

For all those who still believe that politics works best when decisions are made by a central core few 

     – as in the last Irish Dail where the core triad consulted, it seems, by means of coaching rather than by garnering the range of views present at cabinet - this has not been such a good week. The upside of that way of governing may be coherent immediate action but the downside – the significant dangers that arise from group-think is among them – can be seen in the actions of the Tony Blair government in the UK before going to war in Iraq and in some of the decisions the Irish Government made, apparently in thrall to the EU and unwilling to give the IMF sufficient clout whilst the Troica managing the Irish bailout were in place.

 Independent members of the cabinet made it clear they would not be rubber-stamping  decisions made outside of cabinet. 

     Both the Alliance of such members and Deputy Katherine Zappone - whose contributions to the international debate on the need to properly tax global corporations  are, reportedly,  on the Senate record of her time there - have insisted on being given time to enable them to be better briefed before a cabinet decision is made. The Alliance also insisted that the Dail must be recalled and able to debate and vote on such an important decision.

Initially I stopped listening to the recurrent reporting of the known issues on radio and the media bleating about a possible cabinet crisis.

     Honestly, sometimes I wonder if a proportion of the media are jealous that their own default role as opposition when the Dail couldn’t debate in any significant way is the only issue concerning them. Now, however, I am being better educated on European process and the arguments on taxing Global Corporations by journalists who are clearly doing their homework. For example, it appears this morning that the Irish government offered legal alliance to a similar situation, a Spanish bank’s appeal to the European Courts, a few years ago when they saw the importance the decision could have for the right of EU member States to decide their own tax policies. A central issue is whether or not the tax law applied to Apple can be argued to be selective – one of the four key questions that are likely to be involved in any appeal according to a Morning Ireland reporter/expert on RTE1 this morning.

The critical line between European law and its interpretation and the political decision- making that goes into making such law may well be at stake here. 

Cabinet accountability, as in making Ministers accountable, and the beginning of a more effective Dail process is kicking into gear.

    Those who long for return to two party politics while simultaneously moaning about both parties should get over their caoining. (The traditional wailing at Irish wakes).

 

This has the potential to be a much better way of doing things. 

     It will not be ideal. It is in continuous danger of becoming grid-locked by indecision and divisiveness. But it is an opportunity to develop a much more mature, effective and – crucially – democratic process worthy of engaging the electorate who have put it in place.

It offers hope, and hope and its absence is becoming central to the question of what kind of Europe and world the next generation will live in. 

     To be fair, the politicians who spent the first couple of months of their tenure putting the new processes in place have served us well. I’m for giving them sufficient time to at least have a reasonable go at finding out how to make it work.

Weighing the Odds

  - Post the Brexit Vote  and Theresa May’s new Cabinet.

Is the new British Prime Minister playing an extremely smart long game or does she actually believe this is her best possible cabinet?

    The question I kept returning to this week, like a rough tooth that a tongue just can’t stay away from, is whether the new British Prime Minister is playing an extremely smart long game or actually believes her new Cabinet is the best possible.

     She acted swiftly to nail her colours to the mast for exiting the EU.

     The Prime Minister appointed Boris Johnson and David Davis, strong campaigners for the Against campaign to positions where they will be to the forefront of negotiating the deal. She has even included her rival for leadership by appointing her to the Energy and Rural Affairs portfolio and she has appointed a new Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is no question then of prevaricating in relation to moving Britain on and out of the Union, that is the European Union. She has made her commitment to the other, United Kingdom union, clear: she is Prime Minister of that Union and has made clear her urgent concern to look after it by visiting Scotland at the first available opportunity. She doesn’t want a Scexit from the UK.

     She has thus acted quickly to reassure the majority of the voters who won the Referendum for Brexit that she will honour their choice while allowing some comfort to the others, half almost, in the population who know she wasn’t on the side of exiting herself. She has also offered them leadership by demonstrating a determination to honour the decision made regardless of what her own preference would have been.

     Theresa May has even managed to clearly acknowledge and state from the beginning her commitment to resolve the underlying and inevitable sense of injustice at the root of the vote. 

     The inequity of the ever widening gap between the top echelons of society and those most alienated by their suffering as a result of austerity politics and the expanding economics of globalisation is currently at the heart of British and international politics. As David Williams cogently put it in an article in The Sunday Business Post last weekend*10.7.2016, those in power forget at their peril that every now and then in a democracy the population are all equal, that is when they exercise the power of their vote.

     A more Machiavellian perspective on the new British Prime Minister’s strategy, the one that that tongue just won’t leave alone, might suggest that the leaders of the Leave campaign have been given their just deserts by the new Prime Minister. 

      Johnson is not getting out of the mess he led the British into by stepping down from the leadership contest, he is going to have to face the international leaders – European and way beyond Europe – who see him as having been a main contributor to the challenges they now have to address and lead the diplomatic mission to mend and move the broken fences. A quickly masked incredulity was seen on many of the faces screened as the news broke of his appointment. While theirs was not so, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t resist an ironic smile while viewing the appointment from this perspective.

     It may indeed instead be encouraging that these Exit campaigners can be certain to work for the outcome they supposedly desired. But the caveat must be born in mind that commentators have also suggested it was not in fact their truly desired outcome. Instead their desire may have been for political power. Well if that’s it, they have it – even if not quite to the extent hoped. The curse, now it seems falsely attributed to the Chinese who have never heard of the saying, may apply: may your dreams come true. It will be interesting to see how they bring about what they desired and what they learn in the process.

Nevertheless, if I was in the Labour Party I’d be worried.

      Despite having other small things to worry about – like how the shadow cabinet and Party membership are to agree on a leader and direction for the Party -I’d be worrying just how soon Theresa May is going to call the General Election, that very possibly her carefully chosen cabinet would best position the Conservative Party to win. Presumably it won’t be called too quickly – a certain amount of stability has to be secured first from the initial chaos of the Brexit vote – but I’d be concerned that it might be as imminent as is decently possible. Would Boris Johnson and David Davison be re-appointed afterwards? Considering that future sharpens the tooth that that tongue won’t let alone.

Angel Merkyl and Theresa May are capable of procrastination when it is politically expedient

     There was an interesting piece in The Irish Times on Friday, 15^th July, by Derek Scally reporting from Berlin in which he pointed out that both Angel Merkyl and Theresa May are capable of procrastination when it is politically expedient. There will be an inevitable period of stormy weather ahead for Britain and its relationship with the EU.

I think I’d put money on the possibility that the Conservatives will form the next Government in the UK and that, whether or not the EU exit clause is invoked, eventually the relationship between Britain and the EU may not be all that different from what it is now however it comes to be described.

     However, if I was a gambler - and like it or not we’re all gambling given the world we live in now, although maybe it was always case even if less evidently than in the past – I think I’d put money on the possibility that the Conservatives will form the next Government in the UK and that, whether or not the EU exit clause is invoked, eventually the relationship between Britain and the EU may not be all that different from what it is now however it comes to be described. But I wouldn’t put all my money on it. I’d take a punt against as well. If, alternatively, the UK can make Brexit work the danger to the European Union that it would encourage others to try to do the same might be offset by their example becoming the most effective agent in bringing about the badly needed change of perspective within the EU. In the longer term one possibility has still got to be that the Brexit vote could ultimately lead to a better outcome for both.

*http://www.businesspost.ie/brexit-dont-underestimate-chavs-carrying-polling-cards-or-the-chance-of-brexit-ii/                                                                          

Trust Trumped, Democracy is at Stake.

     Continue to believe that rhetoric, promises and arguments elect leaders and keep them in office and you have the lost the ultimate key to the doors to power. Hit by a ball on the head it dawned on me Donald Trump’s views have become irrelevant.   He has gained the trust of a significantly large number of the electorate who will vote for the next President of the United States of America.

    

    On Irish radio the woman defending Trump said that without his golf club at Doonbeg, Co. Clare, there’d be no jobs, butcher or other shops nearby. That’s important but not critical. He has earned her trust. No matter what he has said on anything her vote is now for him. She doesn’t care what views he expresses -about Muslims, Mexicans or anyone in the United States of America. It’s not new but her point struck home.

     

     The hole-in-one was the realisation that the most important thing is: he has earned her trust. In her case it may indeed be he has earned it by seriously contributing to the local economy. Having earned that trust she will leave the best approach on other issues up to him. If he thinks a wall should be built – in Ireland or on the Mexican border – then either it should be built or he has his reasons for saying so. The rhetoric of politicians, commentators, friends, neighbours - even the hurler on the ditch, become irrelevant once allegiance has been won.

   

     Lose the trust of the electorate however, or anyone significant and you are on marshy ground. Gain that trust, however you do, and you have gained significant advantage. Of course arguments, promises proffered and delivered play their part but ultimately the voter is deciding on who they can trust.

    

     Once won trust can be lost. It takes quite a lot to lose but lost it is much harder to win back than it was to gain in the first instance. Hilary Clinton has ground to win back. Church leaders might take note. Brexit campaigners, beware. Enda Kenny and Micheal Martin should be learning that lesson. They lost the trust and allegiance they’d long had. A new again politics– we’ve had similar in the past - ensuring Government is kept accountable to the Dail is the result. The Dail must honour that trust.

    

     False promise will eventually come home to haunt you. To those of you trusted for the first time and now elected to office don’t think that you, either, will be forgiven if you don’t keep your eye on the ball of honouring and keeping whatever trust you’ve won.

    

     Donald Trump may be winning now but he has set himself up. He’d better deliver or expect a great fall from grace. Much more importantly: every time trust is betrayed it becomes harder to trust again. Trust in politics and democracy itself is at stake. Already a lot of ground has been lost. Tread with great care.

Meitheal Politics for the Second Millennium?

The innate spirit of generosity and reciprocity that has made up rural life in Ireland is coming to the fore to balance the cut and thrust of adversarial politics. 

 

Farmers compete at market but they co-operate to get there.

     Civil war politics may be moving on at last as we celebrate the hundred year anniversary of the 1916 Rising that also gave rise to the circumstances of their formation. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the two major Irish political parties founded from each side of that divide, will not go into Government together to make the only possible cohesive majority in the Irish Dail. It appears they will, however, support each other in ensuring a working government can be formed. The Irish Dail is coming together in a Meitheal.  It seems that Micheal Martin, the leader of Fianna Fail, will support Fine Gael’s outgoing Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, to be the first Fine Gael leader to return for a second go at the role (even if he steps down mid-term as he has long proposed) and lead a minority government made up of his own members of the parliament and a number of independent parliamentarians, Irish T.D.s.

     

     The Members of the Dail are working hard in committee at putting together a framework for a new way of working in a parliament that will be much more collaborative and in tune with the spirit of the Meitheal that forms an instrinsic part of the  fabric of Irish history, society and psyche.  The farmers came together in community Meitheals to bring the harvests in or to assist in barn or shed building and similar ventures. A new structure for the Dail aims to allow and support responsible participation by all members of the House, and enable them to contribute more through debate and committees to government. The innate spirit of generosity and reciprocity that has made up rural life in Ireland is coming to the fore to balance the cut and thrust of adversarial politics. It won’t make the adversarial nature of politics go away and it should not. But it has the potential to contribute a long needed balance and so allow for a much better use of all the members of the Dail by putting their resources at the day to day service of best possible government.

     If you haven’t watched Borgen it’s time to get out the box set. This television series on the forming and re-forming of minority governments in Denmark has become part of the national conversation in Ireland, mostly thrown in by politicians, in the last week. I had thought I was one of a small minority of people watching it here.  Now it turns out the politicians have been quietly viewing all along - or maybe they’ve only just begun. The cynics scoff at the notion of a new politics. However, as one member of the panel on the Late Debate said on radio last night, it may have been Eamon Ryan of the Green Party who made a great contribution to the discussion on constructive oppposition, ‘Why can’t we change our mind-set from that entrenched Irish way of doing things and do what the Scandinavians and others are doing? We might even find we can do it better.’

     It is part of the wisdom of Fianna Fail, as well as their only real option at the moment, that they will not go into government with Fine Gael. To do so would be a step too far - with historical rivalries wagging the tail of the dog. This will hopefully be a much more desirable first step that will bring about experiences in working together – already well begun in recent  Dail Committees, including the Banking Enquiry into what happened on the eve of the Bail Out - and do more to fade out the rivalries of civil war politics than any forced co-operation in a hot-house Cabinet would do.

      We are a creative people. We can do this. It is a time of unprecedented creative endeavour in Irish Politics. The electorate have forced the change continually promised but not delivered. Research indicates that human beings are happiest when they are rising to a manageable challenge and bringing a solution to fruition as Mihally Csikszentmihaly describes in his book Flow –the Psychology of Optimal Experience. This is a good time for Irish politics and the journalists having to catch up as they are coached by those participating in discussions to change the discourse. ‘Well if you don’t mind, I don’t think that’s the language we should be using. It is more appropriate just now to talk in terms of partnership.’

     There’s some floundering going on but that has got to be good language to be moving towards at the start of a new millennium. There couldn’t be a better memorial to the leaders who produced a Proclamation to initiate an Irish State than to change the language of politics to suit the times we live in now and to shift from a conflict consciousness to the resurrection of the imagination of the Meitheal. Farmers compete at market but they co-operate to get there.  

     Yes, it is a time for rural Ireland to contribute its best while they hold a good hand of cards. It is argued the rural vote ensured the last government didn’t return. That thought helps to focus the minds of those elected on putting together a new kind of government and making sure they don’t return too soon to ask the electorate to vote again. They might not be forgiven for that. We tend to like Meitheals.

New Writers Opportunity - West of Ireland, from Clarinbridge Arts

Calling New Writers!

Clarinbridge Arts, with the support of Galway County Council, are inviting writers to try their luck in 'QUOTECARDS', a miniature publishing enterprise.

The idea is to give new writers from the west a kick-start.

"It's hard to become published," said a spokesperson. "And writing can be very solitary. So we want to give some writers a chance to meet each other, we want to celebrate them out in the open - and to micro-publish them!"

Poets, journalists, historians, thriller writers: any genre or form is welcome. "If you love writing,  are over 18, live in the west of Ireland, and have not been commercially published before - you're in!"

Here's how 'QUOTECARDS' works.

·      Send in one or two pieces of work (no more!) to quotecardswest@gmail.com by 15th May 2016.

·      A panel selects 4 - 8 pieces from all the submissions.

·      Each piece, or a line or two from each piece, will be printed on an individually designed postcard or bookmark.

·      Clarinbridge Arts print 100 of each card, 50 to go to the author, and 50 to give out free at a celebration launch of 'QUOTECARDS' in September.

·      The writer owns the copyright of the card for future use.

For further information contact quotecardswest@gmail.com

Poetry Vomit and Pleasure - from London

Bloomsbury Coffee House – was a real pleasure to visit while in London on the weekend despite long delays in the delivery of delicious porridge with a compote of prunes and apricots. It allowed time to check e-mails and read the Sunday paper headlines.  I’ve decided to cook up a compote to have on hand for breakfasts in future. My first treat in this regard was in Folyle’s Hotel, Clifden, Co. Galway, where it was a rhubarb and ginger sauce. It was Sunday morning in London though and the place was packed. The ambience was full of character and kept us entertained - and maybe the new body in the kitchen was not yet quite up to speed. My daughter thought the avocado on gluten free toast was to die for.

     In terms of design if you want to know how to make a lower basement look great this is a good place to visit. The old metal window frames remain intact. I hadn’t seen similar windows for a while. They reminded me of the home I grew up in. It’s amazing just how long a building can retain its authenticity when well looked after. White paint with shades of grey – and the bathroom which could have been disaster was an enjoyable visit with a concrete floor painted light grey and just a few lively tiles and a mirror reflecting such light as was available.  The white yard with the steps down to the entrance painted red let plenty of light into the larger two room

s of the coffee house.

     Then, naturally, I met the Irish language poet, Louis de Paor, outside - en passant. He also lives in Galway. You couldn’t visit London for a few days and not come across someone from home. He was gracious in being accosted with a ‘hi from Galway’ – just couldn’t resist it!

 

  http://juddbooks.com/  82 Marchmont Street, London

     Judd Books, justly proud of it it’s used academic books, was just around the corner from the coffee house. It didn’t open until noon on Sunday but then I had a good browse through their quality selection – both on the ground floor and downstairs - once I’d received a clothes peg receipt for the bag I’d to leave at the desk. There were large books I’d have liked but then I’d have had to carry them around so I settled for Kid, the Simon Armitage collection of poetry from Faber and Faber that ‘won the inaugural Forward \prize for Best First Collection in 1992’. I have to admit I bought it because two of the poems made me chuckle. When I flicked through it later on I discovered Not the Furniture Game within – a poem Kevin Higgins had recently given out in the Skylight Poets writing forum in the Galway Arts Centre as a writer’s prompt (great for encouraging metaphors) and that I had left on my kitchen table before leaving home in readiness for the Monday night group meeting Having the Conversation – About Celebration. I was suggesting it celebrates language. It evoked a powerful reaction in the group – for most it was overwhelming, an overabundance of metaphor, too prolific a list and insufficiently clear in its meaning. Just the kind of poem I need for the Conversation group using poetry to provoke discussion. ‘This is not a poem,’ allowing us to try to establish what criteria it doesn’t fit and whether they are in fact the criteria we want to use in evaluating a poem. Not something we could establish. Just the kind of meat and drink required. It made one participant want to vomit, for the same reason – too much. I love the poem, the cascade of language and metaphor and I wish my 'one-liners were footballs through other people's windows'. It was an evening of visceral poetry with quite a few lists including Bertholdt Brecht’s To Eat of Meat Joyously and Pleasures following on from Chana Bloch’s Rising To Meet It, a poem seen initially to be about childbirth but, taking the third stanza into account (controversial in this discussion for being included for which, again, I was thankful) more a celebration of woman’s warrior-ship invigorated by the wisdom and intuition of the body. Lines from Rising to Meet It and from Armitage’s Gooseberry Season, also found in his book, are now displayed on my Twitter title @susanhlindsay.

       Matilda The Musical at the Cambridge Theatre www.matildathemusical.com/, on Friday night was a disappointment. We should have known it didn’t augur well when three adults and a child clamboured over us to aisle seats they could have reached without discomfiting anyone. The man of the party who stood with his umbrella all but spiking my stomach and his case blocking my knees while the rest of his company flaffed around making it impossible for me to resume my seat for so long that I had eventually to ask him if he’d mind making space to enable me to sit again should have been a further warning of what was to come. The Grand Circle seats were stacked high. Despite that, at one stage a man of the party climbed over to swop seats with a child in the row before during the first Act, the ultimate distraction after continual talking and movement among the party who appeared to be explaining everything to the children as it took place, not in whispers but in loud continuous mutter and even singing along at one stage. Then the men who were now sitting together began to talk to each other.

     Initially was in sympathy with the possible need to settle the children in. But when I realised I’d missed a significant section of the first half of the performance and was no longer clear as to what was happening, that the seats had cost us sixty pounds, that others paid considerably more and our whole trip from Ireland had been initially motivated by a wish to see the event, hear the music, enjoy memories of the Dahl characters and see the children who would bring them to life it became really annoying. The usherette shushed them and stood at the end of the lines they occupied for most of the performance. Eventually I added my own entreaties. In the interval my daughter pointed out that people from all the surrounding seats had shushed and given glowering looks in the hope of enjoying the show but to no avail. In fact the group appeared entirely oblivious to the needs of anyone around them. In the interval those who had not already moved along to fill the few empty surrounding seats did so as we did. But it was too late to still fully appreciate and enjoy the show although we did what we could. I am not sure what language the group spoke so maybe they did come from a culture that doesn’t value silence in the theatre. It wouldn’t encourage me to travel to another London show, too much at stake when audience members can’t be trusted to allow others enjoy their night out.

    I can’t tell you much about the performance. It is quite amazing to see such young performers deliver such professional performances that you forget they are children and want to judge them on the same terms as everyone else and they certainly did deliver such performances. Overall I thought it was a little mechanical and had lost some sparkle. The artifice of delivering the storyline through Matilda telling it her local librarian and saviour didn’t seem to quite work but having been so distracted and trying to deal with the disappointment – not least because I knew how much my daughter wanted to enjoy it - I am in no position to judge. 

Our Sunday afternoon trip down the Thames to Greenwich did not disappoint. The sun came out while we were on the river and it was all the more appreciated for its absence earlier.

The Elephant in the Room at Corrib Toastmasters is No Weed.

 

    

‘…And I still don’t know what that elephant in the room is all about’ was the General Evaluator's conclusion to the Corrib Toastmasters meeting on Tuesday 8th March, 2016 - at the Maldron Hotel in Oranmore, Co. Galway - having begun with a comment on an atmosphere of giddiness on the night. She was to find out.

     The giddy tone may have been set when the Toastmaster of the night invited members to attend his wedding celebration. He is to marry the man who is already his civil partner. This time last year he was working on a jigsaw of maps on the kitchen floor in preparation to for Vote Yes in Co.Mayo in the campaign to legalise marriage for all in the Irish Constitution that was passed and came into law at the end of 2015. 

       

     The meeting proper having begun: the first speech made a cogent case for legalising medicinal marijuana. The liveliness was brought to earth as the speaker described the far more dangerous drugs and two year waiting list for spinal pain relief injections involved in managing personal chronic pain. Her concluding hope that by the time medicinal marijuana is legalised she will no longer need it was upbeat.

     From euphoria – the grammarian’s word of the evening that each speaker is invited to use – to the bread the next speaker has discovered it’s a pleasure to bake. Personal Oscars were awarded during the third speech. His Stage Five speech would be evaluated in relation to use of body language and expression. No question about able use of facial expression when this speaker taunted the Mayo team followers with his Oscar for the Galway team winning thrice in a row – glee and humour clear in a winning smile and sparkling eyes. His final winner is a Nun whose seventy-fourth he recently attended. In her ‘retirement’ she teaches mindfulness to people recovering from addiction.

    ‘I thank God that I have always had the gift of a great deal of energy’ the final speaker, working on an advanced speaking programme, began. He had needed it in the early in his married life while working in Australia on a major construction project. He broke his leg, his brand new machinery, worth around a hundred thousand, became bogged in a swamp as did the recovery efforts and vehicles. Three days of dogged persistence got it out. Exhausted he got home, only to discover that a close family member was critically ill in his hospital. The speech’s evaluator summed it up: ‘Resilience best describes the underlying theme of this speech’.

    Seamus Heaney’s Mid-Term Break was the end poem read with exceptionally beautiful pacing. The reader contributed a welcome reflective pause before the final reports and evaluation asking about the elephant at back of the room. It may well accompany the Corrib Toastmasters in the St. Patrick’s Day Galway parade. Who’ll walk with the club? How can you miss that? 

Note. Corrib Toastmasters can be found at www.corrib.toastmastersclub.org