Fangs for all those memories, Scotland

SECOND generation Irish people may speak with English or Scottish accents, but most are capable of mimicking perfectly the accents of their Irishborn parents — and indeed Irish accents in general.

So I was more than a little surprised to hear comedian Frankie Boyle’s take on his Donegal father’s accent in a recent BBC yoke. In Frankie Boyle’s Tour of Scotland he was responsible for a lamentable Irish accent. It sounded as if Frankie had been for lessons at the Dick van Dyke School of Regional Accents.

Which is odd. Frankie Boyle is a regular visitor to Ireland, and is part of the Irish Diaspora in Glasgow. Still, there it is.

THE accent was as bad as Sean Connery’s in Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Sean’s brogue is probably the gold standard of bad Irish accents — “Top of the begorrah to ye, to be sure to be sure” etc.

But Boyle’s Tour of Scotland has otherwise been instructive. In Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Boyle visited the Kilmarnock Arms. Dublin man Bram Stoker was a regular visitor to nearby Cruden Bay and may have written early chapters of the book here circa 1894. The hotel guest book still bears his message: “Delighted with everything and everybody, and hope to come again — Bram Stoker.”

Whitby is usually quoted as the inspiration for the Britain-based sector of the story, but Stoker’s imagination may well have been fired by Peterhead. This northerly town is called “the Athens of Scotland” about as often as Athens is called “the Peterhead of Greece”. In short, never. Because, exposed to the full force of the North Sea, it’s quite a bleak place. Visitors will be shown the gasworks and the prison, and the nearby brute of a fortification Slains Castle — which greatly impressed Stoker.

Meanwhile the authorities in

Peterhead recently announced their tourism strategy which includes “measures to improve the town’s physical attractiveness”. Had it happened in Stoker’s time, he would have undoubtedly disapproved and rushed to the scene to stop developers destroying the desolate nature of the place.

You can almost hear him saying, “There’s not a moment to lose: pray God we are not yet too late!”

THAT’S one of the great lines about sycophancy in the English language — you’ll seldom read better. They’re part of a poem by Longford* man Oliver Goldsmith, published exactly 250 years ago.

The poet was riffing about the local schoolmaster, back in the days when such a figure would be of high status in town or village. The poem is The Deserted Village, a social commentary condemning rural depopulation and the pursuit of excessive wealth by the over-class.

It begins “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain. . .” Auburn, close to Athlone, itself is in Westmeath, but whether Goldsmith got his idea of the ‘village on the plain’ from the biblical Cities of the Plain, I don’t know. They were (although I’m sure you need no reminding) Admah, Zeboim, and Bela. Oh, and two more — Sodom and Gomorrah.

On an unrelated note, Goldsmith finally left the Irish midlands and settled in London.

Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith began working on Grub Street as a hack writer. But in his spare time he came up with what many regard as the finest literary trilogy in the English language; the novel the Vicar of Wakefield, the play, She Stoops To Conquer, and the poem The Deserted Village. Journalists, eh? *Even his name and address sound like a line of poetry: Oliver Goldsmith from Ballymahon, County Longford. But there is a possibility that he was born in Elphin, County Roscommon, which is almost equally poetic.

“Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee At all his jokes, for many a joke had he ”