CUMMINGS AND GOINGS

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Dominic Cummings, who appears to effectively be the British Prime Minister at the moment, is in a heap of trouble for skiting around the English countryside during lockdown.

He travelled from London to Durham at least once with his wife and child at a time when he was infected. His ostensible reason for doing so was to be near his parents on their estate so that, if both he and his wife were incapacitated, his parents could look after the child. In the event it appears this was not necessary.

The original claim was that he was isolating on the parents' property. However he appears to have been seen [in town and] at Barnard Castle some 25-30 miles away. There is a suggestion that he has business contacts in Durham and in Barnard.

He has denied that Police contacted him, or his family, about breaking lockout, but Durham Police confirmed that there was contact with his father about his trip and presence in Durham.

I've been to Durham once and found the Police there quite civilised, even at two in the morning.

This is Durham Castle, a painting by constable, the irony of which will become apparent.

In the course of a visit to the town in the mid 1970s, a policeman in a Panda car caught me shinning down the Castle drainpipe at two in the morning.

While I was being questioned a motley crew of peripheral Celts slid down the drainpipe, one after the other. No sooner had he taken one name than another strange one was elicited. I expect that must have produced a most unusual set of entries in his notebook.

Anyway we Bojo'd our way out of that one and were not arrested despite the strong odour of Newcastle Brown Ale emanating.

Perhaps it was actually this that saved us. He may have come to the conclusion that anyone, even a Celt from the fringe, who enjoys the local brew can't be all that bad. Mind you, I did pay a price the following morning with a hell of a hangover which lasted all the way back to Dublin on the Fokker Friendship.

Back to Dominic and his sock puppet Bojo.

BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg was straight out of the traps defending, or making excuses for, the boul Dominic, just as she had gone easy on Bojo in the past.

The BBC has gone to pot, or maybe it was always like that but we didn't notice.

It has been said of Bojo that he didn't really want to be Prime Minister, as in doing the job, but that he wanted to have been Prime Minister, as in basking in the glory.

I wrote this thing way back in the early Brexit days and it certainly looks likes coming true not only in relation to Brexit but also the Corona Virus crisis.

On a lighter note, these pictures are going round the internet.

The Church Militant and social distancing.

And, sure if you're into that stuff, you might as well go the whole hog.

NORMAL PEOPLE

This is just a short post with my reactions to the the series Normal People currently running on RTÉ with eight episodes already broadcast. I caught the first six on the player and watched the last two live.

I didn't know much about it in advance but had heard an interview with Lenny Abrahamson on Arena on RTÉ radio. So I knew there were sex scenes and that there had been an intimacy coordinator on the set.

Then I saw it in a link to the RTÉ player in Twitter and thought I'd have a look.

I was totally captivated by these two young people, Connell and Marianne.

Connell had a lot of resonances for me. I don't, and didn't, play sports and I never noticed women swooning over me. But I identified with his emotional reticence.

Marianne, apart from being a looker, initially appeared to be a loner with an assertive streak. But this was subsequently revealed as covering up a serious vulnerability which led her into a relationship, if that's what it's called, with a totally obnoxious and exploitative partner.

I don't know how this is going to end. It would be nice if the pair got back together and recaptured the innocence and intensity of their original relationship.

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for this series.

It has been suggested to me that it is too drawn out relative to the actual content. I could sympathise with this view from someone who had watched the series over the weeks and was not as emotionally involved as I was. But I don't agree with it.

There appeared to be some criticism out there also of the sexual content. My initial reaction was to not understand this as I thought this aspect had been most sensitively handled. But on reflection maybe I can see where some people are coming from.

What struck me, thinking back on it, was the absence of guilt. I saw the relationship as natural and positive.

But it did contrast starkly with the environment in which I grew up, dominated by a negative, sex and power obsessed Roman Catholic Church.

To people, still influenced by some of the lorry load of baggage I picked up along the way, the sex must have seemed crude, irresponsible and even pornographic. One contributor to a phone-in did use that term. However she demurred when pressed to explain herself further.

So Full marks to all who had anything to do with this work. It dragged me through a whole range of emotions, and it's not over yet.

JOHN CHARLES

Agnes Bernelle in Castle Leslie 1950
Photo: Picture Post
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This short post is inspired by a perceptive piece by Mark O'Brien on the depiction of Irish life in the Picture Post photojounalist magazine of the 1940s/1950s.

The photos are excellent and tasteful. Despite this, the magazine had a chequered history when it came to the Irish censor, and more particularly the Irish Catholic Church.

Ecce homo

This is probably the most influential Irish clergyman of his day, John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland 1940-1972. Note, not Primate of All-Ireland, I'm sure that rankled.

Some people will remember him for his return from Vatican II consoling his flock that nothing had changed. Had he lived into the present day he might have been proved right, but then it was a case of swimming against the tide.

I remember the period well. We had a newsagent's shop and on a Sunday morning when you opened early to sort the newspapers, you would often find one of the English papers missing - stopped by the censor at Dún Laoghaire.

McQuaid was a great man for the prohibition: you can't go to Trinity; you can't have pagan English welfare state type provision for mother and child; you can't preach "heresy" in my diocese no matter who you are (Charles Davis, Gregory Baum etc.) and so on.

Mark has a wonderful evocation of one of JC's obsessions which I just can't help quoting. Vivion here is Dev's son.

It concerned Vivion’s schooldays at Blackrock College and how he had once been summoned to the college president’s office. There, the future Catholic archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid instructed Vivion to review a pile of newspaper cuttings of full-page adverts for Clery’s department store. The adverts, Coogan recounts, included “small line drawings of women modelling underwear of a design which reflected the modest standards of the Ireland of that era”. To the somewhat baffled Vivion, McQuaid pointed out “the insidious immorality of the drawings. Some of them, if one used a magnifying glass, indicated the outline of a mons veneris”.

Mons Veneris indeed. Now where would John Charles have seen one of them things?

As I recollect it, one of the elements which caused John Charles to have John McGahern sacked from his teaching job in my old alma mater, Belgrove, was a passage involving a young man masturbating to the very drawings referred to above.

This is beginning to add up.

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Anyway, the above is my prayer at the altar of censorship, and I hope a small act of retribution for the appalling wrong done to McGahern.

I'll go even further and tell you that in the wonderful Little Museum of Dublin John Charles's picture above stares across at these curtains on the opposite wall.

Behind these tasselled elasticated curtains is a sight you will not see in any theatre or art gallery. I can do no better than reproduce the caption from the wall.

Why is there a nude woman in this museum?
PICTURES AND SCULPTURES of naked young men are found in museums all over the world. But older women? Not so much. Above is a painting of the legendary journalist, feminist and civil rights campaigner Nell McCafferty, by the American artist Daniel Mark Duffy. McCafferty donated the picture to the museum. She says, "For some people the dream lives on. For me, the illusion lives on. I think I'm gorgeous. There is a delusion among the young that the body matters." The image provokes a variety of responses. If you find yourself offended by it, ask yourself why.

The irony here, and the pleasure I take in it, is beyond conceiving.

And the picture at the top of this post, I dedicate to John Charles. It has all the elements: a wise owl, a pillar, a bit of stained glass (I think), an ominous presence, a beautiful lady, and TITS. May he long contemplate the unattainable, wherever he is.

SEÁN O'ROURKE

Today was Seán O'Rourke's last day hosting Today with Seán O'Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1.

He'll be missed. I listened to his programme whenever I was around. He saved me from the clutches of the awful Pat Kenny. So what am I going to do now?

Anyway, his departure provoked me into wondering who I'd go on air with should the occasion arise.

Seán had been top of my list. He put in the graft and seemed very fair. He was confident in a laid back sort of way. He brought you his contributors rather than himself, not like the other fella. He listened but you were aware of his presence. And he asked the questions I'd have asked, almost as they were just forming in my head.

I'd go on with Seán Moncieff who is first class and deals well with a vast range of subjects. He is also brilliant at puncturing pomposity and appearing to take seriously some of his most outrageously way out (usually American) ccntributors.

I would not go on with Pat Kenny. I have read Betty Purcell on him, which just fortified me in my own opinion.

I'd steer clear of Mary Wilson & Ivan Yeates.

I have been on with both Myles Dungan and Patrick Geoghegan, both excellent broadcasters and I was completely at ease with them.

These are just a few thoughts that spring to mind as I pen this hurried farewell. A more comprehensive treatment would be for another day and further hunk of listening in the meantime to refresh my memory.

So, as I said, sad to see Seán 'Rourke go, he'll be missed.

MY LIFE IN PICTURES

1944
Source: National Library of Ireland

The challenge on Twitter was to publish, over seven consecutive days at one a day, seven pictures related in some way to your life and without any people or words. I have taken this to mean that there should not be any people in the pictures and that they should not be accompanied by any text whatever (eg commentary, location, date). The status of words in the pictures themselves, even if only incidental seems ambiguous.

On each successive day you have also to nominate a different person to do the same.

I was nominated by Felix Larkin.

The photo above is from day 1. It shows the Gem in Howth village (two storey under the bridge on the right) where I spent the first four years of my life after coming home from the Misses Foody's maternity nursing home at 40 Upper Fitzwilliam Street where I was born.

The Gem is also where the renowned, but long forgotten, cartoonist, Gordon Brewster died when I was two years of age.

1958

My mother brought myself (14) and my sister (11) on a holiday to Ostend in 1958, from where we visited the World Fair in Brussels. The Atomium was built specifically for this fair and, along with the Manneken Pis, it has become one of the icons of the Belgian capital.

The photo was taken with a precious 116 bellows camera which has since vanished.

My particular memories of the fair are of meeting Fr. Peyton, the Mayo rosary priest, and of my mother losing £20, or it having been stolen. That was a lot of money in those days and we had to have replacement funds wired out from home.

1963

I spent much of the summer of 1963 as an au pair boy, briefly in Paris but then in Loire Atlantique. That is how I describe it as it involved looking after four young lads between the ages of nine and fifteen and teaching them English (which they didn't want to learn, and they didn't) and tennis and sailing (about which I knew nothing, and I didn't). The correct French term for me in that capacity was "moniteur". I didn't do any cooking or cleaning.

The picture above, taken with a cheap plastic camera, is of a travelling Corrida in St.Brévin l'Océan. As it was a travelling show they couldn't afford for either the bull or the matador to be injured so it was a very mild affair.

1967

I spent an academic year at the College of Europe in 1967/8, This is the canal between Bruges and the nearby town of Damme.

2007

I worked in the Department of Finance from 1968 to 2006, barring a stint in the ill fated Department of Economic Planning and Development from December 1977 to January 1980.

The photo is of the second main corridor in the Department of Finance in the South Block of Government Buildings. I suppose I have to concede the status of (first) main corridor to the Minister's and Secretary General's corridor. to the left at the other end of this one.

2001

This was an unforgettable Eisteddfod for many reasons, not least of which was the winning of the Bardic Chair (Y Cadair) by a woman for the first time ever.

The sound of shattering glass has resonated with me ever since. Though, to be fair, entries are judged anonymously and there was no bar on women entering. This was a wider societal problem which I won't go into here.

And I was there, as part of the accredited press corps. Heaven.

2018

Once seen, never forgotten. This is an image which remained with me since my stay in Brugge in 1967/8. At that time I just considered it from an aesthetic point of view and was not much concerned with the history of the building of which it is part.

This is the Gruuthuse palace occupied by the Lords of Bruges, from the 13th to the 16th century - these Lords of Bruges and not the other Lords of Bruges. As happened with the Popes, there were two factions claiming the title at times. One would have to admit that these guys were pre-eminent having among other things the franchise on certain taxes, including the groat on malt and beer.

And the people I nominated? As far as I can make out, none of them have so far taken up the challenge.

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As an afterthought I thought I'd offer some reflections on the process.

When Felix nominated me, I thought Oh Shit, I'm behind in everything and here's more work. But slowly the challenge got to me. How much of my life could I illustrate in seven pictures, what were the high points, and how accessible were the pictures?

I initially intended confining them to photos I'd taken myself, I've been doing that since my teens, but I more or less abandoned that as too restrictive. In the event five turned out to be my photos, one from the National Library of Ireland, and one a scan of an object, my Welsh press badge.

In order to avoid a daily nervous breakdown, I assembled all the pictures in advance and scanned my Twitter followers for victims. I reasoned that those who followed me might be more interested in taking up the challenge.

That was an interesting exercise in the course of which I found that Gerry Adams is still following me despite my ripping into him over the years.

As I had all the material assembled I couldn't wait for midnight to strike to shoot off the next one.

However, as the week progressed I had further thoughts and I ended up doing two substitutions at the end of the sequence. You can see the dropped ones below.

2009

This is the entrance to the circular staircase inside Martello Tower No.7 in Killiney Bay. I have been associated with this tower from around 2000 to date and have a section on it on my web site.

2011

Finally the chapel window in my alma mater, Coláiste Mhuire, which was broken after the premises were abandoned but hastily patched up when the Queen visited the Garden of Remembrance across the road in 2011.

The photo shows the patched window on the right and a pristine window on the left.

And finally, one I dithered over including right up to the end.

2007

The manual cleaning of the supposedly self-cleaning Spire. The resonances here are enormous, hubris, Celtic Tiger, Fallen Empire, and so on.

Anyway it was all great fun and if any of my victims read this post and, however belatedly, take up the challenge, I'll let you know.