Month: October 2020

• 

I had an unusual experience a few years ago while living in Cyprus. It was something that happened out of context and registered with me as being distinctly Irish. When you’re away from home for any length of time, small things that you wouldn’t normally pay any attention to, can sometimes catch you by surprise.

There was an Irish guy living close to my apartment. He had previously served with the UN in Cyprus and he liked the country so much that he bought a place there. We bumped into each other one day and he told me to call up to his apartment for a coffee whenever I was free.

A few weeks later, I took him up on his offer and duly arrived at his front door. It was 8pm on the button. The reason I know that for certain is because Cyprus is two hours ahead of Ireland and as I went through the door, the Angelus was ringing out from the TV in his living room. It caught me off guard because it was the last thing I expected to hear in that part of the world.  

I only had Euronews on my telly and everything else was in Greek, so I rarely turned it on. So, to suddenly come face to face with Ann Doyle reading the news was a real treat. It was something familiar and it got me thinking about the Angelus.

For some people, particularly those of a religious bent, the bells ringing out the Angelus is part of their daily routine. It brings a degree of comfort to their days’ proceedings and that’s important. I imagine there are still many families who take time out during the Angelus to say a prayer and there is nothing wrong with that either. But not everyone does it.

When I was working in Dublin, I shared digs with five other guys. The landlady, Molly was her name, and her husband were religious country people and if we were ever having dinner at six o’clock in the evening, the knives and forks were put on the side of the plate as soon as the Angelus started, and nobody moved until it was over. Well that part isn’t strictly true.

I grew up in a house that didn’t observe the call to prayer. It just wasn’t something we did but I understood that many other families enjoyed that time and fair play to them. Each to his own. So, when I witnessed this for the first time in the digs, I was a little surprised, but it didn’t bother me. I chewed away quietly while they did their thing. I figured as long as they had their eyes closed, they wouldn’t notice. I got away with it for a while too, but I was eventually rumbled.

You see, I was born in Leicester in England. Molly established that and she also discovered that my mother was a Carson and my father’s name was Reginald. Armed with that information plus the fact that I wasn’t saying the Angelus, there was only one conclusion she could come to; She promptly decided that I was a Protestant.

She never discussed it with me, but she did talk about it with the other lads who, of course were more than happy to fan the flames. One guy in particular went to great lengths to strengthen her belief and reinforced it at every opportunity that presented itself. Sean Healy was the main protagonist.

Sean is from Listowel in Kerry and was working in the bank in Dublin at the time. His father was a garda who served in Listowel, so we had something in common but any hope of loyalty because of that association was totally misplaced on my part.

Dinner was usually around 6pm so there was a regular pause for the Angelus. As soon as it was over, Sean would begin questioning me about the traditions observed by Protestants and why we didn’t say the Angelus. It was always in a loud voice to eliminate any possibility that Molly might miss something. “What do ye do in your religion? Do ye believe in God at all? Do ye ever say prayers?”

Poor Molly and Jack were probably wishing he’d shut up and leave me alone. This went on for a few years and there was no point in trying to defend myself because Molly’s mind was made up. I was a cast iron Protestant. I hadn’t the heart to tell her the truth and if I did, she probably wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

Her sister also lived in the house and she died during my time there. A few days after the funeral, Sean came to me and I knew he was up to something. He told me that Molly thought it was very decent of me to attend the funeral and she was even more impressed that I entered a Catholic church. I’m pretty certain who started that particular conversation and I doubt it was Molly but there was no going back after that.

The Angelus has no religious significance for me, but I understand the importance of the moment for others. There are some who couldn’t care less whether the bells chime or not and that’s fair enough too. For a minority though, the sound of the Angelus is enough to fill them with rage. They see it as offensive and outdated and have even campaigned for its abolishment.

Whatever you think about the Angelus, it’s fair to say it can certainly be divisive. For me, the bells are a reminder of the happy times I spent in Dublin and the gang saying their prayers around the dinner table. And I still have no idea what the Protestants do.

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• 

Did we ever think we’d see the day when the bicycle would be taken away from Postman Pat? Sure, they may as well take Sonia’s O’Sullivans runners and Bruce Springsteen’s guitar while they’re at it. The world is changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Progress is a good thing, and we can’t stop it, but we don’t always like the consequences.

These days it’s all about productivity, profit margains, streamlining and efficiency. Improving customer satisfaction means getting them in and out of the premises as quickly as possible with the least amount of interaction. Time is money and every miniute counts. Many of the things we did in the old days would not be acceptable in the workplace today.

My grandfather drove my father up the walls with the amount of time he spent straightening used nails when they worked together. He was old stock and didn’t like waste so when he pulled bent nails from pieces of timber, he would patiently flatten them on a hard surface with his hammer while humming to himself. Then he would put the rescued nails in his pocket, with as much satisfaction as David Attenborough would muster having saved a whale.

My father tried explaining to him that the time spent straightening old nails was costing him more than the price of a box of new ones, but it made no difference. He just thought it was wasteful and he wasn’t for changing. Time meant little to him, or anyone else in those days, but it’s a precious commodity now.

When I was a young, my parents had an account with a local newsagent and in that shop, there was a large timber construction on the wall behind the counter. It was divided into pigeon-holes and each pigeon-hole had the name of a customer printed underneath it. Whatever reading material the customer ordered was placed in there and kept until it was collected.

My father loved ‘Time’ magazine, my mother had her favourites, and I had my weekly copy of ‘Shoot’, the football magazine and they were always waiting for us in the pigeon-hole. They never went astray. It was a simple, uncomplicated system that worked well, and the account was settled at the end of the month. I never considered that one day it might come to an end, until it did.

Maybe it was considered labour intensive and too time consuming but, in any event, the pigeon-holes went by the board. It’s hard to find a shop that even takes orders now and when I’ve tried from time to time, it hasn’t ended well. On a good day, they’ll write my name on a paper and put it somewhere safe but even then, it can disappear.

It’s nobody’s fault. Shops aren’t designed to act as newsagents and shop assistants have enough to be doing without worrying about my order. It’s just another sign of the changing times like the disappearance of Postman Pat’s bike.

An Post is doing away with delivery bikes and according to their website, the top-notch Pashley Pronto bike has been the workhorse of An Post’s fleet for many years. Staff who previously used one on their delivery routes are being equipped with the latest electric trucks, vans and trikes.

No doubt the new electric bikes and vans will be more practical, more efficient and better for the environment, but will they be better for rural Ireland where community life is already taking a battering? A shortage of priests has led to reduced services in some parishes and the closure of many garda stations, small pubs and post offices has done little to promote community spirit.

Young people aren’t too concerned though because they don’t need Mass to meet up. They don’t need the small rural pub either unless it has Wi-Fi and loud music, and they don’t need a newsagent with pigeon-holes because they don’t buy newspapers.

They have little use for the post office because they don’t write letters. They communicate with each other by email, text or through their headphones while shooting the enemy on their latest Internet war game. They buy everything from Amazon, and have it delivered right to the door by courier, so they are less reliant on Postman Pat than the rest of us. That doesn’t bode well for the future of our posties.

Postmen and women all over the country came in for a lot of praise for their dedication during Covid -19. They’ve been going the extra mile for their customers and keeping an eye on isolated and more vulnerable neighbours. Checking in on them to make sure they’re OK.

They collected parcels and letters during the lockdown and distributed them free of charge. They fetched provisions from the shops and pharmacies and delivered local newspapers. They really rose to the challenge and deserve the plaudits for their service to the community.

It reminds me of a postman we had in Cobh, when I was a child, called Kevin Sealy. He was a giant of a man standing well over six feet tall and he wasn’t skinny either. He was a fine cut of a man.

He travelled everywhere on his trusty bicycle and it looked tiny when he walked beside it. He had a word for everyone and always seemed to be in good humour. He was well regarded in town and, like a policeman, he brought a sense of security with him wherever he went. Nobody would mess with Kev. He was part and parcel of the daily routine and a fountain of knowledge too.

If Kevin were around today, he would find this changing world a strange place. He would have plenty to say about it and taking his beloved bike away from him wouldn’t be easy either.

• 

The Department of Health has launched a campaign aimed at encouraging children to eat more healthily to combat the increasing obesity rates. It also hopes to create awareness about the type of food children are putting into their bodies and the amounts they are consuming. They produced a guide on portion sizes too which makes great sense, and this should also help kids in later life with food preparation and cooking.

I must be honest, I was never much of a cook but my lack of talent isn’t entirely my fault. I was brought up in a home run by a typical Irish mammy who believed her role in life was to prevent the family from starving to death. There was a standard portion size in our house that could have been classified as a shovel full.  

The kitchen was her domain, and I was never encouraged to go anywhere near the stove. When I left home, I was fed and watered during my time in Templemore. After that, I worked in Dublin for a few years and lived in digs with five other guys where the landlady cooked our grub and even prepared sandwiches for those of us on shift work, so I was mollycoddled again.

When I returned to Cork in 1983, I moved back home for a year while the house was being built so it was back to my mother’s cooking. There was no talk of healthy eating or portion sizes then either. It was good wholesome food, piled high and I’m showing the signs of it now.

I was just about able to boil a kettle by the time I got married in 1984 and my wife must have discussed my lack of culinary skills with my mother at some point because she took great pleasure in telling me that my mother used to take the top off my egg. When I tried to defend myself by telling her that all parents did that for their kids, she agreed but pointed out that by 22 years of age, most kids have figured out how to do it for themselves. Fair point I suppose.

With the two of us working, I had to pull my weight in the kitchen. I could manage scrambled eggs or beans on toast but that was hardly a substantial meal for a hungry wife coming home after a hard days’ work. The oven was a complete mystery to me, and I was reluctant to go near it, but I was saved when I discovered the pressure cooker.

It was basically a big pot with a lid, and it cooked the food under pressure. Just put some water into the bottom of it, put the food into a tray and seal the lid. There was a weight that went on top of the lid and as the water heated in the pot, the steam lifted the weight and escaped through a little nozzle and soon after, hey presto, the dinner was ready.

Nothing is simple though and one day while preparing the dinner I was distracted. I put the food in the pot, sealed it and turned the heat on but forgot the water. After a while, I heard a strange sound coming from the kitchen and when I peeped in, I could see the pot doing a little dance on the cooker. It was vibrating violently and suddenly there was a loud pop and the little escape valve shot from the pot and lodged in the ceiling.

Whatever I had been cooking erupted from the pot like a mini Vesuvius and ended up all over the cooker. The floor was destroyed and there was a strong smell of burning. When we left that house many years later, that mark was still visible above the cooker.

Shaken from that experience, my fear of cooking returned and after that I went back to the humble saucepan. I kept it simple with stews and curries from then on, nothing too adventurous. It kept the wolf from the door and there was no danger of blowing anything up but recently, I’ve taken things to another level.

My wife came home a few weeks ago with a thing that looked like a massive egg with a handle on the front of it. To me, it was just something else to clog up the kitchen, but she told me it was an air frier. I was sceptical at first, but I have been completely won over by this gadget. It has an element and a fan, so it cooks everything by hot air. It’s ingenious, it’s healthy and there’s no mess but that’s not all.

My sister, Deb, dropped down a few Slimming World cookery books. Not sure why she thought I needed them but maybe she was just having a clear out. Anyway, I had a look through them, and I was pleasantly surprised. A lot of the stuff in there looked very appealing. I had always assumed those meals were full of twigs and raw leaves and tasted like cardboard, but I was wrong. This food is lovely.

The ingredients take a bit of getting used to. It can be off putting when you see a list of ingredients you’ve never heard of with names you can’t pronounce, especially when all you have in the cupboard is salt and pepper but once you invest in a decent spice rack, this cooking lark isn’t so complicated after all. I’ve even started to use the oven and surprise, surprise, there’s no mystery to that either.

My mother would be surprised at this transformation and that I was finally able to take the top off my own egg. But if she was here now, I bet she’d still be doing it for me.

• 

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like today if you hadn’t made certain decisions? Maybe a simple decision that might have seemed insignificant at the time but went on to have a major impact on your life. Or what would have happened if you hadn’t made that phone call, or hadn’t had that chance meeting or if you hadn’t been in the right place at the right time?

For example, many years ago, I escorted a bus load of children to the City Hall. They were coming from Belarus in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at the ChernobyI power plant and I was very taken with the plight of those kids. They were still on my mind when I finished work, so I made a last miniute decision to return to the City Hall to find out more about them.

I met Simon Walsh there and that meeting led to twenty years of involvement with Chernobyl related issues, lifelong friendships and some incredible experiences. Some good, some bad but they were all due to that one decision.

None of my decisions had catastrophic consequences though unlike one made by Michael Keogh. Keogh was from Tullow in County Carlow and had a spirit of adventure. He left home to join the German Army and rose to the rank of Field Lieutenant. Keogh was duty officer at a Munich barracks in 1919 and was on his break when he was called to deal with a riot in a local gymnasium.

A local agitator was making a political speech to a crowd, including soldiers, when some of the crowd turned on him. He was dragged outside with another man and they were getting a severe beating when Keogh arrived on the scene. Some of the mob were armed with bayonets and it seemed to Keogh that the two men were about to be killed so he ordered his men to fire a few shots in the air to disperse the crowd.

The two men, battered and bloodied, were brought back to the barracks prior to being transported to hospital for treatment. They probably wouldn’t have survived that ordeal if Michael Keogh had not arrived on the scene. When Keogh asked the guy with the small moustache who he was, he gave his name as Adolf Hitler.

Hitler was just starting out on his campaign of hate at the time and if it wasn’t for the Irishman, Adolf may have had a much shorter life and history would be very different today. It’s impossible to calculate the number of deaths he was responsible for, but it certainly runs into the millions.

Hitler was hardly deserving of any luck, but he had his share of it. He survived several potential life-threatening events because good fortune smiled on him. Evan Andrews, the historian, wrote about some of them.

Georg Elser was a struggling German carpenter and vehemently opposed to Nazism. In 1939 he knew Hitler would speak at a certain location in Munich and Elser successfully planted a bomb near the podium and set it to explode midway through Hitler’s speech.

Hitler moved the start time of his speech to 8 p.m. so he could be back in Berlin as soon as possible. He finished his remarks by 9:07, and by 9:12, he had left the building. Only eight minutes later, Elser’s bomb went off, levelling the pillar and sending a section of the roof crashing down on the speaker’s podium.

Eight people were killed and dozens more injured. Elser was captured that night while trying to cross the Swiss border, and he later confessed after authorities found his bomb plans. He spent the next several years confined to Nazi concentration camps. In April 1945 he was dragged from his cell and executed by the SS.

In 1943 a disillusioned German military officer approached a member of Hitler’s staff as they were about to board a plane and asked him to take a parcel containing two bottles of Cointreau brandy to a friend in Berlin. The officer obliged, not knowing that the package actually contained plastic explosives rigged to a 30-minute fuse.

A few hours later, he received word that the Führer’s plane had landed safely in Berlin. A defective fuse had prevented Hitler’s plane from being blown out of the sky.

In 1943 the Führer was scheduled to visit an exhibition in Berlin and another officer volunteered to organise a bomb attack. Security was so tight he decided a suicide bomb was the only option, so he did his best to stay glued to the Führer’s side as he guided him through the exhibit. The bomb had a short 10-minute fuse, but Hitler slipped out a side door after only a few minutes. The would-be suicide bomber was forced to make a mad dash for the bathroom, where he defused the explosives with only seconds to spare.

Probably the best-known attempt on his life was the briefcase bomb in the bunker in 1944. A group of conspirators planned to kill the Führer with a hidden bomb and seek a negotiated peace with the Allies. The bomb was placed under a wooden table close to Hitler, but it was moved inadvertently and ended up behind a thick leg of the table which saved him when it exploded, and he survived with non-life-threatening injuries.

Michael Keogh did what he had to do back in 1919. He responded to a call as he was trained to do and, in the process, he saved two lives, but little did he know the impact that decision would have on the rest of humanity. If he had been blessed with the gift of foresight, he might have done the world a favour and taken a bit more time to eat his lunch.