The Domestic

Feasting at the buffet of tragic anecdotes is a very Irish tradition, says Sophie White, but why do we serve them up to sad people?

Misery miners

‘What a fun headline,” you might be thinking right now over your Sunday fry. I’m not about to hit you with a monologue of misery, but a very Irish trait has come to my attention, and I’m fairly certain that, at the time of writing, it hasn’t been formally christened yet. Here’s where I come in.

It’s hard to say when exactly I first noticed this uniquely Irish attribute, but it might have been during a bout of postnatal depression after my first baby. As a race, we have an intriguing and completely ludicrous way of dealing with other people’s distress. It’s something I like to call ‘misery mining’.

For some reason, when confronted with the angst of others, instead of being empathetic or trying to distract them or cheer them up, our knee-jerk reaction is to plate up another worse incident of woe and offer it to the dejected person as some strange form of consolation.

As I cradled the tiny baby, visitor after visitor brought, along with gifts, quite inexplicably the most hideously tragic anecdotes to heap upon me. I can never quite decide whether it’s a ‘things could be so much worse’ kind of vibe, or if the misery miner in question is just reminded by your sad circumstances of some other interesting sad circumstances they recently heard about.

“Did you hear that the Riordans’ house burnt down? And then in the hotel where they were staying, Mrs Riordan found a lump in her breast and then the breakfast buffet didn’t do hash browns,” might constitute one such misery-fest.

“When encountering an already miserable person, why is our instinct to ply them with more misery?”

Having perpetrated the odd bit of misery mining myself, I see that it’s a way, albeit an odd one, of dealing with the awkwardness of another person’s pain, a conversational tic passed down through generations. “You’ll never guess who died,” is, as we all know, a fairly standard opening gambit for any telephone conversation with an Irish mother.

In the same vein, many a pleasant Irish funeral is spent debating who’s next. As a nation, we enjoy a good communal lament. Just look at Liveline. It’s verging on a form of tragi-porn for us. A friend of mine just lost a close friend, and instead of tea and sympathy, she’s being hit with an abundance of tea and misery. It’s confusing. Why do we do this? When encountering an already miserable person beaten down by life, why is our instinct to ply them with more misery?

I suspect we have the expression “misery loves company” to blame, but in my years as a miserable pessimist I’ve uncovered the true balm for malaise: cake. It’s important to note that the icing-to-cake ratio shifts in proportion to the level of anguish. This cake is suitable for weathering mild misery. If the circumstances are dire, double the icing quantity.