THE OLD OTHER COUNTRY

My parents were not great drinkers.  They weren’t religious.  And they weren’t Irish, although there was some Irish ancestry on my mother’s side a couple of generations back.  Nevertheless they spent most Saturday nights at an Irish Catholic Club in Hillsborough, in Sheffield.  I suppose they went there because the rest of my mother’s family did, and some of them were great drinkers.  Below is a photograph of a large slice of the family in the club.  Does everybody’s past look like a Martin Parr photograph?

Anyway, I have been thinking about this as a result of rereading Flann O’Brien’s At Swim- Two-Birds.  I first read it a very long time ago but it’s much as I remember it, even if I like to think I “get” it rather better now than I did back then.  It is terrific.  Here is a picture of the author, drink in hand:

Here in At Swim-Two-Birds the hero describes his first experience with alcohol:

“It was my first taste of porter.  Innumerable persons with whom I had conversed had represented to me that spirituous liquors and intoxicants in general had an adverse effect on the senses and the body and those who became addicted to stimulants in youth were unhappy throughout their lives and met with death at the end by a drunkard’s fall, expiring ingloriously at the stair-bottom in a welter of blood and puke.”

But then on the next page, “On the other hand, young men of my acquaintance who were in the habit of voluntarily placing themselves under the influence of alcohol had often surprised me with a recital of their strange adventures.  The mind may be impaired by alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired.”

         Which pretty much covers it.

I also dug out this picture from the family vault:

My nan is the second from the left in that picture, and she’s the only one I recognize.  I don’t know where they are – a school?  Milk 32, Dinners 28 - what on earth does that mean?  And I have absolutely no idea who your man in the middle is, but you can see the map of Ireland in his face, can’t you?  Sometimes your past resembles not so much a Martin Parr photograph as an episode of Father Ted, note the sandwiches.

O'BRIEN'S POTATOES

It’s probably no great disadvantage for a writer to be named after a kind of food.  Take the example of Flann O’Brien, born Brian O’Nolan, and sometimes known as Myles na gCopaleen, and occasionally as Brother Barnabas or George Knowall, among other pen names.  At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman are the two great books, and a good, searching look along my bookshelves proves that my copies have been "borrowed." 

Back in the day, when I was involved with what we used to call “London fringe theatre” I had a semi-girlfriend who acted in a stage version of The Third Policeman.  She dressed up as a strangely convincing and very lovely heifer. And she recited the poem The Workman’s Friend, which in fact comes from At Swim-Two-Birds, but was obviously thought too good not to include in the production.

         My favourite verse runs as follows (and is none the worse for being recited by an 

attractive raven-haired woman dressed up as a cow):

“When food is scarce and your larder bare

And no rashers grease your pan,

When hunger grows as your meals are rare –

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

I don’t know much about O’Brien’s eating habits, but we do know he was a serious alcoholic, also a depressive, cripplingly disappointed by his lack of literary fame and success (that old chestnut).  In the latest edition of the London Review of Books Jonathan Coe writes about two newly published collections of O'Brien’s work, one a volume of plays and teleplays, the other of his short fiction.  Coe quotes from a piece titled Slattery’s Sago Saga, which he doesn't really rate, but it had me chuckling fit to bust.

“The forenoon passed quickly and it was about two o’clock in the early autumn day when Tim sat down to his heaped dinner of cabbage, bacon, pulverized sausage, and sound boiled potatoes of the breed of Earthquake Wonder.”

I’ve never worked out precisely how many breeds of potato there are, and perhaps nobody even really knows, nor am I sure exactly what constitutes a breed, but I see the figure “over 4,000” regularly quoted.  They do have some fancy and improbable names, and of course the Irish potato famine was exacerbated by an over reliance on the Irish Lumper, a name that sounds absolutely weighted down with doom.  

Other breeds include the Glacier Chip, the Stampede Russet, the Dakota Chief, the Inca Dawn, (and my current favorite) Ruby Pulsiver’s Blue Noser; all of which sound as though they might have been invented by Flann O’Brien, though none, admittedly, is quite as good as the Earthquake Wonder.  Ruby Pulsiver’s Blue Noser looks like this (a disappointment in some ways):

        Potatoes do seem to have been on O’Brien’s mind quite often one way or another, and sometimes in connection with his lack of literary “success.”  He once complained (though I haven’t been able to find out exactly where) “Gone with The Wind keeps me up awake at night sometimes – I mean, the quantity of potatoes earned by the talented lady novelist.”