Is that blogging?

‘I don’t want any Ú,’ and I was trying to sound serious about this, because I really did not want any, but they must have heard the laugh in my voice, because Ú started pushing it against my closed lips while I protested, and then S leaned over and grabbed my chin and pulled my mouth open, while Ú inserted the bar, and S clamped my jaw shut. It’s very difficult to convincingly give out to your children when you can’t stop laughing. 

The guitar I used is my father’s—heavy, deep, requiring fair strength to hold down the strings. My dad pulled it out of a closet and strung it before my first lesson, then played a competent, booming rendition of "Rocky Racoon", something I had never seen him do before, nor since. The teacher would tune it before each class, then strum it vigorously and exclaim: ‘I love the sound of the old ones!’ But I sort of resented the guitar and how difficult it was to play. 

We learned chords and songs and a little fingerpicking. The Beatles, Elvis, 4 Non Blondes (it was the mid-‘90s). Nothing I particularly wanted to learn but, in retrospect, nice, fun songs. I was capable enough but barely practiced at home. I didn’t like the pain and the callouses, and there was quite a lot of pain. But throughout those few years of lessons and into my teens I continued playing just enough to keep my hand in. Outside the lessons I learned bar chords and Nirvana songs, found tab websites, becoming intermittently enthusiastic about attempting songs I loved. I remember after my last lesson, after three years in which I can barely claim to have progressed, one of the other boys asked what my next step was going to be. I didn’t understand what he meant. We were finished. He wanted to play guitar in an orchestra. I wanted to strum Radiohead in my bedroom.

What I could never do was sing along. I could sing. I could play guitar. Doing both was like trying to rub my belly and pat my head simultaneously. No matter how comfortable I became with simple chord songs, as soon as I opened my mouth my voice would come out in the wrong octave, my fingers would fumble simple transitions. I watched friends begin to play and then to sing along almost immediately. As soon as their fingers could perform. I tried to explain my problem to a few guitar players and they couldn’t really understand me. It was dispiriting. And I didn’t have the skill to play the kind of guitar that needs no accompaniment. 

For my twenty-first birthday, my parents offered me €500 (a lot) to choose myself a new guitar. I prevaricated for a year before finding one (I do this over every present), and finally bought myself a very lovely, beautiful-sounding Martin guitar. I brought it along as I moved out, moved around, but never really played it very much. I knew twenty or thirty chords, and could strum them fairly competently, but had great difficulty remembering songs. I would occasionally and intensely practice an Iron & Wine song for a week, then immediately forget it. People still say: ‘Play a song,’ and all I can offer is "Karma Police". The only thing that ever stuck. That and the callouses, which never really soften. 

But in recent years I began playing for the kids. I think it was an offshoot from our constant improvising of stories. I would play a random three chord arrangement and sing whatever came to mind. Silly stories, descriptions of the day. Something loosened—instantly and strangely—in front of this unformed audience, and my voice came out clear and true, as good as it ever was without the guitar. Better, even, as the music helped to regulate my pitch. It was different to sing something I was inventing myself, where there was no original I was failing to imitate. And once that block had dissolved, I could even play and sing songs by other people; I have somehow learned to rub my belly and pat my head simultaneously. After twenty years, after thousands of attempts, it kind of happened accidentally, obliquely. 

The kitchen table in this house is and large and old and unbelievably battered. It was bought from an antique seller many years ago, and probably lived before that in the servant’s kitchen of a large house—it has that shape, that quality. The joints are neat but loose, and you have to physically push the tenons back into the mortises every couple of days. The grains have raised on the legs from years of moisture and shrinkage—you can feel the lines on it, like an old piece of pine out of the sea. Not rough, but crenulated. The surface of the table has divots and gouges and ancient burn marks It can be wiped clean but is patchily dark in its craters. 

I often think about refinishing this table. I could run an orbital sander over the top in half an hour. I could put new wedges in the joints. I could even sand the legs, take off some of those geological features. I think Helene’s family would be horrified by this. It would entirely change it. It might reveal the timber’s softness, lack of character. I’m sure they prefer it the way it is. I think I do too, but I can’t help wondering how the table looked when I first saw it twelve years ago. Was it less battered than now? Did it have that long scrape running down the centre? It is, like all things, in a state of slow deterioration. We’re not really, truly “keeping it the way it was”. But it's not really possible to half-refinish a table.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome describes a phenomenon where humans seek to maintain environmental biomes at the level at which they became aware of geological degradation. This is the loss they feel—the deterioration during their living memory. So when we talk about restoring ecologies, we look to restore them to how they were in the ‘90s, or the ‘60s. We don’t look to restore them to how they were in 1200, or 8000BC, even though these timeframes are equally valid in ecological terms, and in terms of human impact.

Now she’s scooting ahead of me, too far ahead, but Ú has just gone to sleep so I don’t want to shout for her to slow down. And I can’t run. I’m waiting for her to notice how far ahead she’s gotten, but she just keeps hammering her left foot on the ground to drive herself forward. An older woman comes out of her driveway just as S goes past her, and she watches the tiny blonde creature wobble at speed down the hill alone. She looks around for an adult and I wave as I approach, smiling through my mild anxiety. She woman nods at me with relief, and as I pass she says ‘She looked too small to be on her own. But,’ she adds, her eyes sparkling sincerely, ‘what a creature. What a beautiful creature!’

Helene said something along the lines of: ‘How do people who don’t live in Dublin understand these novels?’ We had both begun reading this at the same time, sharing it between naps.

It made me think of Ulysses (sorry), which I read in my late twenties after living in Dublin for a few years. What struck me hardest was the local atmospheric immediacy of it; Parkgate St and Sandymount and the the rhododendrons at Howth and all the rest of it. A text supported by personal sense memories. Of a novel written to minutely and particularly describe a city, how could you fully appreciate it without the city? With that comes an awareness of all the novels whose settings I have never visited. All that ignorance of texture.

You’ll laugh at me for loving a novel so much that centres on a man in Dublin in his late 30s navigating the chasm between youth and the next thing. And there’s a lot to talk about in that, but the real thrill of this novel was in the density of its descriptive powers. Despite the amount of writing about Dublin in recent years (in all years), I can’t think of many that describe the contemporary city like this. It felt like it was following me around. Not just the popular beats (nighttime circuits of Merrion Sq, dinner in the IFI), but a dozen other smaller, intimate pathways laid down in words (the environs of IMMA, the green byroads of North County Dublin, the sterile Docklands, the side lane into Grangegorman, on and on and on, you know it all, you thought it was cumulatively somehow only yours. Everyone feels like they have a personal mind-map of Dublin (that sense of it as a small town) but probably it isn’t so uniquely personal as that.

There are celebrated contemporary Irish novelists (don’t make me name them) that barely touch the texture of the city. It is arguably the reason for their international success—the airspace quality that never gets in the way. This novel layers atmospheric texture with the history and the art and the scenes and the politics and the weather to give deep dimensions to the space-time continuum of one pretty ordinary asshole.

But I’ve mainly talked about location here. The novel also notes the “mould” flavour of an old pack of studio digestives, the mute expressionless face of a father who’s carrying his incalcitrant children out the door. On and on it goes, page after page, the world I know but haven’t noted described back to me, like a series of memories uncovered. It was my greatest thrill as a young reader, the novel superanimating the familiar, expanding moments of attention like a good trip. I don’t find it much in contemporary novels.

Cormac (the guy) is precisely my age (he is ~3 years younger, the novel takes place ~3 years ago). He has ridden the same waves of boom and recession Dublin, the same stratum of the ‘90s, the same second-rate private school. His impression of the 25-year-olds bustling beneath him at times echo my own (he is fucking them, I am not). It would be an oversimplification to call him sympathetic or unsympathetic. He seems both empathically attuned to the women in his life and cruelly oblivious. Both knowledgable and ignorant. At times the novel feels like a takedown of a manchild the author once knew, at other times an acknowledgement of our irreconcilable qualities.

The songs I sing to my kids are, for the most part, songs that were sung to me. Fair Rosa is a song my father has sung to us since I was a baby, but I have also heard him sing it at large gatherings. And I heard him sing it again, after a long absence, to his first grandchild in Madrid seven years ago.

When Sadhbh was born I sang it to her. Hundreds and hundreds of times, as a lullaby to sleep. As a comfort during her endless stomach pains in the middle of the night. To send her to naps until her naps ended. And even still in later years, when a moment of quiet was needed. Now I'm singing it to Úna. Of my small repertoire it's the one she likes most. She collapses against me gratefully as soon as I begin.

It's a simple folk song, an Irish version of Sleeping Beauty that exists in many forms online (many claimed as Irish or English, with an origin well detailed here).

It opens like this:

Fair Rosa was a lovely child, A lovely child, a lovely child, Fair Rosa was a lovely child, A long time ago

sung with a lilt that I still often fumble until the end of the first verse.

Each subsequent verse is one new sentence in the same structure:

A wicked witch, she cast a spell, Cast a spell, cast a spell, A wicked witch she cast a spell, A long time ago

And so the entire song that I sing, which is close to my dad's but possibly missing a verse or two, is:

Fair Rosa was a lovely child A wicked witch, she cast a spell Fair Rosa slept for a hundred years A forest it grew up around A handsome prince came riding by He kissed Fair Rosa's lily-white hand Fair Rosa, she will sleep no more

The versions I find online are full of small variations that bring it closer to or further from the Sleeping Beauty myth as recognised today. What I like about our version is the bare quality of it, it is a telling onto which much may be presumed or discarded.

This song takes two minutes to sing, and so I might sing it five or twenty times in the course of a walk around the room, the end of the song returning seamlessly to its beginning. After the second or third go my grasp begins to slip, and I start singing the verses out of order. When I'm very tired I begin to sing them randomly, without thinking of it, any one falling out of my mouth without conscious awareness. The forest follows the prince. Fair Rosa wakes before sleeping. The forest grows before the years have passed (instantly, in my mind's eye). The story stutters and starts and lapses, its repetition becoming a feature of the story, a narrative confusion, lost in time.

I notice myself one night singing "A handsome prince, he cast a spell", and so must follow with "A wicked witch came walking by". The story is remade and I have the witch kiss Rosa's foot instead.

Helene always sings "A handsome prince came marching by", and so when singing together we always clash on this verb, and laugh.

The spare quality of the words we sing allows me some selective interpretation. I know the story's end is meant as a romantic escape, but as the years have passed an alternative has hardened in my mind. Rosa is a child. She is released by the prince's touch, it might have been anyone's. The spell is broken, and she is free, not further bound. The great forest is hers.

I find myself sometimes frightened to walk there alone on windy nights, because the wind blows so hard that I can hear nothing around me and feel sure, during the loudest howls, that someone is about to tap me on the shoulder. A friendly neighbour, perhaps, who will kill me dead while trying to say hello. The beach road is not empty of houses, but rather dotted with ones; a place that is full and friendly in the summer months and often eerily empty during the winter. A whole evening can pass without a car passing.

But we are back in Dublin for Hallowe’en, where of course the dead are more densely gathered on every lamplit street corner than they ever were on the WINDY beach roads of West Kerry. In Kerry the sand dunes of our local coves contain hill-sized middens of shells and bones from people who lived there eight thousand years ago. Life and death have been turning over on those shorelines for inconceivable generations. But there’s something steady and reassuring about it, this kind of death. It’s up in Dublin where you have neighbourhoods named for plague pits. Where you find out the meteorological office that overshadows your house was built, not as you first thought, over a Victorian square, but instead over a mid-century detention centre for homeless and delinquent children, with all the attendant horrors that implies.

I’m brushing my teeth in the upstairs bathroom window, looking over the Victorian schoolhouse in the yard behind our garden. The school was in use until a few years ago, when it was shut down, boarded up and bought by the hospital. In the past year a large white tent has appeared in the yard outside the schoolhouse, used as a pandemic lab and testing centre for the hospital next door. We were not told this, but it’s impossible to overlook such a scene without making observations. I take Sadhbh out for walks past the road behind our house and see figures in hazmat suits shuffling awkwardly between the adjacent gates, lugging chunky blue boxes.

The schoolhouse itself has been overtly disused since it closed, as its windows and doors are well-sealed with unpainted chipboard. But as I stare at the dark building I realise that I can see a thin sliver of light coming through the cracks around some of the boards, and that the single large room inside must be very well lit. In a closed up schoolhouse at eleven o’ clock on a Tuesday night. There’s nothing spooky or eerie about this cold blue light, save for its unexpected presence. I wonder to myself if the lab technicians have another entrance that can’t be seen from our house or the road, and if so, why. I wonder if there are people in the dilapidated rooms right now doing laboratory tests. I wonder if it was hastily set up as an overflow mortuary for pandemic victims, as I read about last year.