Ken Armstrong Writing Stuff

A Goodnight to Lullabies

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 10:49:00 +0000

This post may be more for myself than for anything else. Still, you’re welcome to read it if you want to.

A couple of months back, my youngest son climbed into bed and announced that he would quite like to read this new book he got until he was ready to fall asleep. This seemed like a very good idea and so we ran with it.

And so ended my fourteen-year-long career of singing to my children.

In fairness, it went on much longer than I thought it could. With the youngest, it was going on so long that you’d have to wonder where and how it would end. As with all these lovely childhood things, it finally just fizzled and died in a sweet moment and that was fine,. It was how it should be.

But, while my memory still holds a little of this, I thought I better set down something about it, for myself, before it slips away.

When my elder son stopped requiring his bedtime song, after his bedtime story, I let it go without a mention but now I can’t, for the life of me, remember what it was I sang for all those years. It is gone from me, which is kind of sad.

So here, for my own benefit, is a record of the two songs I sang each night for Sam for over eight years. You’d think I would never forget them but, if I don't write them down, I will. I’ve done it before.

So, after a chapter or two of the current book (God, how many books have I read aloud?) there would be ‘turning ‘round’ and ‘cosying up’ and then we would have two of the oddest, most inexplicable lullaby choices in the history of tucking-in.

First up, a song hijacked from a ‘Barney’ video tape: “If All The Raindrops Were Lemon Drops and Gum Drops’. God knows why. None of us ever liked Barney all that much and we only had this one video. I think that early on a large variety of songs were tried out and that one seemed to stick. I hasten to add it was a reflective slow version of the song, of my own devising, rather than the sickly-sweet panderings of Barney’s eclectic crew.

Then, bringing at least a tad more ‘Street Cred’, came a little Bob Dylan… or not, as the case may be. You see it was that first song off Dylan’s album ‘Self Portrait’ where he didn’t really sing on it at all. You know the one? ‘All the Tired Horses in the Sun, How’m I s’posed to get any Riding Done? Hmmmm Hmmmm mm hmm hmmmmmm…”

Two choruses of that and that’s it. A little spiel about doors being left open and teddy being in place - never changing, a set routine for all those years – and off to sleep with satisfying ease. I often wished I could do it on myself.

So an era passes… and, as I think about it, it wasn’t just bedtime that brought opportunities for songs and fun. Guys who aren’t dad’s won’t believe this but one of the great opportunities for a bit of banter was at changing time. Think about it – once the ‘offending material’ was bagged and tagged and everybody cleaned up, you had a wide awake little feller just itching for a bit of fun. I can’t remember what songs came out in those sessions but the bits I remember, I remember them fondly.

The song that sticks in my head from the baby-fun era is actually the ‘Baby Rice’ song. When the guys were moving from milk onto solid foods, they were both subjected to the ‘Baby Rice’ song on a regular basis. It may have scarred them for life.

Sung to the tune of ‘Baby Love’, lyrics by yours truly, it went something like… this:

Baby Rice, Oh Baby Rice
I eat you, oh how I eat you.
When I eat you like I do.
Then I go and do a poo.
Then I feel as good as new.
Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby...

(and around again until all the food was gone)

Yes, yes, I know…

… but they were simpler times.

Memories of Innisfree

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 13:40:00 +0000

Pretty soon new, Leonard Cohen will arrive in my home county of Sligo to play two concerts in the grounds of Lissadell House.

This is the same Lissadell House where Sligo’s beloved poet W B Yeats spent so much time and became so enchanted with the area. So enchanted that he effectively wrote his own epitaph in a poem which set out where his final resting place should be and exactly what words should be cut into his headstone:

“Under bare Ben Bulben's head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago, a church stands near,

By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase;

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by”

And these last three enigmatic lines are indeed cut into limestone ‘quarried near the spot’. The poem is like a treasure map and Yeats' grave is there to be found at the end of it, exactly as one would expect.

So it seems likely to me that the great poetic soul of Leonard Cohen will be drawn the few miles up the road from Lissadell House to visit this much-visited place.

I bet he will.

But what I also wonder is whether he will be tempted to seek out the island on Lough Gill made famous by a much earlier Yeats Poem. Will he, too, “Arise and go now, go to Innisfree”?

If you are, indeed, thinking that way, Leonard my lad, (yes, I know read this) well, let me give you the inside scoop on Innisfree.

Because I know Lough Gill. I grew up on the Garavogue river and I fished on the lake for salmon with my brothers on freezing New Years Days where you wouldn’t send a dog outside. I’ve sat in placid bays of an spring evening among the dark spent mayflies and watched the trout suck them down without causing hardly a ripple on the water.

I was never the fisherman my brothers or, of course, my Dad was but I knew the lake all the same.

So let me tell you about Innisfree.

There are boats and buses that will take you to Innisfree and they are completely honest and well-meaning, for the island they will show you is indeed called Innisfree. And you will probably be bewildered and a little disappointed because all you will see is a tiny tree-laden island not far off the shore with no room for docks or moorings let alone beehives or wattle huts.

For this is Innisfree… but it is not Yeats’ Innisfree.

Yeats’ Innisfree is out on the lake and is harder to get to and it is bigger and more sprawling and more baffling. It is called Church Island. This is Yeats’ Innisfree.

Back in those days when we went fishing, we would often pull into a sheltered bay on Church Island for the ‘tea’. We would light a small fire with twigs and would boil a black crusty kettle with no lid. We would have white bread sandwiches and, more often than not, watch the rain plant circles out on the lake. And the smells that haunt us from those times are not of the island or the lake but rather they are of the things we brought there ourselves and the things we did there ourselves. The wet wood we caused to smoke in the fire, the petrol dripped from the Seagull ‘Forty Plus’ outboard motors that stained the water with flat rainbows.

And what of Yeats? Well he had been here long before us. Yes here, not on some tiny tree-ridden rock a stone’s throw from the shore, here lost on this island. He took the name from the other little island and put it here for his literary purposes. Why would he not? He was a Poet, it was what he did.

You can look this up on the internet, you can check it out. But, unless you look quite hard, you won’t find anything of what I am telling you here. Perhaps I am just making it up, I can’t say who told it to me because I don’t really know.

But the final proof is out there, on Church Island, because Peace is indeed there, still, and it still comes dripping slow.

It really does.

You may think this is all rubbish, that’s okay. I know in my heart that I’m right.

And if you go there, Leonard – or any of you – then you will know it too.

Two Movies I Think You Would Like, If You Hadn’t Already Seen Them

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:17:00 +0000

Here’s a little post about two films I have seen only recently. I enjoyed both of them immensely and I think that you might too.

The problems with my doing little occasional posts like this are twofold:

Firstly, I rarely get to see movies when they first come out. DVD releases are where I usually catch up and sometimes it’s even much later than that. These days, my first sight of a film might even be on television. So I’m not rolling in with anything new or exciting and the likelihood is that you’ve already seen what I’ve seen and probably even written your own bloody good review of it.

Ho Hum.

Secondly, I hate doing spoilers. Thus the information I tend to give about these movies that I like is severely limited. I won’t even bother giving a synopsis of the plot because what is that if not a spoiler?

So, this’ll be a cracking post, right?

Anyway…

The first film I want you to be sure that you have seen is called ‘Let The Right One In’. It’s a Swedish film from a few years ago and, yes, it’s sub-titled (get over it). Avoid dubbed versions which I hear are available and see this version before Hollywood brings out theirs, perhaps as soon as later this year.

I taped this one off telly a few weeks back and saved it up to watch. I was looking forward to it and wanted a nice quiet late night time where Trish and I could enjoy it.

So, what can I tell you? It’s about a lonely, slightly awkward, thirteen year old boy who slowly befriends his new neighbour… who only really comes out at night.

This is a dark, beautifully atmospheric film with real believable characters despite the fantastical central premise. Be warned, it’s a bit bloody and a bit graphic and there’s a rather silly bit with… well, there is.

Having said all that, and despite it being two years old, I think this is my current film of the year.

Give it a go.

Second up is ‘Moon’. A man is alone on the moon, supervising mining operations for his bosses back at Earth.

Something happens to him…

Don’t let anyone tell you any more than that. It’s easy for someone to tell you much about this film by the use of just one word. “Oh, yeah," they'll say, "that’s the one that’s all about…”.

Try not to let them do that.

Both these movies are slow and dark and atmospheric and both, in my outdated opinion, are very very good.

Keep them in mind, when browsing the DVD shop shelves and let me know what you think of them.

That Mysterious Book I Sometimes Read Just Before Sleep

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:09:00 +0000

‘Can’t sleep without reading a book. ‘Can’t do it.

Even if I tumble in the door at four in the morning (a comparatively rare event, you must agree), I would still have to hit the current book and read for a while before sleep might come.

Usually it happens that I read for awhile and then I start to feel tired and so I put the book away, turn out the light and go to sleep. That’s probably the normal chain-of events for most book-reading-people-of-the-bed, nothing unusual there.

But there’s another way things sometimes go and I wonder if I’m the only one it happens to. Usually it happens when a book is so good that you just don’t want to stop reading, it’s too interesting/exciting, you just want to read on…

But sleep will come, it will not be cheated of its prey. That’s when the odd thing happens – to me at least.

Sleep creeps into the text of the book and/or the text of the book creeps into sleep and suddenly the text I am reading is not the text of the book I am holding but some crazy pre-dream-state literary concoction.

If this just happened for a split second, I could let it pass. But it seems that this can go on for quite some time. I find myself reading, enjoying the words, when suddenly some remnant of consciousness says, “wait, this isn’t the book you’re reading, this is something else.” And, indeed it is something else. Some story with a logic and a sensibility all of its own but not from any printed document that ever existed.

Does this sound mad or do you know what I mean?

It would be much easier to discuss if I could remember anything - anything at all - of this strange text that my book morphs into just as sleep descends. But I can’t. I guess the story is sprinkled with a little of whatever dust gets shaken onto dreams, that gradual but irrevocable self-destruct powder.

And, of course, I may tell you that this mysterious text goes on for quite some time but what do I really know about it? Dream time is amorphic and tenuous at the best of times. This thing I think lasts for minutes may only be a split second aberration of the shutting-down mind.

So, effectively, I’m posting about something I know nothing about.

Not exactly a first, no.

What bugs me about it, what makes me think on it now, is that this phantom text which appears in my book as sleep comes…

…well, it’s quite good, I think.

Maybe it's some book of my creation that it sitting inside my head, one I just haven't written yet. Maybe my mind is giving me a sneak preview as a subliminal encouragement to get on with it.

Maybe I'll never get it written and will only ever see self-destructing passages as consciousness ebbs away.

Maybe I’ll be allowed to read all of it, as I die.

I Am Glad I Like What I Like

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:20:00 +0000

Yes, I am glad that I like what I like.

Lots of my Friends on social media are pleased-as-punch with their new purchase this weekend – The iPad. Quite right too, it’s a neat looking and very desirable piece of kit.

It struck me that the availability of the iPad in Britain (and soon here in Ireland) will create envy with some people. It’s a lovely device but it’s not the cheapest thing in the world. Few people are entirely escaping the grip of the economic difficulties our green little country is currently in the midst of. Therefore many people will want one but will simply not be able to buy one.

That’s why I’m glad I like what I like – ‘cos I don’t really want one.

Before you run off, this is not a whinge-post along the lines of, ‘Why can’t I have one?’ I am (thankfully) in the happy position that I could go out and buy one any day I ever wanted to. Times are not buoyant but there’s ‘enough-to-get-by-on-and-then-some’ and I know that’s not the case for everyone and my heart goes out to them, it really does.

All this post is really about is me celebrating that the things I really love and desire are cheap or free or very easily accessible…

… bloody hell, it’s starting to sound like a ‘family, friends, trees, air and sky’ post now, you must have all left. All those things are valuable and wonderful, of course, but they’re rather a given and, let’s face it, a bit of a bloody cliché too. I’m talking about those more mundane things which we might want or aspire to… things like iPads.

Imagine if your great love was Travel. Every year, you lived for your sojourn to some far-off place or your weekend away in some wonderful colourful capital city. Then the current Recession would probably mess you up, wouldn’t it? Imagine of your ‘thing’ was ‘Haute Cuisine’ – a fine meal in a fine restaurant now and again. These cutbacks could really mess with your delight.

But me, I’m lucky. I like movies, I like books, I like music. I’m lucky because I can get these things whether times are good or whether times are bad.

I am also lucky because these things are great social levellers. Look at the very-well-off people in the world. Let’s pick one… Donald Trump, okay? Do you like good food? Trump’s going to eat better than you. ‘You like clothes? Trump’s going to dress better than you. ‘You like travel? … you get the picture.

But me? I can have everything that Trump can have. He’s got nothing on little old me. What movie can he see that I cannot see? What book can he read? What tune can he listen to that I cannot? (Actually I think there is one Jan Michel Jarre album – ‘Music For Supermarkets’ – that only ever had one copy made of it. So I can’t hear that - but I’m not that bothered really).

These things I like enable me to gain enjoyment at the same level as the richest man in the whole world. I like the thought of that.

So when I express delight at your new iPads, it’s genuine. You’re getting something you desire and you deserve it. I’m really not envious at all.

Me? I’ve got a movie to watch…

… and that new book sounds really good.

Doesn’t it Donald?

The Biggest Movie of My Life 2 - Cross Country Viewing

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 23 May 2010 10:45:00 +0000

(This is a companion-piece to the first post I did on Jaws some time ago. You can see that here.)

In the book, ‘Fever Pitch’, Nick Hornby tells how key moments in his life have been defined by soccer matches he had seen.

It’s much the same for me with films. I have very precise memories of almost every film I have seen – which cinema, who was with me, events that happened on that day.

How odd then that, after such enormous anticipation, I remember so very little about the first time that I ever saw ‘Jaws’. Almost anything I might say about that first viewing would be largely imagined or made-up because I really don’t remember.

However, I remember loads about the second time I saw it. It was exactly one week after the first time I saw it. I was going again with my friend and his sister, neither of whom had seen it yet.

My mother was annoyed that I was spending good money to see the same film twice, she thought it was a bad idea. But I went anyway – this is as close to rebellion as I ever came. I since found out that my Dad went to see ‘The African Queen’ on seven consecutive nights in the local cinema so maybe Mum didn’t mind me going quite as much as I thought she did.

In that second viewing, I actually felt that I owned the film. It was mine now and I was showing it off proudly to my friends. ‘Look what I did just there, aren’t I great?’

This second time around, I was able to look around and watch the astonishing audience reaction when Ben Gardner slipped out of that hole in the boat. It was the oddest thing – everybody jumped. And I really mean jumped, they didn’t cower under their loved ones elbow or throw their hands up to their faces to hide. They jumped and screamed in complete unison… and then they laughed in relief.

One thing I do remember about my first viewing is that I didn’t jump.

I think I might have been the only one.

* * * *

In September 1980, Jaws turned up on television in Ireland for the very first time.

It might be hard to believe now, but this was a bit of an event too. VCRs were only just starting to tentatively appear in the more well-off homes and the concept of the video as home entertainment was still a few years away from being cemented. As a result, the film had dropped from view after a long cinema run and had not been seen much for nearly five years. The prospect, therefore, of reliving the experience in your own living room was an interesting and, yes, an exciting one.

This Sunday night TV premiere spawned one of the most lasting and emotional memories of ‘Jaws’ for me. Perhaps it goes some way to explain why that silly old film still means so much to me.

You see, Sunday night was no good for me. I couldn’t get to see it. On Sunday night, at Six O’clock, I got the bus back to college in Dublin. I had just turned seventeen, was only two weeks into College and Dublin, had never been away from home before, and was physically and desperately homesick. I didn’t want to be in Dublin, I wanted to be in my own house watching the film, just like everyone else would be.

But I had to go and so I didn’t get to see the film that night.

Except… I did.

I watched the film through every living room window I passed, from eight o’clock to ten, as my bus rolled across the country. My eyes riveted to the bus window, I saw snapshot after snapshot of ‘Jaws’ beam out to me. There was lots of houses, lots of windows and everyone was watching.

I know, I saw them.

And the abiding memory of that snatched cross-country viewing? Easy. The colour blue. The azure sea… I can’t explain it but it tugs at me to write it even now.

That blue became a link to home.

Strangely enough, it still is.

My Approach to Drunkenness

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 09 May 2010 11:37:00 +0000

The perception of we, the Irish, is so often one of a person who cheerfully consumes vast quantities of alcohol on a regular basis, often to poetic or musical effect.

That wouldn’t be my perception of we, the Irish, and it certainly doesn't apply to me.

Around the age of 14, as is the norm, me and my classmates were encouraged to take ‘The Pledge’. This happened as part of a religious ceremony where the priest called forth all the boys who wished to eschew the demon drink until they reached the ripe old age of 21. That happy cohort rose from their seats and enunciated ‘The Pledge’ while the villainous renegers remained with ass-firmly-in-pew.

As I recall (I may be wrong) I was the only one in my class to not take 'The Pledge'. As I also recall (I may also be wrong) I was one of a very very few who went on to not take a drink until I was over twenty-one. This probably says something about me but I’m damned if I know what it might be.

If my relationship with alcohol was summarised in a Facebook page, it would definitely say, ‘It’s Complicated’. Thankfully, though, it is not a tragic relationship, as so many complicated alcohol relationships are. My family were all light or non-drinkers and nowhere in the closet lay the spectre of a relative damaged or destroyed by the bottle.

No, my complication lay firmly with the fact that I started working behind the bar at such a young age. My friend's family owned a pub and we both worked there regularly. It was mighty fun but I got to see an awful lot of drunk people while I was there and I think this coloured my own subsequent behaviour markedly.

You see, I like a drink. I like many kinds of drink. Sometime a beer is just Nirvana, a whiskey a treat and a glass of wine a welcome accompaniment.

But, here’s the thing, I hate to be drunk. I really really hate it.

There is a brief magical thirty minute period which can occur about three drinks into a social occasion where I become 'Master of The Known Universe'. My synapses weld together and connections and thoughts flash across them and out my mouth like a virtual wild fire.

Then that passes and I get drunk.

I’m not a sloppy drunk or anything. It’s more about what’s going on with me than with what others are seeing. I feel, inside, some abdication of control. Whatever events might unfold over that subsequent few hours will not be manageable by me, someone else will have to do it. And somewhere deep inside my haze, this disturbs and unsettles me. I try to regain position but I know I am now hobbled and that it will be twelve hours or more before normal service is restored.

Nuh-huh. That’s not for me.

So the upshot of this is that I have only been drunk about three times in my life. A little buzzed? Many time but drunk? Not so much.

I remember, so well, the first time I ever got drunk. I was twenty one, living and working in London. One Saturday night, we went out in High Street Kensington and I had one too many. That’s not an expression. It doesn’t take many drinks for me to get drunk. One too many will be fine.

I remember standing outside a pub, under a scaffold, with my friend who had best remain nameless as he is now a more prominent man than I am. “Look,” the now-prominent person said, “A scaffold. Let’s hang on it.” So he and I jumped up, grabbed a bar, and dangled on the scaffold. It was fun. Long after he had fallen away and found something better to do, I was still dangling.

Then a girl I had known some years before appeared. Her name was Grace, I’ll say no more, she might be prominent too. I was astonished. Is this what alcohol does? Bring old friends out of nowhere on a Saturday night? What a wonderful thing.

I conducted a jolly and effusive conversation with Grace who I noticed, even in my befuddled state, was not the least bit interested in reciprocating. Looking back, I believe this is because I remained dangling from the scaffold for the whole time she was there.

After that some time passed, Dylan Thomas fashion, and I found myself alone in my shared flat. Lord knows how I got there. The other guys were not back yet so that explained the alone part. I found that it was far too dark so I turned every light in the place on. Then I found that I missed the gentle gurgling of my home-river so I turned every tap on too.

Then I sat on the couch and watched telly. Fatima Whitbread was on. She was talking about her javelin and running with some car tyres tied to her rear end As I studied her face in close up, she slowly transformed. She became bigger and more Neanderthal and, well, sorry, uglier (it was me, Fatima, not you). Then I fell asleep and was found that way later – lights on, water running (no leaks) and Fatima long-departed in disgust.

So, these days, if we meet, don’t expect me to consume vast quantities of booze with you. I will probably have two and be surprisingly altered by them. Then I will either move on to soft drinks or simply pretend to drink more if required.

It doesn’t mean I don’t like you.

Quite the opposite, probably.

A Shallow Grave for The Dice Man

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 02 May 2010 14:08:00 +0000

My youngest son, Sam, has just given up wanting to be read-to in bed at night. He is Nine. Suddenly, he only wants to snuggle up under the quilt and read himself to sleep.

As a matter of interest, the book that grabbed him and made him want to do this is called ‘The Name of This Book is Secret’ by Pseudonymous Bosch – which is possibly not the writer’s real name. I don’t know anything else about it, sorry.

Thus ends my ten-year stint of reading every night to our two children. It’s something I have enjoyed enormously and would recommend wholeheartedly. Along the way I have read aloud ‘The Lord of the Rings’, The Hobbit’ all of the ‘Harry Potters’, ‘Watership Down’, ‘Winnie The Pooh’ (which is wonderful to read aloud) and many many others. Just a few pages a night, every night. It's stunning how much ground gets covered.

As we peeped in the other night at Sam reading his own substantial book, Trish remarked that this was a gift I had given both of our kids. If that’s true, I’m very pleased. I myself have adored reading for a very long time.

And I started so very very young.

Well, not so much 'reading' as 'reading adult books'.

My parents were very protective of what I was allowed to watch on television but they never seemed to realise that books could be so much more vibrant, descriptive and damned informative than TV could ever hope to be. I quickly got bored with ‘Famous Five’s and such and so, when I began to dig around in the adult section of the library, nobody seemed to mind.

I arrived in post-primary school, aged eleven, and the English teacher asked what was the last book we had read, she was a bit taken aback when I told her it was ‘Papillon’. She took it on board though and slipped me a copy of John McGahern’s ‘The Dark’ while the others were catching up with Dear Enid. That teacher, Patricia O’Higgins, was a huge influence in my pursuing my writing in the way that I have. I should really thank her for it somewhere other than here.

Was it a co-incidence then that, at the end of first year in that school, I was given a book prize for coming second in the class? (I nearly always come second in things). The book was the rudest book I have ever owned. It was called ‘A Little Treasury of Limericks Fair and Foul’ and whoever picked it out for me could not have misunderstood the level of content within because it was copiously illustrated. That book met the same fate as The Dice Man, which I will come to in a minute, but not before I practically memorised it. I still get laughs from recounting the verse therein from time to time.

Where was I?

Ah, yes, The Dice Man…

At some stage, I got some kind of cold or flu and I demanded that Mum go and get me a book to tide me over. The book I wanted helps me date that sickness quite accurately. I wanted a copy of Spike Milligan’s latest war memoirs which were called “Rommel?” “Gunner Who?” and which was brand new out. That came out in 1974 so I was eleven at the time.

I got the book. It was funny but didn’t last long. I needed something else to read. Mum dug in a cupboard and came out with a thick battered paperback – ‘The Dice Man’ by Luke Rhinehart. I don’t know how this book came to be in that cupboard. Nobody in our house had ever read that book, that’s for sure. If Mum had only read the blurb on the back, she would never have given it to me. That blurb on the back was so misogynistic and sexually explicit that I would even not be comfortable reproducing the text here although I remember it word-for-word.

So there was me, in my sick bed, aged eleven, reading The Dice Man and quite enjoying it. It was rude and wrong and overly-educational but I soaked it up and moved on.

The big problem was what to do with it after I was finished with it and feeling better. Should I have it back to Mum, say, “Thanks, that was great.”

Hardly.

In the end, I wrapped the book in a plastic bag, took a spade, and buried the little package in the back garden, behind the old shed. The limerick book went there too some time after. Thankfully, that marked the end of my book-burying career.

So maybe I have given my kids the gift of reading – I hope so. What I won’t be giving them any time soon is the gift of adult reading.

They’ll probably be a little behind me in that respect.

I can live with that.

Flag Day Brings Out the Chameleon in Me

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 12:07:00 +0000

“There’s a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he’ll take you seriously.”

(Coker – The Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham)

A word of explanation to start.

In Ireland, a ‘Flag Day’ is when you go out onto the streets and collect money for a particular charity or club. The little sticker you get for your lapel after contributing is called a Flag. Okay?

I have a particular trait which I think most people possess a little bit of. It’s just that I seem to possess an awful lot of it It’s not a conscious thing by any means but I am a naturally self-aware person so I often catch myself doing it and then I actually hate myself for doing it.

It’s just this:

I like to give people what they want.

If I’m talking to a bunch of guys in a pub, I can be crude and conspiratorial and enormously politically-incorrect. If I’m talking to a little old lady, I can be sympathetic and saddened and dismayed and supportive, as required.

I tend to give people the ‘me’ which I think they might best like to see.

I know we all do this to some extent. I even said it earlier (read back). Maybe I don’t even do it any more than others but I think I do and that’s enough to annoy me. Why can’t I just be myself with everybody and let them take me or leave me as they choose?

I remember finding the character of Coker in the novel ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and immediately identifying with him for his trait of changing his manner of speaking depending on who he was addressing. It’s the closest I’ve come to finding myself in a fictional character.

This habit of mine is bad but it gets infinitely worse whenever Flag Day comes around.

Every year, I stand outside my local Supermarket and ask people to help towards the upkeep of our local tennis club. It’s there that this ‘Coker’ quality of mine reaches manic and exhausting proportions.

Standing in the lobby of the store, I see whoever is coming towards me and, in order to extract a little funding – or at least not get beat up – I give each one a little of what I reckon they might want. I look sad for the old ladies, pissed-off for the guys, funny for the kids, businesslike for the shop-manager, friendly for the emigrants, small for the police, big for the pretty gals…

It’s completely and utterly bloody exhausting. I would imagine if a security camera caught me, it would present a bewildering array of attitudes, stances, facial expressions and movements.

Kid Chameleon, in full flight.

Of course, I’m not like that all the time in real life. Mostly it’s very subtle and I doubt many would even notice it. But, like the title says, flag day and its peculiar requirements brings it out in me.

Confounding all this disgraceful emphatic posturing is the manner in how I deal with people who might challenge or attack me in any way. I cannot bear to be messed with, disrespected, or maligned. Those people – and there are always a few on Flag Day – may be surprised at the passion and vehemence of my response to them. That, perhaps, is when I am closest to being that elusive character – the ‘real me’.

So perhaps I wish I could be the ‘real me’ a little more often. But who is the real me? The ‘me’ who exists when no one else is around is a rather silent and deflated sort of a fellow. Not someone you’d jump to spend much time with.

I sometimes think the best description of me would be as a sort of a mirror – when nobody’s in front of me, there’s not all that much going on…

Perhaps the ‘real me’ really is this hybrid mimicking fool who alters himself to suit whatever background he currently occupies. Perhaps I should just accept that fact and move on.

What do you think?

Whatever you say, I’ll probably agree.

On 3D TV, Grand National Day, and General Disbelief

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 22:59:00 +0000

Ever since I’ve been around the Internet, whenever Grand National Day arrives, I usually say pretty-much the same thing on some forum or another. This year it was Twitter.

I usually say, “If you’re bored watching the Grand National on telly, put your sunglasses over one eye and it will be in 3D.”

The reaction to this little nugget of information is invariably the same. People take a ‘Yeah, sure… pull the other one” approach and I suppose I can’t really blame them.

This year, as I sat with my sunglasses watching the race in 3D, I was longing for someone to try it out and come back and confirm that I was neither a raving lunatic nor an inveterate prankster. Of, course, as we know, I am both. But not in this instance. This really works.

But nobody would try it.

Of course it doesn’t work for just the Grand National – that would be silly – it will work for practically any horse race or anywhere else on telly where people or things run around a track. If the action is moving from right to left on the TV, put the sunglasses over your right eye and/or vice versa.

Why doesn’t anyone believe me?

It’s a widely known effect but I like to think I put the spin on it of using it to watch horse racing. I’m probably wrong, it’s a big old world, somebody else probably did it first.

Here’s a little of the science. We’re talking about something called ‘The Pulfrich Effect’ which refers to lateral motion of an object in the field of view being interpreted by the visual cortex as having a depth component, due to a relative difference in signal timings between the two eyes.

In simpler terms, if you delay the light coming into one eye – by the use of, let’s say, sunglasses – then the object can appear to have some depth.

“But if this is the case”, you cry (I know you don’t really), “why don’t all 3D glasses just have one eye darker than the other?”

Good question.

The problem lies in the phrase ‘Lateral Motion’. You see the depth perception trick only works while the object is in motion. When it stops, the effect stops too. So, unless Avatar was going to be a constantly whirling extravaganza, this technology would not work for it.

But it does work for horse races…

(Sigh)

But none of you are ever going to try it out, are you? It sounds pointless and stupid and, in truth, that’s exactly what it is. It’s rather a weak effect and it gets tiresome awfully quickly but my refrain is, it does work and nobody will believe me.

So maybe you’ll have a look at this…

The BBC tried to use this Pulfrich Effect in their 1993 Children in Need programming. They even produced a dreadful Dr Who short, touting it as a 3D episode, they even issued glasses, which were just one lens darker than the other, as described above.

And here it is.

Humour me. Cover your right eye with your sunglasses, sit a little back and give yourself a minute or two to become accustomed to the effect.

There’s another example here.

I don’t expect a plethora of in depth comments on this dodgy post. I just wanted to explain my annual announcement. Maybe, though, someone could just confirm that it works.

Eh?

And if you want to move on to a televised horse race, please, be my guest.

Contemplating Eternity

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:36:00 +0000

I got plenty of religion when I was very young.

I was taught, in those formative years, in schools run by nuns and Christian brothers. I was an altar boy and also a highly-regular mass-goer, whether anyone pressured me to or not.

Advancing years and logic has dispatched much of my earlier naivety but you can’t do all that stuff without something or other becoming ingrained.

Once such thing is the concept of Eternity.

When I was young, in Mass and bored, my mind would sometimes turn to this idea of Eternity. I think the schools had gone beyond the 'Fire and Brimstone' teaching by the time I got there but they were very good at pushing the idea that, wherever you went after you died, it went on for ever… and ever… and ever.

This didn’t seem so very bad when one was thinking of a cool place with soft drinks, penny chews and matinees all of the time. But it was a rather different proposition when you were threatened with being put in a bad place. As I said, not necessarily a 'Fire and Brimstone' sort of a place, more a dark, cold, lonely place with nobody nice around and nothing nice to do.

So there I would be, regularly, in Mass, contemplating Eternity – an Eternity of not-very-nice-ness. My method was not terribly sophisticated – I would say to myself, “When you die, you might go someplace dark and horrible… and you might stay there forever.” And then, crucially, I would repeat this last thought over and over in my head, “for ever… and ever… and ever… and ever….”

After about 30 seconds of doing so, a strange thing would happen. I would start to feel disorientated, dizzy and sick. At some point in the repetition, instead of just repeating words, my mind would start to grapple with the concept of something which actually has no end. No end at all. It was the oddest thing, I would feel my consciousness almost literally founder at the thought. It would reach out, disbelieving, thrashing to get to an end which must somehow be there. The more I thought, the worse it got.

My childish mind, I discovered, could not seriously engage with the concept of Eternity.

I had forgotten about all this, as I do, until recently. Something must have reminded me, I can’t remember what. I started to wonder how my adult mind would be, playing the same game. I am now a good deal less committed to the practices of my youth and, without delving too deeply into matters of belief, the concept of Eternity should now hold considerably less awe for me.

So I gave it a go…

I was walking along somewhere when I deliberately started that childish thought process all over again:

“When you die, you might go someplace dark and horrible… and you might stay there forever... and ever… and ever… and ever… and…”

And after a time, I needed to find a wall to lean against. The old inability to cope with the concept of Eternity is still in there, doing fine.

I know I’m odd but the question is am I alone?

Would any of you care to engage with the concept of Eternity and tell me how you get on?

It’s not enough to simply think the word ‘Eternity’ and say, “I’m fine with all that.” If you want to know if you can handle it, you have to give yourself a full sixty seconds of thinking along some eternal line, “for ever… and ever…” Can you cope or does your mind too start to reject the idea. Does it demand an end be found somewhere, somehow, down the line.

I’d be interested to know.

And, if there is actually something eternal waiting after we croak, be it good or bad, however am I going to cope?

500 Days of Summer – My Review

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Sorry to do review posts twice in a row. I won’t make a habit of it but this was an opportunity too good to miss.

I only really bother with a movie review when I get to see a film I know practically nothing about. It gives me a chance to give a clean unprejudiced view. I haven’t always been great at confidently forming my own opinions on things but I’ve got better at it, this last few years, and this kind of thing is good practice for me.

I’ve been aware of this film for some time but didn’t know what it was about – so that’s a good start for wanting to review it. But the thing that sets this one apart, the thing that made me rush out and rent it, was quite unusual and a bit fascinating.

You see, this film split my friends right down the middle.

Half of them love it and half of them hate it. There was very little of that ‘it’s okay’ or ‘it passes a few hours’ type of thing. It seemed to polarise people into extreme camps. I’m talking here mostly about Twitter friends because they are the wonderful folk who still engage and argue and josh about things like music and movies and such… is it any wonder that I love them so?

I have to confess that there was a little interest too in what I might think of this film. Which camp would I align myself with? I wanted to find out.

So it was for this reason that I sat down to watch this film - a film which I might never have otherwise got around to watching - to see what I thought.

For starters, my preconceptions were all wrong. I had sub-consciously placed the film in the same bracket as another one called ’50 First Dates’, probably on account of the number in the title. That one was a rather charming and totally easy-going romantic comedy starring two immediately recognisable leads. I saw it on telly and quite enjoyed it. I expected very much the same here.

But the moment the ‘Fox Searchlight’ logo came up, right at the start, I realised that I had been on the wrong track. Fox Searchlight is the more ‘leftie’ wing of the organisation, providing some of the more off-the-wall content. So, what had we here?

If you know how I review stuff, you’ll know that I don’t tell you the story of the movie, you can find that all over the internet, although I was pleased to come to this one knowing so little.

All I’ll say is that it’s the story of a relationship – all 500 days of it - and that the narrative 'cherry-picks' its way erratically through this 500 days in an off-beat and rather individualistic fashion.

It uses a device that now seems increasingly common. Whenever the hero goes off into any kind of reverie, this gives the director an opportunity to throw in a little surrealism, a cinematic-in-joke, or just a different coloured film stock to show us how just clever the whole thing is. It’s an ‘Amélie’ sort of a thing. I think I first noticed it in ‘Ally McBeal’, where they always seemed to be literally ‘going off on one’. More recently, ‘Pushing Daisies’ did it a lot too.

And that’s what this movie is really, it’s a sort of a big screen ‘Pushing Daisies’. The same themes of ‘The Ache of Love’ and ‘Not Being Able to Get What You Most Want’ are explored herein.

Okay, I’m a page into this review, did I like it or not? Get off the damn fence Ken.

Well, yes, I did like it.

Yes I did.

It’s smartly made and touching and the leads are good to look at and convincing. It charts a Metropolitan Romance which is something I’ve been lucky enough to experience in my time. The movies, the museums, the Sunday afternoons, the rows… (ahem)…

Without giving too much away, it also succeeds in doing something I haven’t seen done before. It shows us a basic, fairly-obvious truth about relationships which just about every other movie before this has shied away from.

For that alone, I’ve got to give it a thumbs-up.

Failings? There are some. We see here the single most misguided use of a narration since the original Blade Runner cut. This truly awful voice-over absolutely reeks of the Studio saying, “The audience won’t get that bit, tell them, tell them…” but we probably would have got it and you should have let us at least try, Mr Film maker, you really should.

The music too is all a bit random and ‘sound-tracky’. It grates in places.

As with every other film ever made, apart from perhaps, ‘The Fountainhead’, this film has no idea what an Architect really does.

And, once, just once, it breaks the fourth wall. And that one breaking of the fourth wall is nearly enough to ruin the whole film. Really.

You know what ‘breaking the fourth wall is’ right? It’s when the actor looks right out of the screen at us, the audience, and tips us a knowing look. Burt Reynolds used to do it a lot. There’s a reason it isn’t often done and this film give possibly the best reason illustration of exactly why it shouldn’t be done. It breaks the illusion, spoils the magic, cuts the bond. It was a bad mistake here, a very bad mistake.

But, hey, here’s where I lose half my friends. ‘500 Days of Summer’ is a light, funny often-touching little film which strives for an avant-garde sensibility and delivers a small truism before the credits finally roll.

So I commend it onto you.

And now I have to go and hide.

Under The Dome by Stephen King – My Review

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:30:00 +0000

I tend to carry my books around with me, particularly if I’m going somewhere where waiting might be involved, like the Pizza place or the swimming pool.

In the (considerable) time it took my to read this one, as I carried it around, a lot of people stopped me and wanted to talk to me about it.

“Was it any good?” They wondered.

“It’s big, isn’t it?” They remarked.

“I started it but gave it up.” They confided.

There seemed to be a lot of interest so I though it might be worth setting down a few thoughts about it here.

But, before I do, a little scene-setting.

Stephen King has been with me all the way. He has been a friend and constant companion in my reading-life. I started off by reading 'The Shining' in 1978, when I was 15, and I haven’t ever stopped since. I’ve read everything he’s ever written and I feel that some elements of the way he writes have inevitably rubbed off on the way I write.

I do not always particularly adore the books Stephen King writes but some of them, particularly in the earlier years seemed to come along and speak some Technicolor Truths to me. I started reading ‘Christine’, for example, as soon as it appeared. I’ve have never re-read it and would probably find it a little ‘teenage’ and ‘obvious’ for my adult taste. But those heady days of reading it, crisp and new, were like being addressed directly to my soul. Not so much about haunted cars or revenge but rather about alienation and how very hard it can be to be a teenager.

‘Pet Semetary’, I feel, is a masterwork which is seriously flawed in its ending. The first three-quarters, though, sets up a tragedy that comes barreling down the road from a million miles off and carries the effects of that event to extraordinary lengths. A shame about that ending…

One of my favorites, now, is ‘The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.’ If you’ve never read King and want to see what he can do, try that one first.

My own feelings about his writing seem to be at variance with that of the majority of his fans. While they ooze over the huge novels like ‘The Stand’ or ‘It’, I always feel that Stephen is at his most masterful in the short form, sparsely populated, novel. I would take ‘Misery’ or even the neglected ‘Gerald’s Game’ over any of those bigger tomes, any day.

Which brings me to ‘Under The Dome’, one of the very largest of the Stephen King books.

I asked for it as a Christmas Present and started into it soon after. It took a long time to read. At first glance, the story is the same as that in 'The Simpson’s Movie' wherein a huge dome comes down and traps a small town and its residents inside. Worry not, though, it’s not much like that at all and, fairly soon, any thoughts of Homer and his Spider Pig are left well and truly behind.

The story is much more like a magnified version of King’s story 'The Mist,' where a group of small town residents get trapped in a local supermarket during a terrifying ordeal. Yes, it’s very like that, if you need a comparison.

I won’t synopsise the story or run through the vast array of characters therein. You can get all that stuff elsewhere and done much better too.

This is just my impression.

I was engaged with the book throughout. The very size of it promises an immersive experience and it delivered that. The timeline in the book is short and the pace of unfolding events is rapid. In short it fairly rolls along.

Downside? Well, for me, as with most of King’s larger works, the drawing on such a large canvas means that the paint is spread rather thin in places. For all the words and pages, I never felt I was getting to know any of the characters terribly well. They started out a little limited in depth and continued that way throughout. Also the effective ‘locking down’ of a key character for the mid section of the narrative seemed to make that part of the story less successful.

One would fear that the train would run out of steam before the end but that is the redeeming factor in this book. Stephen has plenty left in the pot to take us positively barrelling over the finish line. A number of expected plot conventions are bucked along the way so that you’re never really sure how anything might turn out. As in all Stephen King novels, nobody is safe in here.

And the ending. Not giving anything away but I thought the ending – the explanation – was humane and thoughtful and apt and this alone rounded the whole package up into a story that I am glad I took the time to read.

Can I recommend this book to you? Well that really depends on who you are. If you loved the bigger King books of old, chances are you will love this too. If you enjoyed The Mist, you will find things in here for you.

But if you are new to King and want to see what all the fuss is about? Perhaps you should go back up the road a little… and work your way up to this one.

The Shopping Trolley Corral As A Metaphor For Our Failure to Communicate with Each Other

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:06:00 +0000

Catchy Title eh?

I’m worried that the title may end up being longer then the actual post.

No, wait, I think I’m okay.

I don’t know how it is where you are but here, when we go to the supermarket and want a trolley, we have to put a Euro coin into the trolley to release it from the trolley corral. I guess people steal them or make karts with the wheels or... marry them or something. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, you need a Euro coin to get one.

But, invariably, when someone is going to get their trolley, someone else is putting theirs back and retrieving their precious Euro coin. So the person who wants a trolley stands and waits while the person with the trolley shoves it into the trolley-stack and dicks around with the coin-release thing and gets their coin and goes. Then the person who wants the trolley goes and puts their coin in and dicks with the release thing in order to get the trolley the other person just put back.

I watched this being taken to a crazy degree just today with a group of people who wanted trolleys all standing waiting around for the group of people to put their trolleys back.

For God’s Sake People…

Isn’t it obvious? If you want a trolley, and have your Euro, and someone is returning a trolley and wants their Euro back… just give them your Euro, take the trolley and save a full bloody minute of faffing-around for both of you.

Yes?

No.

It doesn’t happen. All right, it does sometimes - but not as often as it should.

People don’t want to talk to other people or, even more so, they do not want to be talked to. "This guy offering me a Euro for my trolley, he might give me a fake Euro, or mug me, or make improper suggestions to me…"

We’re all just becoming more and more insular and scared. Make a stand, build a bridge, if a little communication is mutually beneficial, do it. Sometimes it’ll work out, sometimes it won’t, but at least you’ve tried.

So, if I’m returning my trolley and you offer me a Euro and ask me for it, I will say…

… well, I’ll say ‘No’, actually.

I don't use Euro coins. I’ve got one of those keyrings with a Euro shaped disk magnetically attached to it. I use that to get my trolley and I want to get it back.

So, sorry, no.

Hypocritical bugger, me.

Taking Dad to the Car Boot Sale

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:02:00 +0000

My Dad is one of the world’s greatest hagglers. He will haggle himself a deal no matter what the occasion. So, when he and Mum came to visit us in London, back in the mid-nineties, I reckoned I knew something he would like.

We did the usual stuff, we bought them some dinners and they saw a show but, when Dad got out of the car on the outskirts of Hounslow early on Sunday morning, he knew his real treat-time had arrived.

Is it still there, I wonder? That big big field – with a gate and everything – and miles and miles of cars, boots open, folding tables laid out, with their owners nonchalantly displaying their wares. The Mother of all Car Boot Sales.

I had added one finesse to our visit to the Car Boot. Something specifically designed to heighten Dad’s fun. It was… a ‘Mission’. I had thought hard about something I needed, something odd, something to hunt for. What I came up with – and I hope I’m giving some of you a new word here (although you are very smart, so probably not) – was a little thing called an 'Escutcheon Cover'.

The front door of our little house in Twickenham led straight into the living room and the front door had a large keyhole through which the West London winds would come a-blowing. An escutcheon is the metal plate that goes over a keyhole to protect the door from the knocks of misguided drunken key-entries. Sometimes they come with a circular cover piece which can be swivelled around to let the key in but normally they just sit over the hole and keep the draughts out.

So there we were, on a mission to find an Escutcheon Cover on a bright warm summer’s morning. It really was a very nice excursion.

One of Dad’s foibles is that he absolutely has to talk to everyone he meets. What’s more, he addresses everyone with the same cheerful familiarity that would lead you to believe that he has known them all his life. This made for slow progress through the lines of marketeers.

At one point I had to ease him away from a gang of heavily-tattooed motorcycle guys who were eyeing him suspiciously as he prodded them on the forearms and cheerfully asked whether ‘those things hurt?’

Of course we were never going to find an Escutcheon Cover, much less a suitable one. It was just something to keep and eye out for as we strolled around.

Except he did. Hawk Eye Dad pounced on a plastic box full of assorted things and emerged with the exact item pinched in his fingers. A solid brass Escutcheon, complete with cover.

It was here that I learned a valuable lesson in haggling – one that I often use (or at least quote) in my dealings with people. That lesson is, When Haggling, Start Low.

The man in charge of this particular car boot was reclined in a deck chair reading a battered copy of 'Jaws ' and he seemed hugely disinterested in how his trade was progressing. Dad leaned over to him with the prized item pinched between thumb and forefinger and he started the bidding in a way I would never have guessed.

“A little thing like this,” my Dad said chattily, “Sure you couldn’t want any money for that at all.”

The man looked uncertain. He looked at Dad and he looked at the little Escutcheon (and cover). He hesitated.

“You’re right,” he said, sounding as if he was surprising himself, “I couldn’t ask for money for a little thing like that.”

It was like the Jedi Mind Trick in real life.

Dad said, “That’s great, thanks,” and prepared to withdraw before anyone changed their mind – which is another good haggling-hint.

But suddenly a shadow fell on proceedings. A huge, bejewelled, floral-patterned woman emerged from somewhere to the side of the car.

“Well that’s just bloody great!” she bellowed, “I sit out here all morning and you give the bloody merchandise away.”

She wasn’t kidding either. But we smiled and nodded and got swiftly away with our totally-free brass escutcheon. Even at some distance, we could still hear the poor man getting ‘what for’ from his beloved.

“This is a grand place,” said Dad, looking all around “We’ll have to come back here.”

A Twitter Murder Mystery

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:36:00 +0000

“So, tell it to me again. He was on ‘Twatter’ when he was murdered?”

“Twitter, sir, it’s a social networking site.”

I looked around the room admiringly. The guy was obviously a bit of a movie buff, judging by the original posters he had framed on the walls. Good seventies stuff, all very neatly done. In contrast, the study desk was all a bit of a bloody mess. The keyboard was glued now with thick black blood and the screen was spattered with tiny bulbous droplets of the stuff. Some of them had run down a little before the heat of the screen had boiled them solid. Not many though.

I peered through the droplets at the web page on display.

“Was that his name? Armstrong?”

“Yes Inspector-“

“’Chief Inspector’, if you don’t mind.”

“Sorry sir, ‘Chief Inspector’, congratulations sir.”

“His name, son, you can bake me the cake later.” I enjoy being a bastard at murder scenes. It helps keep the minions focused.

“Sorry sir. Yes ‘Armstrong’ sir, ‘Ken Armstrong’.”

“But not ‘KenArmstrong1’?

“No sir, that was his twitter name sir.”

“You seem to know a lot about this twat thing.”

“I tweet a little myself sir.”

“You what?”

“Tweet sir.”

Bloody hell!

I looked young Nash square in the eye. Never look in two eyes, concentrate on just one. That’s the secret to winning a staring match.

“Moving on,” I said, “Cause of death?”

Nash looked at me as if I was mad. There was perhaps hope for the lad yet. I was yanking his chain and he knew it. The hilt of a bloody-great dagger was sticking out of Armstrong’s throat, there wasn’t much question about what it had done…

I shook myself. I’d been staring and thinking about that knife and how it might have felt going into my own carotid artery and that wasn’t the way forward.

“Who have you got in the other room?” I asked Nash.

“Three men. There was a poker game. They took a break apparently, Armstrong came in here for a tweet, one went to the toilet, one went into garden for a ciggie and one stayed in the room.”

“And you think one of them killed him.” I said.

“Why, yes sir, I do.”

“Which one?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know sir.”

I sighed again. TV detective programmes were a curse on many levels. Not least because practically every second young cop now thought every domestic was a clue-ridden mystery to be pondered. In fact, usually they were just a bloody mess with a whimpering fool sitting on the periphery, waiting to cough it all up.

“Who are they, these three?”

“As far as I can gather they’re an old school friend, his doctor and his brother-in-law. The in-law is a pain, says he works nights and has to phone in, we’re keeping him from that at the moment.”

“Why?” I asked.

The question seemed to confuse poor Nash.

“Well, it’s a classic locked door thing, sir. One of them did it, there was nobody else. Plus there’s something else.” Nash looked embarrassed.

“What something else?”

Nash squirmed.

“Spit it out lad, what else is there?”

“A ‘clue’ sir.” Nash said it as if it were rather a dirty thing.

“What bloody clue?”

Nash showed me the screen.

“It’s like I said, sir, he was tweeting when he died. His watch hit the desk and broke, the time stopped at 11.47. Look at the tweet on the screen, it was sent at 11.47 too. The killer must have been in the room when he sent it.”

I walked over to Nash. I was a good foot shorter than him but that hardly mattered.

“You think he twatted us a clue from the grave, don’t you?”

“Well, yes sir, I’m afraid I rather do.”

I was about to berate him for the penny-dreadful-consuming fool that he undoubtedly was when I stopped. Maybe, just maybe, he was right. There hadn’t been a real ‘clue’ case since the ‘Smirnoff Affair’ and that was a few years back. Maybe I was due another. I leaned in and read Armstrong’s Last Tweet.

“Okay,” I leaned back, “what does it mean?”

“Buggered if I know sir,” said Nash, who then blushed furiously, “Sorry sir.”

In fairness, it did at least seem possible that Armstrong had looked up from his desk and seen someone come in with a whopping great knife in his hand. He might have had a moment to twat off a message with a clue in it.

“But why wouldn’t he just twat the name or the initial or something,” I asked, “ why type ‘Top Left’?”

“Because if he wrote the name, the killer could have seen it and deleted it. He had to be obtuse.”

“Obtuse, Nash? What are you reading?”

“Morse, sir.”

“Bloody thought so.”

I looked at the twat thing again… harder. Forensics will catch this killer, or he’ll cave under a moderate Q and A, we didn’t have to do this Sherlock Holmes shit on it…

… but it was fun… and when it worked, it was bloody awesome.

Nash piped up. “Maybe it’s an anagram”, he said.

But it wasn’t a bloody anagram. There was no time for anagrams, not with a killer bearing down on you.

I looked again. Top Left. Top Left of what? There was nothing to be Top Left’ of…

… except there was, wasn’t there? This twit twat thing wasn’t just a few words, it was a picture too. And we all know what a picture can be worth.

I looked at the computer, then at the wall, then at the computer again. I clicked on the picture and it got bigger. I shouldn't have been touching anything, I know. The picture was clearer now.

I tried to keep my voice level.

“On every street,” I quoted, “in every city, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.”

Nash looked nervous. “I don’t understand you sir.” He said.

“Never mind,” I clapped my hands together, “Let’s see the suspects, Nash, one by one, just like your bloody Morse would.”

“What order do you want to see them in?” asked Nash.

“That brother-in-law, the one who works nights, what did you say he does for a living?” I asked, nonchalantly, holding my breath.

“I didn’t say, sir, but I believe he’s a Taxi Driver.”

I let my breath out, smiled.

“Then let’s see him first,” I said.

Little Mister Patchy Britches

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:32:00 +0000

One of my own favourite posts in this blog concerns my late Mother and how we finally got to sing together. You can read that one here.

One of the key points of that post was that, although Mum never sang in public, she was always singing and humming around the house and quite a few of the songs I heard in that way have never been heard by me anywhere else, before or since.

Now and again these songs turn up – on the radio, in a movie – and it an odd experience whenever I hear one.

One such song turned up out of the blue about a week ago. It wasn’t on the radio, nor in a movie, it was in my head. I was watching Twitter when someone mentioned in passing that they were thinking of re-lining their coat rather than getting it done professionally, to save a few quid…

Pow! There it was – a fully formed song in my head - a song I hadn’t thought of in over thirty years, a song I had only ever heard in one place.

The song was all about stitching and patching, you see, so that’s why the coat-lining thing brought it back. I thought it was called ‘Little Mrs Patch-Me-Britches’ because that’s how Mum sung it but it turns out it was actually called ‘Little Mister Patchy Britches.’ The chorus went like this:

Little Mister Patchy Britches

I love you

If you'll be my Sunday follow

I'll patch them with pink and with purple and yellow

And folks shall say

As we lean on the old sea wall

Lena's been patchin' his britches

Til he's got no britches at all.

I went looking straight away but there’s no YouTube or Blip of the song that I can find. I found nowhere to hear it except in my head.

So I did a little research and some Twitter buddies helped. Together, we found that the sheet music for this song is available and there’s a forum where people have discussed it and posted much more lyrics than I ever knew. We also found out that the song was recorded by Carol Deene in 1970 and was the flipside to her single ‘Windmill in Old Amsterdam’.

That’s about all we got though. Not very much at all. So, sod it, I thought, I can’t just let the memory go again. I’ll write a blog post, I thought, that’ll do it.

But that doesn’t really do it, does it?

I know how the song goes, don’t I? What am I supposed to do about that? Let it go?

Can’t do that… so brace yourself. This is me in ‘lullaby’ mode, something I still do every night though my song is Bob Dylan’s ‘All The Tired Horses’. So it’s not any good but it does give an idea how the song’s chorus went – the lyrics aren’t exact but they are how they were sung in our house years ago.

Now don’t start – I know I don’t sing well. But there are two reason for embarrassing myself like this. The first is that this post will now become first in the search engines for any other poor bugger who comes looking for ‘Little Mister Patchy Britches’ so I might actually be doing a public service by collating what little information I have on it.

The second reason is trickier…

Although this song was released in 1970 on the back of a single, it goes back way before that. Mum was singing it before that. I believe (but can’t be sure) that she sang it as a lullaby. It’s more likely that I heard it being sung to my younger sisters rather than me but again can’t be sure.

So here’s a little piece of memory that has popped to the surface after a long time. It deserves to be cleaned up and kept, doesn’t it? It is incumbent upon us to keep the memory of the dear-departed alive in whatever ways we can – by laughing about them, telling stories about them, including them in our day, by remembering them.

So long as we do that, there is at least a little bit of life after death…

…for sure.

There Won’t Be Blood

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:34:00 +0000

Although I am in the rudest of rude health (touch wood), I am no longer allowed to give blood.

This is a source of some sadness and disappointment for me. I still get the letters in the post telling me that my blood is badly needed and that people are waiting for me to come and donate but, if I were to show up at their door, arm at the ready, they would turn me away.

I always found blood donation to be very good for the soul. That old adage about it being better to give than to receive could easily have been written specifically for blood donation. If you don’t do it – and can – I would highly recommend that you do. It’s good for the person who needs your blood, obviously, but it’s good for you too. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.

Although I’m of Catholic extraction, I find it hard to buy into the notion that I can undo any or all of my sins by going in a little box and telling somebody all about it. It all seems way too to easy to me. Deep down, I can’t help but feel there needs to be some actual ‘Reparation’ for things I’ve done wrong. Blood donation seemed to help me with that notion. The pinch, the sacrifice of vital fluid, the sense of giving something back by way of making good. I dunno… it seemed to work for me, is all.

Then one day I got a letter. My blood was no longer usable by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service.

I accept the reasons for this but I still think they are strange and a bit scary too. The reason I can’t give blood is because I lived in England between 1984 and 1997.

That’s it, that’s all.

From November 2004, people who have spent one year or more in the UK between 1st January 1980 and 31st December 1996 are excluded from donating blood here in Ireland. This was apparently on account of the fear that Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) can be transmitted through blood transfusion and that the people who were most likely to have it were the ones who ate infected meat in Britain in that time.

That’s a lot of people taken out of the blood-donation loop and I’m just one of them.

And I miss it. I really do. I still wear my little Pelican donor pin on my coat but it’s an ironic gesture now rather then a proud one.

And then there’s that niggling worry, irrational but present nonetheless: If they don’t want all this badly needed blood of mine, what on earth do they know that I don’t? Is CJD still some time bomb waiting to explode in a proportion of the millions of us who ate meat in that decade?

And, if not, are they being just a tad too careful?

How To Cheat The National Lottery

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:18:00 +0000

This past little while, I have been polishing up a three-act theatre play of mine which has not (yet) been produced. It’s called ‘Lottery Story’.

In thinking again about the play, I found myself running over many scenarios relating to the National Lottery. A number of these lottery-related sequences ended up in the finished play but what I’m about to describe did not.

I want to describe a way of cheating the National Lottery – well, actually it’s a way of cheating your friends via the National Lottery. First, though, I want to be perfectly clear about something. I’m not posting this so that you can go out and cheat your friends, truly I’m not. Rather, I’m posting it so that you, the friends, might see whether you are being cheated or not.

I thought up this cheat myself – I have rather a horrible mind in some ways. I'm sure others have thought of it too but I would never dream of doing it to anyone. You have to trust me on that, it is the truth.

Anyway, here’s what I dreamed up.

Form a Syndicate of your workmates. Every week, collect their contribution and play the National Lottery over each weekend using random numbers. You must play the Lottery for the Syndicate. Somebody else can look after the money part, that doesn’t matter. Every Monday morning, you pin up the Syndicate’s lottery ticket for all to see and inspect. It is the correct date and the amount spent on it matches the amount raised from the Syndicate.

But it is unlikely to be a winner, is it? Because you have conned your work mates haven’t you?

Yes. You have…

When you went to the Lottery Shop, you bought a random number ticket for the amount the Syndicate put in.

Then – what else did you do? That’s right, you bought another random ticket for the exact same value with your own money.

It’s Friday, work is over. You bring both tickets home and you check both of them after the weekend draw. Most times, you won’t win anything. But occasionally you will enjoy a small win, once in a while a slightly bigger one and, one day, well, who knows?

Whenever a ticket wins, you keep that one for yourself. On Monday morning you bring in the losing ticket and you nail it to the wall for all to inspect. Once in a blue moon, both tickets will win something. Then the Syndicate will enjoy the smaller of the two prizes. How very nice for them…

“Is that it?” you may ask, “Forking out all that money every week for such a long shot?”

Yes, that’s it. It’s a silly idea really. But here’s the thing – just make sure it’s not being done to you.

As I said at the front, I’m posting this so that you can insure that you are not being conned. It’s terribly easy to do. If you are a Syndicate member, make sure your ticket is on display in advance of the draw and that somebody has signed the back of it. That’s all it takes.

I used to buy the tickets for my little work-syndicate, until I described my scenario to them. Now I don’t. I’ve never done this to anyone. I’ve never assassinated anyone either but I can probably dream up a fairly neat way of doing it.

This has been a public service posting by your own in-house devious bastard...

... me.

Yellow Box

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:51:00 +0000

There is a car park outside of my office window. It serves a small shopping centre. (Careful, Ken… they’ll find you…)

As you might imagine, there are lots of places to park in this car park and, similarly, there are lots of places to not park – the footpath, the middle of the road, up the lamppost.

And then there is one place that you really shouldn’t ever park at all, ever, ever. ever.

This place, immediately to the front of the shopping centre exit, is designated by a yellow box painted on the ground with yellow criss-cross lines inside. You know the sort of thing.

As I sit at my desk, I look out and down on this yellow box. When I stop to think and gaze out, it’s this yellow box then I end up gazing at.

And it annoys me profoundly. You know the reason why, don’t you?

Yes, you do.

It's because there’s nearly always somebody parked in the yellow box.

There is no ambiguity about this box. It is evidently a clear way, a safety exit, a place which should never be blocked

Parking or, as is more often the case, stopping-and-sitting in the yellow box causes difficulty to everybody else in any number of ways. It reduces the passing traffic to single lane so that cars coming either direction have to give way to each other while the twerp in the box sits back and enjoys the show. It blocks the trolleys of the people coming out of the shops. It clogs up the whole little eco-system of the car park – all for the benefit of the one loon who does it. Did I mention that the box only has room for one?

This lack of thoughtfulness beneath my window has grown in my head to become an analogy for Man’s overall Inhumanity to Man. I look at the various types of people who do this thing – for they are indeed legion – and I see some of the worst qualities of the Human Race reflected in their obtrusive wing mirrors.

The most common type is the ‘Bully’. Elbow out of window, belly out of shirt, his risible taste in cassette-delivered music imposed on the people he inconveniences. His whole demeanour tells the world, “I know what I’m doing, come and tell me about it and see what happens to you then… wimp.”

Then there is the ‘Naive Fool’. He doesn’t know he is doing anything wrong. He is baffled as to why the traffic is backing up all sides of him or why the old-dear just collapsed with exhaustion trying to manoeuvre her trolley around the back of his Fiat.

And, of course, the ‘Professional’. Very busy, only there for a moment, doing everyone a favour by getting his important stuff done so quickly. One of the worst, that.

I see all these types and many more and I know that, if they would only wake up and see the trouble they are causing for their own small comfort, and if they could only then persuade the rest of the world to wake up and do the same…, well, then things might be all right, I guess.

So there it is; ‘Man’s inhumanity to Man’, all packaged up and delivered to my doorstep, wrapped up in my local car park’s yellow box.

Have I succeeded in pinpointing the key problem with society today? Have I opened up a possible avenue of hope and reconciliation?

… or do I just always need to have something stupid to be annoyed about?

Yeah, I know…

The Blog As Pensieve

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:04:00 +0000

I’ve been doing this blogging thing for a while now and, from time to time, the question arises, “Why do you blog?” My answer has changed several times in the time that I have being doing it.

At first, it was intended to promote my writing and to show the manner in which I do it. From there, the while blogging escapade grew into an online social phenomenon wherein fellow bloggers were followed avidly, interacted with in forums, and greatly enjoyed.

Friendships were built which are still strong to this day and much was learned about the curious process of blogging itself.

It may well be true that it was Twitter that took the heat out of this high-intensity interaction, for me at least.

Twitter arose and provided more immediate and more intense interaction between bloggers and non-bloggers alike. It suited me and it drew me in. Something had to give and that something was the level of blogging interaction I previously maintained. What used to be a blog which was posted to thrice-weekly is now a weekly event and, although I regularly visit and read all of my friends blogs, I don’t comment as much as I used to. I sometimes feel at a loss for something to say even though I may have enjoyed their post very well.

But, despite this change, my blog is still a living thing and a very important part of my life. Ask me today why I blog and the reason is markedly different to the one I might have given a year – or two years ago – perhaps next year, it will be something different again.

For now though, I see the blog as a sort of jigsaw puzzle. A box where each post is a small odd shaped piece that goes to make up a picture of me.

For want of a better image, I see it as a sort of ‘Pensieve’ which, in case you don’t know, is the font/receptacle which Dumbledore had in Harry Potter to store his memories in. Whenever he wanted, he could draw one out – rather like a mucousy snot string (sorry) – and review it. But, more relevant to my point, when he himself was gone, Harry could dip into it too and learn some things about Dumbledore that he hadn’t known before. In the case of my own little pensieve, these are not necessarily huge revelations or truths. In fact, they are often just shitty little things such as my feelings on music and driving or why I think I’m a dog. Each post trivial and passing for sure but each post also with some germ of truth or personality in it to help build up a jigsaw puzzle picture, just like the one on the box.

Our parents are often largely a mystery to us. Sometimes all we know of them are the people they have become after we came along. Before that, what have we got? A photo from Butlins? A letter or two scribbled in haste.

This technology here will be dusty and defunct by the time our kids might start to seriously wonder about us, what we were really like? But there’ll probably be some way of reading it still. Some gizmo in the attic that will prise open the files that used to make up that internet thing from way back when.

Maybe, someday, someone will leaf through this stuff and know me a little better for it.

Who knows, we may be the first generation to leave a fairly solid picture of who we were by the medium of our personal blogs, our online jigsaws, our pensieves…

Next time, I shall be ranting about why gobshites drive into those yellow boxes when they can’t get out the other side.

That should help build a picture, shouldn’t it?

Old Joke - A Bit Rude

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:27:00 +0000

A local radio interviewer was sent out to the island to interview octogenerian Pat about his long life there.

The interviewer set his tape machine running.

"Pat," he said, "tell me, if you will, about your happiest memory of the Island."

Pat replied, "That would be the time that Carmel the Sheep went missing... all the men of the island gathered by torchlight and scoured the length and breadth of the island. They found her stuck in a hedge and they brought her back here where they all had a few drinks and they all had sex with her."

"Interesting," said the interviewer, a tad uncomfortably, "would you also share with us your second happiest memory?"

Pat replied, "That would be the time that Margaret my wife went missing... all the men of the island gathered by torchlight and scoured the length and breadth of the island. They found her stuck in a hedge and they brought her back here where they all had a few drinks and they all had sex with her."

"Finally Pat, would you recall your worst memory of the island."

Pat reflected for a time...

"That," he said, "would have to be the night that I went missing..."

Meet The Scars

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:29:00 +0000

I love that scene in ‘Jaws’ where the three guys sit on the boat and compare their scars. You can learn a little, I think, by hearing about people’s scars and how they came to have them.

I’d be interested to hear your scar stories in the comments and would gladly post off a book to the one I like best - but more of that at the end. For the moment, let me break the ice with three of my own scars – in chronological order - and how I got them.

Eye: I have a 7mm scar just to the left of my left eye. I was fly fishing with my brother in a boat on the Garavogue River, one May evening around 1978. We used to cast dry flies pretty sweetly, my brothers and I, in those days. The trick was to sit on the still river among the bobbing Spent Mayflies and wait for the surface to be broken by a trout sucking one down. Then you had to quickly drop your fly right on that spot and hope that the trout would take yours too. If he did, you would then ‘strike’ the hook into his mouth and hopefully play him into the boat.

It was getting late in the evening and we were thinking of heading home when my brother spotted a nice disturbance in the water out in front. He stood up and back-casted the length of line which he already had spun off the reel. Unfortunately the huge black spent mayfly ,which he was fishing with, snagged me less that half an inch from my left eye. “Don’t Strike,” I shouted to him but he had already started the forward motion of his cast, effectively striking the hook into me instead of the fish.

The hook was embedded and wasn’t coming out. We boated down the river and all the people on the bank asked us if we had caught anything. I kept my hand over my eye to hide the bushy alien impaled there and lied that we hadn’t. We pulled the boat up onto the far shore and struggled up the two fields to the hospital in our waders.

It is easy to remove a hook. You push the barb through and snip it off and then the shaft just slips out. I explained this to the doctor but either he didn’t want to hear it or (as he said) he was intent on returning my lovely Spent Mayfly to me intact. He took a scalpel and, slowly and painstakingly, he cut it out. It was more dark-red than black when he was done but I got it back plus a couple of stitches into the bargain.

Wrist: I have a small but deep scar on the back of my right wrist and various smaller scars all around that wrist. This was 1981, I think. I got a call one Sunday morning to go with my friend (who reads this stuff – Hey ‘S’) to Rosses Point to push a caravan up to a place where it could be hooked to a car and toed away. I got on the back of the caravan with his uncle and we both pushed. Sadly - for me mostly - we pushed on the caravan window. Not smart, I now know. The glass smashed and both of our arms fell through, my right and his left. He was older and wiser then me, I guess, because he left his arm in through the broken pane and took his own sweet time easing it back out. I didn’t. I instinctively pulled back and, in the process, impaled my right wrist on a long sharp shard of window-glass that was left sticking down.

Such was the extent of this little impalement that I could not remove my wrist from the glass on my own. Somebody had to take my wrist and pull it off the glass. I got some smaller cuts on the underside of my wrist from that manoeuvre.

We wrapped me up and took me to the hospital. When I was unwrapped the back side of my wrist had swollen up alarmingly like an angry black blister. The attending-person asked whether I could move my wrist. I did, up and down once, and the ‘blister’ erupted, spraying globs of dark blood on everyone in the vicinity.

Fun times.

Thigh: On my left thigh, I have a large and amazingly deep ‘dimple’ in the muscle. I got this while skiing in New Hampshire with my cousin, circa 1989. We drove up from Boston and I hadn’t been skiing for quite a few years. My cousin and his friend were regular and good skiers and I felt I had to keep up with them, as a matter of pride. High up the mountain, I skied over a little edge, flew a bit and fell, landing on my left thigh. Unfortunately I found what was possibly the only sizeable rock on the whole piste and I found it hard. This hurt like absolute buggery and I lay there in the snow wondering what to do next. I was on my own, the cousin-and-friend were probably already in the bar at the bottom.

I has ‘Salopettes’ on, so I couldn’t easily inspect the damage but the leg was swelling and tightening alarmingly and I wanted to get down the mountain as quick as possible. I had a pewter hip flask full of Jack Daniels (as you do) so I drank it all down then I skied tentatively back to base.

This happened very close to Christmas and we soon travelled on to Boulder, Colorado to spend the holiday with some other relatives who lived there. A number of these relatives were doctors. Most memorable about this scar is the level of indifference paid to it by these doctor friends/family of mine. My leg, at this stage was an utterly atrocious sight – not cut, nothing broken, but whatever bleeding had occurred on my thigh seemed to have run down under the skin and pool in my foot which was black and horrible – as was the rest of the leg.

“It’ll be fine,” the docs all shrugged as they inspected it, “Don’t worry.”

I didn’t, and it was, so I guess they were right. Twenty years later, it’s still an impressively deep scar though.

I have others – don’t we all? But that’s three for you to be going along with.

One other thing worth mentioning about these scars is that they all happened quite a long time ago (although it only feels like last year). The scars are all faded now and not at all prominent. If you were looking at me, you would hardly see them

It’s the memories that still itch sometimes.

If you have a scar story, and want to leave it in the comments – or, indeed, do a post on your own blog, I’ll pick my own favourite and post you a book of my shelf, just for fun. I’ll give you a choice of three… God knows what they’ll be.

Thanks for reading.

Short Fiction - A Little Trouble

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:09:00 +0000

I am sitting on the edge of the quay dropping small stones into the soupy water far below. I have a tough decision to make and these pebbles may or may not be helping. The problem turns over and over inside my head. Do I tell her and further ruin her life or do I keep my secrets to myself and allow her life to remain only moderately ruined, as it already is?

If my stones would only produce some ever-expanding ripples in the dark water then I am sure I could draw some clever analogy between that effect and the concentric relatedness of life’s ineptitudes. But they don’t, they simply plop onto the oily black surface and then vanish without a trace. Perhaps there is a useful analogy in that too but for the moment it escapes me.

A little over nine months ago, my last grandfather entered the water from this very quay – and drowned. A subsequent inquest found this to be an accidental death and, although our family accepted this verdict with considerable relief, none of us really believed it. For forty years, you see, Granddad Noel had worked these docks, unloading timber and coal and whatever else had steered its way up the narrow channel. He knew the quay edge as well as any of us knows our hearts and he was as firmly rooted to that dock as were the huge concrete windlasses that mushroomed along the brim.

It was our family’s secret but firm belief that Granddad had deliberately thrown himself from the deepwater quay on the day before his seventy second birthday. None of us had any idea why.

Our shock at this awful event was as great as would naturally be expected. In our minds, we had all consigned both Granny and Granddad to nature’s gradual deterioration towards infirmity and eventual death. Their four daughters, including my mother, had steeled themselves for the years when the care and dedication which they had received as children would have to be at least partly repaid. The prospect that one or other of the grandparents would be left alone for a time was considered but nobody foresaw that the rift would be caused by anything other than old age and cruel nature.

As it was, the loss of her husband tore flesh and bone from my grandmother as surely as if she had fallen down a stairs or succumbed to a virulent disease. The day that Granddad’s sealed coffin was lowered into the clay marked the beginning of her own inexorable descent to join him there. A descent which still continues and which has every sign of ending soon enough.

It was nine months after the funeral and our lives had returned to relative normality. My twice-weekly visits to Granny kept Granddad in my mind but not prominently so. In my busy and insulated routine, Granny became a gentle chore for me. Her grief and deterioration was a given – it saddened but did not surprise me.

This all changed last Saturday. I had called to Granny earlier than normal because I had a lunch date with an old school friend. As she made the tea, I opened the biscuits and prepared myself for thirty minutes of gentle grilling and familiar stories from a week of threadbare routine. It was to be as it always was. Except this time, it wasn’t.

Granny arrived at the table with her stainless steel teapot. She trembled minutely and then she smashed the pot down onto the table. This was the equivalent of a Hydrogen bomb being dropped on the little terraced house. The vessel landed with such a crash as may never have been heard in this house before and the tea slopped out of the lid and drenched everything on the heavy tablecloth.

I leaped to my feet. The table top was a brown dripping mess of skewed crockery and damp lottery tickets.

“Granny,” I pleaded, “For God’s sake what’s wrong?”

She broke down then, her arms pitched tautly by her side, her face to the ceiling.

“I killed him,” she cried, “I killed your grandfather.”

A twisted image of granny came into my head. I saw her sneaking up behind him and pushing him over the edge and into the deep water. I shook it away.

“He fell in. It wasn’t your fault.”

She shook her head vehemently.

“That day he went out, I had his heart annoyed. Do this, do that. I wouldn’t let him off.”

It is true that Granny had been increasingly hard on him as the years advanced. Granddad’s greatest pleasure had always been to sit with the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table, poring over every page in the greatest of detail. This intent reading ritual has been ever-present in all the years I had known Granddad but it had become more protracted in the latter part of his life. One oddity of his avid consumption of the daily newspaper was that he would not enter into discussion about the stories he so dedicatedly scanned. Only much later in the day would he make himself available for topical discussion and opinion of any kind. It always seemed that he demanded time to digest and analyse what he had learned before passing any judgement upon it and I for one saw this as a highly commendable attribute.

Not so dear Granny. Her resentment of this time wasted over the minutia of external affairs manifested itself in manic cleaning and general irritated hovering in the general vicinity of the kitchen table. Occasionally Granddad would acknowledge her pique with a gentle, “Sod off, I’m reading,” but generally he ignored her completely.

Still and all, it was hard to see how Granny’s relatively low level aggravations could compel the old man to the very edge of his own life. It simply did not seem correct and I said as much to Granny.

But she was having none of it.

“You weren’t here. I forced him to go out in the rain when he didn’t want to and I gave him a list of things to do and each and every one of them was nothing less than poisonous to him.”

Strong words indeed. I was fascinated by what these poisonous duties might have been. She shuffled to the sideboard and produced a flaccid yellow sheet of notepaper. She pushed it across the table to me.

“That is the list I gave him. It was still in his pocket”.

I looked at the paper. Bread, Washing up liquid, Garaty, Eyes, Mass card.

“What’s a ‘Garaty’?”, I asked.

“Mr. Garaty, the television repair man,” she indicated to the incongruous large set in the corner. “He’d had it for ten days at that stage, I told Michael to go up and put a rocket under him to get it fixed. He hated pressing people”

“And mass card?” I prompted.

“For poor Mrs Dobbs in number forty two,” she sniffed, “He hated going to the priest’s house too.”

“And eyes.”

“The straw that broke the camel’s back, I’d say,” granny looked to the ceiling in anguish, “His eyes had been getting worse and worse. He’d sit and stare at the damn paper for hours and get nothing from it. The last fortnight was the worst. It was clear he needed glasses but would he go? I told him to go and get it seen-to or not to bother ever coming back… and look what happened.”

Granny was a bit calmer when I left her. I’d borrowed the little piece of flotsam notepaper. I thought it might be helpful to try to retrace Granddad’s steps on his last day. As it seemed that the question of eyesight was the most fraught one, I started with the opticians.

There was only two in town and one was a hyper modern outlet which favoured angular and compressed fashion statements over actual spectacles. I figured Granddad, if pushed, would favour the older, more traditional establishment so I went there first. In truth, I did not expect to learn that my grandfather had actually been to get his eyes tested on the day he died. I tended to agree with Granny that the option of not coming home at all had somehow presented itself as the most attractive. I was surprised therefore to find that, not only did the portly woman behind the counter entertain my unusual query, but she remembered old Granddad’s visit very well indeed.

“A lovely old gentleman. How is he?”, she asked, which frankly put me at a bit of a loss.

“He died.”

“Oh,” she said, taking that on board and brightening again, “That would explain why he never called back for his prescription.”

“So he did get his eyes tested then?”

“Oh yes, quite weak in the left, not so bad in the right, a little trouble with the Snellen but that’s not unusual in a man of his vintage.”

I wasn’t really that interested in the technical details of Granddad’s visual impairment. I was much more concerned with his demeanour so I asked after it.

“He was fine really. A little embarrassed about putting us to trouble but that’s what we’re here for isn’t it?”

Indeed it was. I left her with a polite thank you. She had one more little surprise on the way out.

“My regards to your grandmother,” She shouted after me. “She taught me in the convent school, you know.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. I only recognised her name when I was filling out your granddad’s details. I… suppose he won’t need the prescription now.”

Damn silly question but perhaps there was a subtle point to it.

“Is there an account? I could….”

She smiled. “Oh dear me no, he settled up in cash on the day, said he’d pick out frames when he came back. Sad really.”

It was sad and all rather unenlightening. I went off to find Mr. Garaty.

Ted Garaty worked out of his garden shed and I knew him quite well from a variety of radios, amplifiers and, latterly, digital satellite receivers which had gone on the blink, been deposited and eventually returned in some varied states of repair.

He looked surprised to see me as I made the extraneous bell over his garage door ring. He looked around furtively as if to identify what piece of kit he had neglected to repair for me this time.

He looked relieved when he found out that I only wanted to ask after Granddad.

“I was shocked to hear that he had practically gone straight from me to the water, so to speak, no offence intended… There was nothing out of the ordinary, his telly wasn’t ready and I told him it might be another few days before I got to it. He did seem annoyed all right but when I asked him he just said something about herself having his heart annoyed.”

This was not good news, lending credence as it did to Granny’s own theory that she had been the primary cause of his demise. I thanked Ted and made to go.

“There was one other thing,” said Ted.

I looked back. My many years of watching ‘Colombo’ had taught me that these ‘one last things’ often held the key to something or other.

“There had been a mention of him in the paper. Your granddad. Nothing much, just a little bit about the closure of the weigh-station down the quay and a reference to some of the men who used to work there. I showed it to him – it’s nice to see your name in print sometimes. I handed him the paper and asked whether he had spotted it. He took it and looked it over and then handed it back and left.”

“Didn’t he say anything?” I asked.

“Not much, something along the lines of, “They’re all the same”, then off he went.”

“”They’re all the same?” Are you sure that was it?”

Ted thought a moment.

“I think that was it all right. He seemed surprisingly annoyed that his name was in there at all.”

Then the bell went again and an angry looking lady came in so I took my leave.

The parish priest had not seen Granddad that day. This was not a surprise since no mass card had been found on him. Along with the washing up liquid and the bread it became one of three errands which were not run.

I walked reluctantly back to Granny’s house, recounting my mornings investigation. Where did it all leave me? Granddad had visited the opticians and the telly repair man and he evidently had no trouble at either… I stopped in my tracks… wait… he had had some trouble – the lady had said exactly that and I had let it pass. “Some trouble,” she had said, “some trouble with…” what?

Some trouble with what?

I ran back to the opticians shop. It was near closing time and the lady did not seem quite so pleased to see me this time. I was breathless when I arrived at her counter and could not express myself as clearly as I might have liked.

“Some trouble with what?”

This was all I could manage to say and I and feared it was sufficiently incoherent as to totally confuse the lady but it seemed she understood me well enough as she immediately launched into a profuse apology.

“I shouldn’t have said anything, I’m so sorry, I spoke out of turn.”

I didn’t care a hoot for speaking out of turn. Mostly, I wanted the word she had used. That odd word.

“Please, what was it you said that he had trouble with?”

The lady hesitated and it seemed for that long moment that she would not tell me the word I needed.

“Snellen”

The voice came from the back of the store. I turned to find a surprisingly young man standing in the doorway. He stepped forward with his hand outstretched.

“I’m Peter, this is my fathers shop but he’s no longer able to… the eyesight would you believe?”

His gentle joke went over my head. There was only one question in my world.

“Please, what is a ‘Snellen’?” I asked.

He took my elbow and led me to the back room.

“Come on”, he said, I’ll show you.

So now here I am sitting on the edge of the quay dropping small stones into the soupy water far below. I know now why my grandfather died and it is a painful knowing. But am I a better grandson by sharing my knowledge with my grandmother or do I do better to simply hold my peace. The thick brine does not seem to know and neither do I.

Peter the optician had sat me in the chair where he tests all his patients and dimmed the lights. He indicated to the chart on the opposite wall and asked my to read the top line. I did so.

“That chart,” he said, “Is called a Snellen chart.”

Then at last I thought I knew.

“He couldn’t see it,” I said, “You had to tell my Granddad that he was going blind.”

“Quite the contrary, he had very good eyesight for a man of his years. No he could see it fine.”

“But then…”

“He couldn’t read it.”

I stared at him a moment then couldn’t help but laugh.

“Nonsense,” I said, “The man had done nothing but read for all of his life.”

In reply, Peter produced another chart from a drawer beside my chair. It showed a series of letters ‘E’ turned upside down and sideways.

“This is an alternative chart,” he explained, “We keep a number of them, for children or learning disadvantaged people… or people like your grandfather who unfortunately never learned to read.”

The truth was slow to sink in – a lifetime of deception revealed.

As I struggled with the revelation, it became clear that Peter was also very upset.

“When Nora told me that he had killed himself… I was getting ready to come and see you… I feel that I…,” he stopped, unable to continue.

“No,” I said, “It sounds like you were kind and gentle with him. It sounds like you were really great. But Nora knew my Granny from school and he must have known that. He must have known that his ‘secret’ would be revealed at last.”

There are no more stones to throw in. It is time to go home. I can’t help but mourn for my proud granddad. All his years of staring at a meaningless jumble of characters on a mocking broadsheet. All his gleaning of news from the television and pretending it came from the printed word. All of his deception. My saddest thought is if only he had spent half of this energy on learning to read, how fulfilled he could have been.

I think I might tell her after all.

I think she deserves to know.

© Ken Armstrong

The All-Important Holiday Read

kfelix@eircom.net (Ken Armstrong) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 12:54:00 +0000

I like to have something special to read over the Christmas holiday. I think it makes the insular feeling all the more tangible to have a special book to look forward to and then devour.

This year I didn’t have one.

Oh, I had some reading lined up – I always need that – but I didn’t have the book that I thought might once again help to define my Christmas for me… yes, it is sad, I know.

These seasonal reads don’t have to be festive or jolly or anything like that. Quite the opposite, in fact. A few years back, I had ‘In The Forest’ by Edna O’Brien, which may well be the bleakest book ever written. It was quite reviled in certain circles, here in Ireland, because it recounted a real-life murder and did so in great emotional and physical detail.

I liked it very much.

Then there was ‘I’m Not Scared’ by Niccolo Ammaniti. What a great Christmas treat that was! Have you read it? You really should. It’s about a boy who finds a similarly-aged boy trapped in a pit deep in the Italian countryside. I will say no more than that, lest I spoil it. There was a film too, which was good, but the book is a complete joy.

So here was I, this year, without a reserved seasonal read. I was re-reading ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ and loving it all over again but that was only going to take and hour or two anyway. What to do?

Then we went round to our friend’s house on Christmas Eve, as we traditionally do, and she had four books on her table.

“I got talking to the bookshop owner,” she said, “and she recommended these.”

She suggested that I take one and read it and tell her if it was any good. It seemed like fate, perhaps it was.

They were four slim attractive volumes. I picked one, I can’t remember what the other three were, sorry.

I picked ‘Fists’ by Pietro Grossi. I had never heard of it. My reasons were selecting this one were as sophisticated as ever – I liked the look of the cover (with the horse and all) plus it reminded me of the aforementioned ‘I’m Not Scared’ because it was also Italian and the cover was brown. Like I said, sophisticated reasoning…

So, having read it, I now wish to wholeheartedly recommend my 2009 Christmas read to you. Pietro Grossi is a young writer who claims Hemingway and Salinger as influences. This is not hard to see. Maybe my perception was a little heightened by finishing ‘Old Man and the Sea’ at the same time, but Grossi writes most convincingly of the sporting challenge and the condition of being a Man. He also writes with that sparse, razor style that I admire so much in the writers who have influenced him.

The book is made up of three long short stories (too short to be classed as novellas). The first and best concerns boxing and gives one of the best accounts of a boxing match that I have ever read. The second deals with horses and the third and least convincing is about the friend of a man who believes he is a monkey.

I really enjoyed this book. The writer is confident enough to get out of his stories when he feels his work with them is done – even if we, the readers, might not fully agree. He writes like a man who knows what he is writing about – a man who has stood in the ring, a man who has healed horses. I believe him in what he writes.

So once again this year, I have had my holiday read. “Christmas 2009” will be partially defined for me by Pietro Grossi and his great little book.

Next year… who knows?

Post Script: Jim Murdoch reviewed this book some time ago. I would have read his review at the time. I must have forgotten about it... or did I? Read it here and note the Author's reply in the comments. Carries some literary weight, does 'Oor Jim'.