Smile

I had to dash to the post office on Friday afternoon to get a letter in the postbox. That was some old-fashioned stuff, right there.

I made it in plenty of time.

(Build the tension, Kenneth, you’ve got to build the tension)

On the walk back, it was 5.15 on Friday and that 'Friday Feeling' came over me. I was just about done for the week and Friday evening beckoned like a nice person beckoning.

(Better work on those similes too, Kenneth).

So, anyway, I was walking back through the car park and thinking about finishing up for the day. I would get some chicken fillets from Anthony the Butcher and some burger buns and lettuce and tomatoes and potatoes-for-wedges and some beers for my one-beer-of-the-week. Then I would go home and put some music on and make dinner while everybody else was out walking or doing whatever. Then, around seven thirty or so, we would sit and eat, constructing our own personalized chicken fillet burgers from the array of stuff on the table.

And, as I thought about this, as I looked forward very much to it, something unusual happened, right there in the car park.

I smiled.

Hang on. Don’t let me give you the impression that I never smile. I do. I reckon I smile quite a lot, but they are different kinds of smiles. You know what I mean. We smile in response to other smiles; we smile at something on telly or on our phone. We smile to deflect and encourage and to hide behind.

But this type of smile was rare. A spontaneous, uncalled-for smile from nowhere. It surprised me; I don’t mind telling you.

And that smile got me thinking.

What a strange beast I am, that I can smile broadly in the middle of the car park while all of the shit in the world continues, just like it always does. What right is there for me to be smiling while such god-awful things are happening all over the place and right here on the home front too.

I got to wondering: how do we manage it? This smiling thing. Is it resilience? Are we so weathered and tough that literally nothing can keep us down forever? Or is it that we are so inherently selfish and uncaring that, no matter what is happening around us, something good in our own little world will always make us happy?

And there has been so much trouble and quite a bit of pain. I don’t need to run through the worldwide stuff with you, you all know that well enough yourselves. And the more private stuff, well, it’s not for blogs is it? Not this morning, at least.

So why smile?

I thought about it and I didn’t come to the conclusion that it is a negative thing, this penchant for a smile. I actually think it’s pretty good.

I don’t think it’s because we’re overly selfish or impervious or uncaring, though we all have a measure of those things in us. I think it’s more that we all subconsciously know that we are all in this together and that pain and sorry and anxiety and… just… trouble is all around the corner for all of us. We may not be in trouble today but we will be one day, as sure as eggs is eggs. 

That guy in Gladiator kind of put his finger on it when he spoke to his deceased friend, “I will see you again but not yet. Not yet.” As adults we mourn the loss of those who have died. And if that was a fate solely for them then it might be even harder to bear. But it isn’t. As adults, we know that we are all going to go the same way, we are all bound to die. In the same way as we know that whatever level of trouble and pain someone is having, we all know we will have our own share of that cake on some future day.

So we smile. Not because we do not care but because we do.

We’re most likely only here once and we’re most likely not going anywhere much after we’re here. So we should just embrace the good moments when we get them, any time that we are able. There are hurdles and ditches aplenty ahead. Some we’ll get over; some we’ll crawl through somehow but some we will not.

But for now, it’s Friday afternoon. That letter is safe in the postbox and the prospect of a homemade chicken fillet burger and my one beer of the week beckons warmly.

“Not yet. Not yet.”

Just once, a long time ago, I asked my Twitter people what I should write about here because I didn’t have any ready ideas for that week. I got only one reply, from my good friend John, who said that I should write about the importance of a smile. In that particular week, I couldn’t think of anything to say on that subject so I wrote something else, God knows what.

So maybe this one’s for you, John - and, of course, for anyone else who wants it.

The world may be in a state of chassis, as the man said, but we can still allow ourselves our little smiles whenever they come to us unbidden.

We deserve them.

Some Thoughts After Rereading The Shining

I just finished a little reread of Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ and I wasn’t going to write about it here, but two things changed my mind. Firstly, I like to write about something I’ve been thinking about during the week and this qualified. Secondly, Aaron Cahill, a lovely guy and a constant supporter of my ‘long-past-their-sell-by-date’ blog endeavours, also announced that he was rereading it. 

So that was like Karma or something.

So, yeah, this post will be mostly about The Shining so it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. I get that. But maybe come back next week, if this one is not for you. I’ll be on some other tack. Though God only knows what that will be. 

Whatever occurs at the time, as per usual.

Some history first. My best guess is that I bought the novel ‘The Shining’ in or around 1978, when I was fifteen. I had been casting around for some reading that engaged me a bit more and, without really knowing anything about King, I picked up two of his novels in Broderick’s bookshop at the bottom of O’Connell St. in Sligo. The other one was Salem’s Lot. I have a strong physical memory of these books because they were both really poorly bound and they both fell apart in my hands while I was reading them.

I found both books to be unputdownable. I was fascinated by the way dialogue and paragraph and narrative could be randomly and savagely interrupted by some other thought, like a TV channel being changed without warning. My breathless reading of The Shining started a life-long affair with Stephen King’s writing.

Then came the movie.

I saw the movie with Brian McGill in The Savoy in Sligo on the Saturday night it came out. I was due to catch the train to Dublin first thing the next morning to start college. My first time ever to be away from home. So, it was an odd evening. The film didn’t go down too well. I really like it now but, back then, it seemed slow and uneven and weirdly uneventful (which it certainly is not).

Now we’re up to date. 2020. I’ve seen the movie a gazillion times and even had coffee in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, where King had some formative inspiration for the novel, but I had not revisited the book since I was a callow youth. On the prowl for something to read, earlier this week, I found a more modern copy on John’s bookshelf and had a peek inside. That was it. I was off once more to The Overlook Hotel, high above fictional Sidewinder in the not fictional Rockies.

So… how was it Ken?

Interesting. It was interesting.

The first thing to say is that King’s style and power was still evolving and growing and although the concept was world-beating, the writing is occasionally a little – dare I say – clunky. Younger Stephen seems to have had some kind of minor fixation with breasts because they get an impressible amount of shout outs throughout the text. 

Some of the scary imagery just doesn’t work for me. Most notably the topiary animals who periodically and literally spring to life. For me, that was too absurd to be chilling. Similarly, the boiler in the basement seemed strained, with no pun intended.

As somebody who has tried a bit of writing since I first read this book, I can now entertain myself by imagining the thought process that started King on this road. You take Shirley Jackson’s ‘Haunting of Hill House’, with its malevolent structure and its psychic visitors, and you massively up the ante. The house becomes a vast hotel. The psychic presence a little boy. It’s a genius conceit.

But here’s what I really want to try to say.

After this second reading, I would say that The Shining is, for me at least, one of Stephen King’s most important books. People who know me through writing will know that I am always banging on about the ‘little drop of blood’ that needs to go into one’s writing to give it intrinsic value. There must be something of the writer’s soul buried in the work for it to reach us. Pure cold story will not do. And, for me, on this second reading, Stephen King has opened a vein and bled into this book.

It is, through and through, a story of alcoholism and fear.

When I am writing, in my own low-wattage way, I don’t usually know the actual point of what I’m doing until I get to the end. Then I go back and rewrite it, informed as I now am but what I am doing. To my mind, King could have written this book as a supernatural horror story and not known until late-on that he was pouring all his own fears and insecurities in there as fodder for the story machine. I don’t know, I’m only speculating. But the overriding impression for me now is that the writer is a man who has known alcoholism (he makes no secret of it) and who has probably feared where that might take him. This fear drips off the pages in this book.

I’m lucky in that alcohol has not played a starring role in my family history. I thank heavens for that. But anyone who has lived in a small town will know the sight of the main breadwinner of a household stumbling home from the hostelry, singly focused on getting in the door. Anyone from a small town will know that thought that goes something like, “I hope he falls asleep quickly.”

Stephen King famously has little regard for Kubrick’s film adaptation of the book. This surprised me initially because so many King adaptations are well below-par and, love it or hate it, Kubrick’s endeavour is striking and innovative and pretty damn wild.

But I think I can understand a little better now why King might not have much time for that movie. As much as the book is ultimately a thinly veiled metaphor for the horrors that alcoholism can wreak on a family, so equally the movie is not. Oh, there is booze there and it plays its part, but it is not the root of everything, it is not the point. And Jack Nicholson’s Torrance becomes ever more elevated and dominant as his possession advances while the Torrance of the book becomes a shambling incoherent mess of a thing, a drunk through and through.

I greatly enjoyed my rereading of The Shining. It’s not perfect but nothing ever is and the imagery from the film rather pervades the book, such that’s it’s hard not to see Nicholson when it’s Torrance standing there.

Not everyone's cup of tea, this, but still a very good read. There is more going on than meets the eye and that's always a good start for a good book. 

Walking the Second Beach

Took Friday afternoon off I did, in true Yoda fashion, and hopped in the car and headed for Sligo to meet my old pal and to have a walk with him on the Second Beach at Rosses Point.

We were lucky with the weather. The sun shone us out and back and it was only on the final part of the return march that the wind fired in a squall from across the bay and the rain came on in drenching waves. 

We sheltered at the side of a car which was fortuitously parked at a good angle on the side of the road. It shielded our lower halves from the driven rain and our jackets looked after the top halves. There was a middle-aged couple in the car having sandwiches and a flask of tea and they were happy to loan us the side of their car in this way for five minutes, even going so far as to ask us if we wanted to climb in, though we knew they didn’t mean it really.

Social Distancing was easy; the nearest people were mere dots on the horizon for most of the time. You can tell the knowledgeable walkers on the Second Beach because they veer sharply to the right and away from the oceanside when they draw near to the cliffs at the end. They know what the novice visitor does not – that there is a busy stream than flows constantly through the golf course, down across the beach and into the tide. There is an easy crossing up close to the dunes. Nothing fancy, some rocks and a plank of wood, but if you try and cross it further down it’s deceptively deep and fast-running and you will get your socks wet. Follow the locals, veer to the right. You won’t go far wrong.

The second beach ends at the base of a small cliff and a rocky outcrop down to the shoreline. You can walk further but we didn’t. It gets a bit slippery over beyond. We’d come far enough.

We had so much catching up to do that the beach nearly passed me by. I got so engrossed in the conversation that I almost forgot to take it all in. The wild windswept blue sea, the sky, the lands across the bay. I only noticed the extreme erosion on the way back and, as I sit here and think about it, I can’t even be sure that the always-constant metal buoy was still there embedded in the sand as it always has been. It must have been, right? I’m mean it’s never not been there, for as long as I can remember. I guess the chat was so involving that I walked right past it. I guess that was it. I hope it’s still there, I used to like trying to climb up it when I was little and succeeding when I was bigger. At the end of the beach part of the walk, I had to stop and look around for a moment. Just to imprint it a little harder on the retina.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, this post isn’t actually about much. There won’t be much detail, narrative, sense, or insight into anything useful. I drove to the beach in my old hometown, had a nice walk and a great chat and came home again. It did me a power of good but to try to explain why would be boring and a bit pointless. Anyway, you know why. It was the beach. It was a friend. It was a walk. You have all the tools to figure it out.

Rosses Point has always seemed a tiny bit ‘other-worldly’ to me. I think it’s because there’s so little down at the beaches to define it as particularly Irish. There’s no shops or administration buildings or anything like that. Just an abandoned beach store, long disused, and a hut for the lifeguards. Apart from that, you could perhaps be anywhere. It’s kind of a blank palatte of sea and sky on which you walk and dream a bit if you like.

A beach walk is a good thing. There’s the theme of this post. I knew it would show itself eventually.

And the Second Beach in Rosses Point has always been a part of my life, back from when I was very little. It is a wonderful place, expansive and bright. If you’re round that way, go and take a walk up and down it. 

Or any beach, for that matter. You’ll see what I mean.