The Marino Waltz

Ahh. Another classic Irish ad. The tune is known as the Marino Waltz. Marino is a suburb of Dublin, and the tune was composed by John Sheahan of The Dubliners. Why he called it the Marino Waltz I don't know. I can't think of anything else to say about this one. But really, what more do you need?

Going home

Continuing our series of iconic Irish ads: the ESB ad. If you've ever had a home and left it, I defy you to watch this without welling up. If the Kerrygold is a Jilly Cooper novel, this is a Maeve Binchy. It's so beautifully done in the way it tells a whole story, just through this man's journey home from the train station, seeing old haunts and new joints out of the window, while Mammy switches on the electric blanket and takes the soda bread out of the oven ... both things my own mother does. R recently posted this on Facebook and it provoked a lot of emotions (one person wrote, 'You had me at the immersion, sob').

These ads are so accomplished: I think advertising is a very underrated part of the Irish media/creative industries. It's interesting how many of them play on the concept of home: Aer Lingus's 'Now You're Home' is another one, or the Denny's ad about 'It's breakfast time back home.' The weird thing is that these ads were all for the domestic market: showing that even when at home in front of their TVs, Irish people still love to feel nostalgic and homesick. Maybe that's not surprising because of course, in the ESB ad, it's not just home he's going to: it's the foreign country of his youth.

You could put a bit of butter on the spuds there, Andre

It's Bonfire Night Weekend, and fireworks are exploding left right and centre outside as I type. J today posted on Facebook: '11 years in the UK and I've never been invited to a bonfire party. :( What am I doing wrong? Who does one have to sleep with for an invite? What happens at these secret, exclusive rituals?' I have never been invited to one either, and I've lived here 10 years. What is the story with these parties? J gets invited to things like the Oscars and celebrity weddings (really) but Bonfire Night remains beyond his social grasp.

In the absence of any Bonfire Night invitations I had people over for dinner. It ended up being 5 girls, none of whom knew each other particularly well, but who all got on like a house on fire. At the end of the evening people were swapping numbers and arranging to meet up and everything. It was lovely. I made sausages with honey and mustard (slightly overcharred), roast parsnips, carrots and potatoes, and I was shameless enough to serve Vienetta for dessert. F, who is Italian, said, 'You have this in England as well?'

So G and I had to tell her about the Kerrygold ads - a seminal series of ads that somehow associated butter with a saga of Franco-Irish sexual tension set against the backdrop of an old-moneyed rural household. That's harder than it looks. It also gave rise to countless catchphrases from the risque 'Zere is somesing I can elp?' to the cliff-hanging 'Who's taking the horse to France?' There's a whole series to enjoy but you might as well start here:

Oiche Shamhna Shona Daoibh

How I love Hallowe'en. During my childhood, it was easily the highlight of the year, second only to Christmas and birthdays (yes, OK, that's third). Here in the UK, people are still getting the hang of it. There is much sniffiness over the fact that it's an American import, but no one seems to wonder where the Americans got it from. Well, wonder no more: it's originally a Celtic feast and very popular in Ireland (where understandably the whole Guy Fawkes thing hasn't caught on). My boss (who is Canadian) was complaining that the British still don't understand that you should only go trick-or-treating at the houses that have pumpkins, etc. In Queen's Park, most houses are now 'on message' and I saw lots of groups of children marauding around on Sunday evening. They were all accompanied by parents, which seems sad. We never went out with parents unless we were very tiny. Is the world really more dangerous today, or is it just perceived as such? We also made all our costumes: there was no such thing as a shop-bought costume, and I made countless pointy witch hats out of cereal boxes (what did anyone do before those?)

I spent most of the actual Hallowe'en (Sunday) recovering from my party the night before. I didn't ask people to dress up, but partly inspired by this fabulous blog I did spend about 3 hours making bats out of black card and suspending them from the ceiling. Our stepladder seems to have disappeared, so my friend L had to help me by sitting on the sofa (as ballast) while I hopped up precariously on the back of said sofa hanging the bats with thread and sellotape. I'd had a glass or two of wine at this stage so I feel quite lucky not to have fallen and broken my neck. I was also going to strew the floor with dead leaves which I've seen done before and which looked really cool, but I realised this was too much madness. Sometimes I wonder: am I really 33 or am I just pretending?

He drinks tequila, and she talks dirty (in Spanish)

Radio silence from me is due to a peaceful week in Dublin. Arrived into Dublin on Good Friday, on the boat. I like getting the boat. Unlike the airplane which is the opposite of restful, the boat is from a leisurely age - train from Euston at 12.30, change at Crewe, Crewe to Holyhead, look out at the coast, sheep, castles, bays, to Holyhead, onto boat, and so to Dublin by 19.30. I did very little but arrived back in London rested and with some memorable snippets to ponder.

- Good Friday is traditionally a day when pubs close, but because of some important match, some pubs in Limerick (I think) had been given a special license to open. I always thought the Good Friday closing was a traditional thing only, but no, it's enshrined in the 1962 Intoxicating Liquor Act.

- On page 2 of Friday's Irish Times I encouter a photo of two children called Eve and Phoenix Williams. Phoenix? Opposite was a snippet about a newborn giraffe at Fota Zoo in Cork. The giraffe's name is Aoife and its mother is called Roisin. It's a strange day when giraffes have more normal names than humans.

- Much discussion of the financial disasters currently engulfing Ireland. The banks are being bailed out, to a much more punishing tune than here in the UK, as our government was if possible even more reckless than the UK banks. There is a growing feeling that the government of the 90s was the worst we have ever had; yet this same government, which is still in power, is refusing to apologise and in fact in classic 'blame the victim' style are attempting to pin the blame back on the public. As one commentator in the Irish Times said, 'We are the nation that walked into doors'.

- Wednesday saw my first ever outing with my dad and brother's hill running association. I finished a 3k run up and down Killiney Hill only a minute behind my 67-year-old father. Yes, I am proud of this; no, don't laugh.

-A new musical discovery: Crystal Swing. I'm not sure words can adequately describe this musical phenomenon sweeping Ireland, but they are kind of adorable. Combine country and western, the Big Band tradition, a sweet Cork family and YouTube, and this is what you get. Make sure you watch the interview. Enjoy!

Mickey money and other mysteries

Today, I am mostly proof-reading a very boring book about military history, and laughing about this blog . I like it, not so much for the beauty stuff (though that's good too) but because it's like being in a room full of Irish women chatting about random things. For a deracinated member of the diaspora like myself, it keeps me in touch. A point in fact: I know what a mickey is (obviously) but I had no idea child allowance was called 'mickey money'. Anyway, maybe you had to be there - here's a brief discussion of the etymology of the term, with variants: read and enjoy. I wonder if 'Mickey money' could also be a term for the fee you get paid for working on a Disney film? Endless possibilities.

Home

Home for the weekend to Dublin - see resolution re keeping in touch with people in Ireland, below (though I don't think people really like being thought of as resolutions, so I'm going to keep quiet about that). And very nice too. Dublin has been having water shortages - the pipes all froze during the snow and now they've burst. My sister-in-law's brother has had no water for 3 weeks. Luckily the parental home was unscathed.

The most exciting part of the weekend was a plan for a family dinner at my brother's that morphed into an ongoing negotiating situation of UN-type complexity, with alternative plans of ever-more fiendish complexity being rolled out. I'll spare you the details but they involved unlimited changes of place and venue, all members of the immediate family, the two girls down our road who I used to babysit, and 12 people sleeping in our (4-bedroom) house. I cut the Gordian knot by saying I had made plans for Friday, and could we keep it Saturday. And that is what we did, and it was very nice. My sister-in-law makes Yorkshire puddings, which I find quite exotic, and we played with their new(ish) cat who shows remarkable tolerance for being manhandled and generally pushed and pulled around. A good quality for any family member, I would say.

We have tested and tasted too much, lover

Anyone who went to school in Ireland between 1969 and 2000 will recognise the above as the opening of Patrick Kavanagh's 'Advent'. And why? Because it was in Soundings.

Soundings (subtitled 'Leaving Certificate Poetry/Interim Anthology') is a school book that has acquired an almost mythic status among Irish people of a certain generation and literary bent. You can't find it on second-hand copies on Amazon - maybe because the people who have kept it don't want to give it away? But many a shelf still has a yellowing copy whose spine is held together with sellotape and whose pages are palimpsests, with the original poem almost obliterated by painstaking pencil comments, often from several siblings who have shared a copy (and whose level of interest/application can be gauged by the frequency and nature of comments).

I don't know who Augustine Martin is/was but he took a directive and detailed approach. Lots of his questions were more than a little rhetorical ('Read a passage aloud. How appropriate to the thought and mood are the slow lapsing rhymes and the long lines?' I'm guessing very?)and he didn't pull his punches with his young readers (one of his questions on Advent is 'In what sense can luxury be predicated of a child's soul?') Considering it was published at the end of the swinging sixties, Soundings took a very canonical approach, going through from Chaucer and Milton to Keats and Tennyson to TS Eliot. And what is wrong with that?

So many of the poems I love I first met in Soundings, especially Hopkins and Hardy. I particularly like the 20th century Irish poetry: Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella (though I always felt not even the teacher really knew what was going on in 'Another September'). Even though we were bashed over the head with these particular poems, I retain a fondness for them and for the general vibe of choosing great classics and scrutinising them closely. I have no idea what Leaving Certificate kids read today - but I'm willing to bet it isn't a patch on Soundings.

Here, courtesy of F's copy of Soundings, is the Kavanagh poem in full:

Advent

We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and please
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.

My perspective on the sentiment of this poem has changed somewhat over the years - trading 'pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour' for 'dry black bread and sugarless tea' seems less appealing somehow. But there's no denying its beauty and power. I love that incantory repetition of 'searching, burning, churning, lurching' in the last stanza, and the philosophy (very typical of Kavanagh) of that line 'Wherever life pours ordinary plenty'. It's an interesting reminder that the time before Christmas is meant to be a time of fasting and reflection - penance, even. Which doesn't seem such a bad idea at the moment considering my post below ...