Yuccas

I've been thinking about yuccas recently. 

Well, for the last forty eight hours or so. Before that I hadn't been thinking about yuccas at all. Not really, though I do recall seeing some on display outside a store in Toronto. And yes, I do recall...yes yes it's all coming back to me as I write, I do recall thinking then that I hadn't seen a yucca in a long while. 

The thought passed. 

I came back to Ireland and there I was, forty eight hours ago, sitting in The Bayside Inn in Sutton in County Dublin. It was very quiet. I hadn't been there for a few months but the same people seemed to be sitting there in the same seats, being very quiet. It was strange for me to think, to realise that all the while I was away in North America these same people had been sitting here. Not missing me in the slightest. The relationship was mutual.

The deceased husband of a girlfriend of mine once told me that it took a good ten years to build up a relationship with a pub. He actually told me a lot of other stuff, me being the lover of his wife, like, but what sticks in my mind is that particular notion, that it takes a good ten years to build up a relationship with a pub. 

Now I don't know about this at all. It may well do, but it is not necessarily so, not necessary that any relationship will be built up at all.  I have been going to the Bayside Inn in Sutton for ten years or so. Every few months. Say maybe six or seven times a year. And, hand on heart, I can say that  I have absolutely no relationship with the Bayside Inn in Sutton, nor with its denizens. And I could be going there for the next ten years, and I can confidently assert that I would have built up no relationship.

So there. But...doubts creep in...maybe that is the nature of the relationship? Maybe a relationship that doesn't exist is in fact a relationship?

Is this all getting a bit Wittgenstein?

Perhaps. So, these yuccas. There I was sitting in my non-relationship with the establishment, a sort of dark matter relationship...there I was and I became conscious of being watched. I put up with this for awhile and then looked around. And there they were, a row of yucca plants along a shelf, watching me. Four or five or maybe even six yucca plants. I didnt count. There was enough. There was actually too many. Because that's the thing about yucca plants, they are a singular, should be anyway. One is quite enough. After that they get sinister. They kind of gang up on you. And one becomes aware...of the yuccas of North County Dublin and the yuccas of Toronto...their totality...

That's all I have to say on the matter.

*

I see I have a new follower on my Academia site.  She's looks very nice. Here she is below. She's interested in Early Photography. And so am I. And she's also interested in The Life and Works of Mary Hayden. And so am I .

But I wonder if she's interested in yucca plants?

Madonna in Monkstown.

Well that was a good six month break from the slavery of the screen.

Have been in Canada for this last month...don't knock it, it's a great country...Toronto is a great city...Soby's at Yonge and St Claire is a great supermarket...Jingles is a great pub...(with the exception of their "chef's salad" which is a few olives buried in a  pile of lettuce leaves...)

And so, now that I'm a leading food writer, I have to mention that I'm barely back in Ireland when I see Madonna walking along by Monkstown Church in County Dublin...well I don't actually see her, not in the flesh (don't tempt me) but rather I see a photo of Madonna walking along by Monkstown Church in County Dublin...she is, the caption tells me, accompanied by her bodyguard and some female friends.

This bodyguard concept is a good idea, Monkstown is a notoriously dangerous area. I found it dangerous when I lived there. Though it must be admitted that most of the danger in my case was created by my female friends. Wrote a book about all that.

I tell my wife H, about whom I wrote that book, that Madonna has been in Monkstown County Dublin.

"What was she doing", says H, "adopting children?"

It's one of her sardonic mornings.

Life does that to a woman. Particularly life with me.

"No", I tell her, "it's all about food".

So what has Madonna got to do with food?

Ah hah...this is the thing...Madonna is going (in the picture on my screen) to the funeral of David Collins.

Oh God, David Collins is not dead is he?

Oh yes he is, and  I don't even know who he is. Quick google. Oh God again. He's a celebrity architect from Glenageary in County Dublin. And he's designed every restaurant worth going to in London. And he wears velvet jackets. And Graham Norton was also at the funeral. And and and...the details pile up...but those relevant to myself are hidden, obscured...I search...it's much like poking through  the lettuce leaves in Jingles pub at Yonge and St Claire, looking  for the damn olives...

Ah hah.

Olive one...Collins went to St Conleths School in Dublin...SO DID I ...

Olive two...Collins designed the Wolsley Restaurant in London...I  HAD BREAKFAST THERE ONCE !

Olive three...Collins's father was an architect Jack Collins of Glenageary County Dublin....ah hah...ah bloody hah...I knew that old boy, vaguely, by repute...and long years ago when I was setting up my horticultural business (another blog, another day, another blog, be patient) I bought some equipment from a secondhand salesrooms which, I learned, had originally been in Collins's offices...

How about that then? It's eerie. The connections between myself and David Collins are obviously multifaceted and extensive. The cosmos does have an architect.

Dammit. I should've been at that funeral. I feel guilty now. I just should've been there. And what was I doing instead?

Well...back in Toronto I didn't spend all my time in Soby's Supermarket or Jingles Pub, I was actually working as well. And part of my work  was to visit and meet and talk to a very elderly lady from Ireland. A jewish lady, she is the surviving sister of Ettie Steinberg, the only Irish victim of Auschwitz, about whom I have written in the past.

I did all that and came back to Ireland with my notes and my photographs and I went to my house and I cut my grass and then I sat down to write about the elderly Jewish lady and her life and all that, and how her murdered sister did not have a life nor a chance to be an elderly lady in Toronto surrounded by a huge loving family.

Yep, that sort of peripheral stuff.

When I could indeed should have been at the funeral of a posh restaurant designer.

Me and Madonna.
                                                                                                                                          ConanK

NOW !

As mentioned previous posting, the NOTEBOOK is closed...('tho you can still read the entries by scrolling around here)...from now on such postings (as they are) will be on the main page under the LATEST heading...thing is, if the thousands of people who have read NOTEBOOK over the past couple of years had bought books then I'd have the time to write more NOTEBOOK...but they haven't, and I haven't.

Other could-be-interesting material still here in seperate locations  focuses on

Genealogy , and  Old Photographs,

There's an archive of published articles and suchlike on topics various right here. 
(Be patient with that link, might need to refresh, reason obscure.)

Same place has access to download a free book !

All good things...

...come to an end....and with the fast moving online interface place (or something) it soon becomes time to move on to something new...which time has now arrived for this writer anyway...so...click for my musical message...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hZrXdJ-ibo

Days of Miracles and Wonder

The week didn't start that well, austerity wise. For reasons too obscure to even mention it so happened that  my beloved H and I found ourselves in guardianship of a small eleven year old boy for a few days.

A pupil in St Andrews College in Dublin, this single fact put the kibosh on the austerity bit. They don't do austerity down there. Or, if they do, the yummy mummys apply a pretty good face to things.

It was a revelation.

To avoid the congestion on Booterstown Avenue we had been instructed by the parents of the small eleven year old boy to approach the school from the rere. (Yes there is a joke there somewhere but I'm not going scraping that barrel.) There is a lane, we were told, running through wooded territory to the east of the Radisson Hotel. And that would lead to St Andrew's without getting snarled up among lowly commuters. We found it. And got snarled up among large vehicles with copies of Fifty Shades of Grey forgotten in the glove compartments. These large vehicles  were being driven (badly)  by blondish Mums who, if it had been sunny, would've been wearing sunglasses in their hair.

But it wasn't. It was raining.

I parked the car, suddenly conscious that the vehicle was a couple of years older than the small boy in my charge. It vaguely occurred that there was some rule of thumb or social convention whereas one's car should be younger than one's children...certainly to be socially acceptable in St Andrews laneway. But the thought evaporated. This happens more and more, these days.

It's not actually officially St Andrew's Laneway, more likely an extension of the entrance to that Radisson Hotel, and obviously originally a laneway that ran round the boundary of the onetime St Helen's Estate. I spotted apartment blocks here and there in the woods. Mere glimpses through trees. But then other lives are like that. And  I also spotted a playing fields which I first thought belonged to St Andrews but then was enlightened by the beloved H. (Not that she's that beloved when she's in enlightening mode, but whatever.) Apparantly the playing fields belonged to neighbouring Colaiste Iosagain, a different school entirely. Oh yes I know it well. Our daughter went there. And now walking down the lane I noticed clones of my daughter...well clones as she was fifteen years ago, that familiar uniform... coming up the lane towards me. Girls in greenish plaid skirts. Whilst going in the same direction as myself the St Andrew's kids were in their grey and darkish blue rigouts.

I noticed the different factions of young people ignored each other as they passed. The difference between fees of six and a half thousand a year and no fees at all does that I reckon.

"Like what do the St Andrew's kids get" I asked H, "like for their six and half grand? Like what do they get that the free school kids don't?"

"Better facilities?" she surmised.

"But Iosagain is one of the best schools in Ireland, and our daughter got a masters from University College London." (I didn't actually say 'our daughter', I used her name. But I realise  she desires anonymity from her father's writing. Wonder about that sometime.)

"Yeah well," said my beloved H, and the matter remained unresolved.

How and ever, that same evening some small chink of resolution did glimmer.

It happened down in Sandymount. I was in the upstairs bar of the clubhouse of the Pembroke Wanderers' Hockey Club. Pictures of old hockey teams on the walls. And among them photographic portraits of deceased individuals important to the history of the club. Women who looked unmarried and men who looked like accountants.

I absorbed all that.

I gazed out over the floodlit expanse of the all weather hockey pitch. Hordes of small boys were rushing around with hockey sticks and I was trying to work out which exactly was my eleven year old charge. They all looked pretty much of a muchness from that distance.

A DART train went by. I imagined myself sitting in the window, looking out at the hockey pitch, as no doubt people were, and as I had done myself so many times.  So many times but this, I realised, this was the first time I had ever been in the clubhouse of the Pembroke Wanderers' Hockey Club. But, however, how and ever, it was not at all the first time I had been at the grounds itself. Long years ago I used play cricket here. It was grass then, and the clubhouse then was a shack over at the Churchill Terrace side.

I remembered that.

The next day Saturday I went to the austerity march through Dublin. I wasn't actually participating, merely observing. I like to be in at the start of a revolution. It gets messy later on, but the start tends to be interesting. I walked up O'Connell Street.

A group of thuggish characters had taken over the O'Connell Monument and were waving flags of the IRSP, The Irish Republican Socialist Party. I nodded, but only to myself. I walked on. remembering how thirty five years ago I had walked through Little Bray behind the coffin of Seamus Costello.

There's been a lot of funerals since.

I walked on. A man that seemed to have stepped out of a Victorian cartoon held a large placard on a pole above his head. It prophesised doom in biblical language. A group of Islamic people stood silently along the kerb. Well, two groups of Islamic people, one made up of men, the other of women. I presume they were essentially the same group. They weren't protesting, rather evangelizing, if that be the word. Definitely was the word for yet another group, this one of fundamentalist Christian preachers. And beside them a group who didn't think much of Jews or Israel. All white Irish, the young men wore Arab scarves and the young women were in gear they certainly wouldn't be able to wear when their cause was won.

I walked on.

A solitary and beautiful young woman handed me a Pro-Life leaflet. I took it politely, wondering vaguely yet again why Pro-Life women are  better looking that Pro-Choice? It's been something that perplexes me. I suppose nature has an answer.

On and on I walked, my pocket gradually getting stuffeder and stuffeder with leaflets and pamphlets.

.Socialists.

Tax Campaigners.

More socialists.


On and on I walked, and on and on they came, the leaflets. I took up my position beside The Spire and remembered going up its predecessor Nelson Pillar. And remembered being in Africa when someone told me it had been blown up. Dublin and its revolutions seemed far away then, other wars on my mind.

The protest parade eventually started. It was very very large and none of the people marching looked like they had kids in St Andrews College, nor that they actively participated in the doings of the Pembroke Wanderer' Hockey Club. 

The parade was led by a masked girl on a horse.

She was wearing a voluminous black cloak and I suppose she was meant to be death.

I thought these are the days of miracles and wonder.

And went home and listened to the song.

Conan Kennedy's new novel is

The Snake Dancer of Sat Choura,

now in (Irish) bookshops.

 Days of Miracles and Wonder

REHOBOTH

There's woegeous journalism and there's an article on The Irish Times website, Is Dublin 8 the New Gay Village. It has the sentence:

The area's edgy cosmopolitan vibe is attracting gay residents.

The writer who should in her own interests prefer to be nameless, she really should, builds on this start and leads the hapless reader into a carcrash of an article.  It's all quite risible, embarassing, appallingly written and...oh for goddsakes...read the comments thereto attached...I actually could say it better myself but can't be bothered.

But but but...at least I now know that the majority of people in Ireland who have entered into civil partnerships live in the area of Dublin 8. (Village? Village? Dublin 8 is a huge urban area with a population greater than most Irish towns.)

Another thing I now know is that couples who allow Irish Times writers into their houses to write about them and their ideas on society and interior decor are pretty damn smug and self satisfied. And it's nothing to do with being gay, but that helps.

Jim and Philip and Nathalie and Carla are (head?)cases in point.

The photo of Mr and Mr shows them standing in what at first glance looks like an Ikea showroom under construction, before the bits and bobs arrive, and yes they do look pretty damn smug and self satisfied. Jim is in communications and Philip is a librarian. But we sort of knew that. Just as we suspect that Jim's role in communications does not involve climbing up telegraph poles to connect wires. The photo of Ms and Ms is much the same, oozing with a like amount of smugness and self satisfaction, but with added girlie bits, like cushions. Ms and Ms appear to be in design, and one Ms is an apparachik in the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network.

This is where I come in.

This is where it all comes together.

My amazing connections!

I shared a flat in London with one of the founders of the GLEN. There were two other blokes there. Every week one of us would cook a Sunday meal for the others. I was the worst cook and the least gay and got chucked out of the whole arrangement. I then shared a bedsitter with the brother of Eric Luke, the Irish Times photographer involved in this appalling piece of journalism. Many years later I came back to Dublin and met the same Eric up Dalkey Hill...he took a photo of my small daughter being picturesque in the snow. And not...only...that...the other photographer involved in the misconceived article is Cyril Byrne...and Cyril Byrne is married to a friend of mine in Shankill.

And...not...only...that...

Mr and Mr Jim and Philip live in Rehoboth Place in Dolphin's Barn. And I know an awful  lot about Rehoboth Place. I learned most of it when editing The Diaries of Mary Hayden.  Stuff like...

Molly Bloom's father lived in Rehoboth Place. Yes he was fictional, but real people who also lived there range from Isabella Mulvany who more or less founded Alexandra College and her sister who was the grandmother of Richard Murphy the Poet.

Whatever happened to him?

I think he's in Sri Lanka.

I suppose it all hangs together.

Sri Lanka being the sort of Dublin 8 of the Indian Ocean.

PS:  My new novel The Snake Dancer of Sati Choura is now in Irish bookshops. Though not of course in The Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar, see below ! Their demographic wouldn't like it.

Jimmy Savile,Melanie Verwoerd, and The Gutter Bookshop.

So...the BBC didn't want any negative information about the late Jimmy Savile coming out...

And...Pat Kenny of RTE doesn't want any negative information about the late Gerry Ryan coming out...

"That book should not have been written", he is reported of saying about the beautiful Melanie's book which, among other things, deals with her late lover the RTE presenter Gerry Ryan.

It's ludicrous, methinks. And Gerry Ryan wasn't even a paedophile, he was just a rather sad character who took too much cocaine and didn't have any friends.

Interesting now that he's safely dead he does have friends in the Irish media mafia.

Hanging together lest they hang seperately? No doubt. And to be expected. But nonetheless it's rather alarming to note that Ireland's major radio/tv presenter/commentator (€800,000 per year...yes that's five noughts) has come out strongly in favour of book burning.

Ah sure...moving on....

Mentioning books. My own new novel The Snake Dancer of Sati Choura has now been published in print format.  And very good it is too. (Though I don't expect Pat Kenny to be interviewing me on any of his shows.)

As part of its publication I thought I'd take a wander round Dublin's remaining bookshops to see how it was looking. And in the course of this wander someone told me there was a new bookshop...well...a newish bookshop down in Temple Bar.

This, I thought, was good news. Bookshops are becoming increasingly few on the ground. Thank God for the world of E, etcetera.

I looked it up. The new bookshop presented itself as a happening sort of place at the cutting edge, reader and writer friendly, all that. I found that it was owned by a bloke who used work for Hughes and Hughes (which went bust) and also with Waterstones (which did likewise). So I reckoned he should know a thing or two about the book business.

I wandered down to The Gutter Bookshop to check it all out.

It was pretty much the same old same old, like a provincial Easons, but with fewer titles.  The usual suspects really. Disappointing but, whatever. A bookshop is a bookshop.

Anyway, they'd never heard of my book. But I suppose they are at the far arse end of Temple Bar in a sort of cultural bubble and stuff doesn't really penetrate.

I arranged for a copy of the book to be sent to them.

Week or so later I wandered down again.

No, they hadn't ordered my book. And she, yes she, whoever she was, had no intention of so doing. And conveyed this info in terms which could not be described as warm and friendly.

Ah hah, I thought, this shop is aptly positioned, in Cow Lane.

"Why not?" I asked, my thoughts staying schtum.

"It's not in our demographic."

"Oh. What does that mean?" I asked, but reply there came none...'she' just  left and walked away to sell a jumper to a customer.

Yes they sell jumpers.

And why not? I myself used sell horticultural products in Dublin's wholesale vegetable markets. And there's no difference. Some people you meet in the sales game are polite, and some are sheer damn ignorant and rude and offensive.

The product is meaningless.