History has made no impression on Brexiteers
IT came on like a coastal fog. Suddenly I was shrouded. The flu left me a coughing, shivering wreck with barely the will to boil a kettle for the next Lemsip. I tried reading.
It was the Booker winner Lincoln in the Bardo and I decided that it was ludicrously overpraised. The kind of book that, if lionised by one smart critic in the New York Times or New Yorker, will instantly be taken up by legions of lesser scribes, anxious to be on the right side of literary history. Ireland has produced a couple of writers who, deemed great by the New York and London literati, seem immune to criticism for books that are at best average, at worst meandering re-writes of their earlier oeuvres.
You will by now judge the kind of mean-spirited form that flu has produced in me.
As a child sickness meant bed and an escape from school. It was a cross worth carrying and path to Calvary ingeniously extended by some of the best acting outside of the Abbey stage.
I generally timed it for the days I was staying at my grandmother’s. May Hassett was always wise to my subterfuge but had a soft heart and what one might call an un-fanatical attitude to education. “You can catch up easily enough,” she would say. My mother was a teacher and of a more Spartan disposition. Nothing short of the bubonic plague would have kept her away from class.
Many the morning I found myself shunted out into the icy dawn when she fell deaf to my piteous cries.
Now the pressure to rise comes from undone chores. The emails keep arriving in ever more impetuous tones. I am struck by the sense of entitlement braided through the words of my interlocutors. They deserve my attention. They must have it. I could be at death’s door — and what middleaged man with flu doesn’t feel he is — and they would still demand that I agree to this or that request. And pronto.
Well, I have news for all of ye. Take a flying jump. It is the time of No. This cranky old man is going to enjoy his ailments.
One of the pleasures of the last stricken week, beyond gazing at the stark trees outside the bedroom window, has been to reflect on the strangeness of much of what is said and written about Ireland on this side of the Irish Sea. I have chortled, harrumphed and gasped with incredulity.
All these years of history programmes, including my own, seem to have made no impression at all. I have heard that concerns over a hard border were related to the fact there is an Irish presidential election coming up. What?!?!?
Or that it was all down to being worried about Sinn Fein’s electoral ambitions. Or the fact we had a young Taoiseach who needed to be led by the hand by Mrs May.
“For the love and honour of Jesus and his Holy Mother,” I squawked. Then came MEP Gerard Batten of UKIP, calling Ireland “a tiny country that relies on UK for its existence” and which was like “the weakest kid in the playground sucking up to EU bullies”.
The furore that followed was in the same rich vein that has entertained students of Anglo-Irish relations since Henry II forced the Irish chiefs to eat a feast of crane — a bird whose flesh they universally loathed — and set in motion the long chain of events that brought us to this latest pass. More or less.
The reliable ghosts of Cromwell and the Black and Tans were harnessed to remind Mr Batten and others of his ilk of all that had passed between our nations. It was a long time since they’d had a good gallop, peace and love having descended on us all since the Good Friday Agreement. I doubt the Irish protests made much of an impression. Mr Batten seems a man set in his thoughts.
If I seem to be treating the Brexit border shenanigans with less than the seriousness they deserve I plead guilty. It is the fever, your honours. I am not entirely myself and no other self has rushed in to fill the gaps.
Of all topics for the sick of body it is the one to be most studiously avoided. Many a time, as man and boy, I have lain ill in my cot and pondered the question of a united Ireland — only to find myself weaker than I when I began, impervious to the tender words and warm poultices of my loved ones. It is the affliction of the true patriot.
I believe I am over the worst of it. The sun is bright this weekend morning and I am off to buy the Christmas tree and make a start on the present shopping.
There is one trip left to make before the holidays. I am off to South Africa — where it is currently 30 degrees and the middle of summer — for the leadership elections of the African National Congress.
The country I love is groaning under the leadership of Jacob Zuma and his cronies, the Gupta brothers, who have, in the local parlance, captured the state through a litany of dodgy deals and crony takeovers. It is the only nation on earth with more tribunals of inquiry than Ireland.
But whatever the nation’s travails, South Africa always cheers me up and I will get a chance to see my old Listowel friend, Fr Teddy Molyneaux, in Port Elizabeth. He was a friend of Steve Biko and loaned the fugitive newspaper editor Donald Woods clothes and documents to escape from the apartheid police. I will enjoy hearing Teddy’s views on Brexit, if the news has travelled that far. See you all before Christmas, when I will no longer be contagious.
‘Well, I have news for all of ye. Take a flying jump. It is the time of No’