Dear Readers,
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TF features editor Séamas O’Reilly released his first book a few weeks back, and has agreeably topped the Irish bestsellers list for three weeks running. It’s a memoir of his childhood, growing up as one of eleven children to a widowed father in 90s’ Northern Ireland. It’s called Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? but it's a lot funnier than that title makes it sound. In this exclusive extract for newsletter subscribers, first forecast a few weeks back, we meet just some of the dogs and priests featured in a chapter entitled ‘An Entire Chapter About Dogs & Priests. To get you warmed up, here’s former Irish rugby winger, Tommy Bowe, producing a moment of Alan Patridge-esque wonder when introducing Séamas’ book earlier this week. Watch it! It’s very funny indeed.
A Dog Called Christmas
Father Huck Balance stood in full vestments, scowling at the dog as the wind wrapped his stole around his face. He had been swinging the thurible fairly hard, and milky incense was now spewing out of it in a dense, Catholic fog. Rain was beginning to fall, and the smell of ozone mingled with the sweet musk of Mass to create an uncanny feeling of everything being out of place. It was the kind of grey, half-started day you’re always reading about in Irish short stories, where strong, unreasonable men attend the rural funerals of even stronger and less reasonable men. This was weather fit for killing your uncle, or nearly-but-not-quite bringing the wake house to a standstill by confessing your love for the widow of the departed, a woman you haven’t seen since that last time, so many years ago, that you, our author, are certainly about to describe in some detail. But we were not gathered by a hillside grave, nor huddling toward a country wake. We were standing outside our house waiting for the priest to bless our new twenty-six-foot ABI Award Superstar caravan. It was July 1992, just nine months after my mother’s death. By this point, I was likely so inured to Catholic rituals – and my family’s common deployment of them – that events like this, though interesting, even exciting, didn’t seem particularly odd. I’ve since realised that most families did not have priests out to the house to bless their caravan; it was more the sort of thing that bishops would do at Dublin airport with the plane carrying the Irish football team to a major tournament.
As we pulled our sleeves down over our hands against the cold, he stood implacable and resolute, broadcasting the solemnity of God in the very same place where, just 25 minutes earlier, our dog, Nollaig, had been eating his own shite. Nollaig was no longer ingesting effluent, but still refused to honour that half-state of reverence the rest of us were attempting, the type of quiet awkwardness that’s general when you have Mass in a weird place and everyone tries to act as though it’s perfectly normal. He was barking and growling, as if mocking the events unfolding in front of him. Father Balance said nothing, but I thought I caught a glint of contempt in his eyes at each interruption. What, he seemed to say to our dog, is so funny about a priest blessing a gigantic caravan in the rain? I presume the smell of the incense was what was bothering Nollaig. Either that or Mr Devenney, our otherwise kindly neighbour, had landed us with one of Ireland’s few Protestant sheepdogs. Such dogs could, of course, sow discord among the others, annex the lands of Catholic cows and march provocatively past contested field routes each July. On the plus side, most farmers agreed, Protestant dogs would probably be more willing to put in a shift on Sundays.
Whatever his denomination, Nollaig – Christmas in Irish – had long established a reputation as something of a cheerful arsehole, and was less a beloved pet than an uncaring brute who tumbled through our lives like a demented frat boy in an American campus comedy. We all pretended we liked him, perhaps out of fear he’d steal our lunch money or push us into a drinking fountain. He’d been a gift for my sister Mairead the year before my mother died, although a combination of his spirited nature and Mairead’s being just seven led to her slowly being forgiven of prime responsibility, and it was instead assumed that he was the family’s problem. He ate everything he could get his paws on, and several things he should never have been able to. He once savaged a frozen chicken that had been in one of the two big chest freezers we had in the garage. How he managed to open its lid, which was large, heavy and stood four feet off the ground, is still a matter of speculation.
When Conall was two years old he grabbed Nollaig’s lead in a fit of misplaced affection, and Nollaig shot off at such speed that the baby of the family was jolted, Buster Keaton fashion, off the ground. For a few seconds he trailed behind our dyspeptic hound in mid- air, fully horizontal, as his little fist gripped the tether now hurtling him toward certain death. In the end, Conall got away with a few cuts and bruises, but for him, my parents and most of the rest of my family, it was extraordinarily traumatic. Personally, I consider it one of the best things I’ve ever seen, and feel as though it made the rest of Nollaig’s bad behaviour broadly worth it. In any case, whatever his thoughts on virgin births or the holy catechism, there was just as much a chance Nollaig was dismissive of priests due to general misanthropy rather than outright sectarianism. In the end, I’m happy to presume our dog was a prick, not a bigot.
The local farmers were less forgiving of Nollaig than we were when he graduated from mauling frozen chickens to killing and eating their sheep. It shouldn’t have been surprising, perhaps, since he had for a while been growing more bold, nipping at visitors and issuing growls and even bites that had long since progressed beyond playful. One cold, wet Sunday – again adding fuel to the whole Protestant theory – Nollaig killed a sheep a few fields over and was put down. I don’t believe a vet was involved; it was instead agreed that Nollaig should be presented to the farmer himself, so that he could have a full, frank conversation via shotgun. We weren’t exactly distraught, but our neighbours threw street parties. We suddenly had that disquieting realisation that everyone within an eight- mile radius had hated him as much as they loved us. I guess it was the dog- owner’s equivalent of when your friend breaks up with her boyfriend and everyone finally tells her that his beard is disgusting and that podcast of his is going nowhere.
Perhaps inevitably, we entered into a rebound relationship, taking in an Alsatian/Labrador cross named Bruno, who was everything Nollaig hadn’t been. Bruno was a girl who we initially thought was a boy, hence her name. We twigged she was a girl when it became clear she was pregnant. It seemed as though she had come from nowhere, but now I wonder if she had been a stray notch on Nollaig’s bedpost who, after keeping as far away from her psycho ex as possible, swooped in and nicked his bed once he was out of the picture. She was quiet and kind- hearted and immediately proved more popular than poor Nollaig, but often flinched from contact, especially from men, which made us think she’d had a troubled time of it. Desperate to love and be loved, I saw in her a kindred spirit, and doted on her unreservedly. Since my mother’s death, we each sought the opportunity to project our neuroses onto the family pet, and here was one that finally seemed aware of our presence. For those of us suffering a lack of attention, we adored her steadfast fascination with everything we did. For those of us who wanted space, we had a little underling we could chase from any rooms we entered, with an alacrity that suggested we might want to do the same to some of the house’s human occupants.
I think I just wanted someone I could repeatedly express my love for, without having to think too much about why, exactly, I needed it so much. I should be clear, this wasn’t Bleak House; my family were open about how much we loved each other, and my father especially. It’s just he probably would have been freaked out if I’d said it four hundred times a day which is, approximately, what I needed to do at the time. An oddly codependent little friendship was forged. I cared for Bruno by treating her very kindly, and she cared for me by not taking off. Two pitiful little eejits, each sad in their own way. I performed those tasks a motherless child might imagine a mother would do: walking beside my furry little infant, saying ‘I love you’ and ‘I’ll never leave you’ and ‘do not eat that dead bird, it’s been at the side of the road for two weeks’.
When her litter finally arrived, these instincts went into overdrive, and I looked on each of her offspring as my personal responsibility. Like some little Irish Oedipus, I mapped new frontiers of dysfunction by casting myself as Bruno’s mother, son and, now, proud father to her eleven pups. While they were little more than squirming, wriggling caterpillars, too small to open their eyes, us Wee Ones handballed them to and fro, sizing them up and allotting each an equal sequence of cuddles and pattings, courting near constant admonition from my father that we treat them a little more gently. Had he not been on hand, I fear more than a few would have been squeezed to death.
It was clear we were not especially attuned to the finer points of animal husbandry, as we discovered one particularly hot day when Conall became flustered at the thought of them growing parched, unspooled the hose by our garage and directed a torrent of water directly into the kennel to ‘cool them down’. The next thing we knew, he’d sent a squadron of bemused little pups sailing on a river of soaked bedding, hay and hundreds of their tic- tac sized turds. But they survived, and soon their eyes were open and they were yapping and squealing like actual little dogs, and producing copious amounts of larger, more substantial, shite.
Three weeks in, I was woken by a distant whine, and followed the pups’ mewling cries to the top of the road. It was just before dawn, and raining hard. I found them huddled beneath a shipping container by the customs checkpoint, and climbed under to inspect them. There was more than enough space for me to sit there cross- legged, and as I did, they gambolled into my lap, their drenched bodies patting me all at once like a sad applause of frightened little hands. There was no sign of their mother, although I could hear her barking in the very same field of sheep that had done for Nollaig. I sat there in the full horror of their abandonment, holding these soaked pups and crying. Daddy was soon alerted to my absence and a little while later he arrived for me, sending Dara and Shane back for a towel to grab the litter.
He told me Bruno’s instructive instinct had kicked in and she’d likely brought the pups up there to hunt sheep, but finding they preferred to flop around uselessly in the rain went on without them. Sister Annette took me out of class the following day to tell me, in the curious terminology used in such cases, that Bruno had been ‘worrying sheep’ and ‘had had to be destroyed’. Even as a child, the idea that chasing sheep ‘worried’ them seemed preposterous, conjuring images of flocks pacing back and forth, of flighty ewes biting their nails. And as for ‘destroyed’, I didn’t even know where to start with that one. They were talking about Bruno as if she were an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, or a nuclear warhead. I imagined piles of bold dogs, stacked like a cache of decommissioned paramilitary ordnance. I’ve since been told this isn’t too far off the truth.
I wonder now why they had to tell us at all, but then I suppose, unlike with my city friends, they couldn’t pretend she’d gone to live on a farm. Perhaps they could have reversed it and told me she had been sent to live in a council high-rise in town, but that apparently never occurred to them.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died is available anywhere books are sold: various options for which can be found at www.mammybook.com
The Absolute State of the State of the Novel Discourse
Everyone’s favourite algebraic arts organ, n+1 seized the throat of literary Twitter this week by publishing one of those State of The Union pieces which appear to foam to the surface of book circles every few minutes. Their well-written and diverting piece, Critical Attrition is very worth a read, and makes some excellent observations about the author-reviewer-publication pipeline and all the nested, vested interests therein.
It raises many salient points about the sometimes sickly lack of bite in contemporary criticism, but tellingly without citing any actual examples. On this latter point, The Fence is forced to pause. We happen to think It's fine to say ‘reviewers and blurbers need to grow a spine and tackle the inadequacy of bad books’ and also fine for writers to say ‘look, I don't want to be attacking specific people, it's unseemly and life’s too short, please leave me alone’. It’s just that claiming both at once doesn’t make sense. Decrying the lack of a clear-eyed, rigorous bravery that you don't even possess yourself is not merely nonsensical, but oddly timid for a piece written with as much vim and vigour as the above.
It could just be that we’re tired of discourse about the discourse, and wondering aloud why it is that so few other artforms contrive such regular meta-narratives about themselves. There are very good reasons for very good writers to write about very good writing, and even - as in this case - to write about writing about writing - but there is perhaps something wearying about it happening multiple times a year.
But, to be honest, since we’ve just subjected you to some writing about writing about writing about writing, we’re really in no place to judge.
Romeo Done
In grim news for older millennials, it’s now exactly 20 years since So Solid Crew topped the charts with 21 Seconds. Looking back at 2001’s number ones, there is a curious mish-mash comprising of shoddy manufactured pop (S Club 7, 5ive, Hear Say), timeless manufactured pop (Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head) and underground dance music slammers that somehow summited the charts (Another Chance by Roger Sanchez; Do You Really Like It by DJ Pied Piper). With their liquid talent and numerical advantage (there are more than 25 confirmed band members), So Solid Crew should have been in for the long haul. What happened to all the members as the group splintered has been documented, elsewhere, by the kindly tabloid press, but allow us to shine a light on this superb interview between Megaman and Joseph Patterson, which focuses, thankfully, on the music itself.
In Case You Missed It
Anagha Srikanth achieves an enviable headline with her sobering look into our ancestors’ deadly forays into cross-species congress
In news that will not be news to anyone who’s sampled our Adam Curtis Hate Matrix, Hannah Williams tells us Why Millennial Leftists Have Made a BBC Filmmaker a Cult Hero.
Siddharta Deb pens an absorbing and disturbing account of the ‘Plot’ to kill Indian PM Naredra Modi
The NY Post carries a rundown of some wild reactions to Governor Cuomo’s resignation from his biggest fans.
Hide your flies and lock in your bees, the University of British Columbia says it’s identified the planet’s first new carnivorous plant in twenty years.
An excerpt from Charlie English’s The Gallery of Miracles and Madness dives into the psychiatrist who venerated his patients’ art, until Hitler’s culture war stopped them in their tracks.
And Finally
2021 marks a century since the birth of one of the great raconteurs: Sir Peter Ustinov. For those who don’t know him, he was an author, actor, director, humanitarian, campaigner etc. Indeed, he was so multifaceted that UN head Kofi Annan gave the address at his funeral. There are loads of potential videos to showcase his mastery of the anecdote, and while we were tempted to share the joy of his explanation of Keynesian economics alongside Fozzie Bear on The Muppet Show, nothing can really beat his machine gun impersonations from about 2:26 minutes in here. Queen Mary has never been so funny, and the make-up of an audience so loaded with celebrities.
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All the best,
TF
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