Castlebar to Ballina – A Setlist

I sing in the car. So shoot me.

In actuality, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been singing in my car. The way I figure it, there are two basic reasons. Firstly I haven’t been in the humour for singing too much and, secondly, I haven’t been in the car too much. Two fine reasons, I think you’ll agree.

And when I was making the short, thirty minute, drive over to Ballina the other morning, I had no predetermined intention of doing any of my patented car singing. But these things just tend to happen. What happened was, a song came on the radio and it just fitted into my head very well at that moment so I sang along with it. With considerable gusto, I might add. After all, it was just me and the curious faces of the drivers going in the opposite direction. So why not?

The song, in case you’re wondering, was, “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song’ by Jim Croce.’ It’s one of those songs that seems to fit with my ramshackle old bass voice. It’s also one of those songs I forget about when I think about songs that I might be able to manage. So, catching it on the radio was a good moment. I sang along, all the way through. Then, when it was over, I fancied singing it again so I turned the radio off and did just that. I discovered I‘d forgotten a few of the words in the middle eight but never mind. On we ploughed. Incidentally, here’s something else I just discovered. Until today, I would have sworn to you that the song was called ‘I Had to say I Love You in a Song’ and, as you can see from the text about, it clearly isn’t. I’ll probably keep singing it the wrong way now because it’s embedded that way. That is, if I ever remember to sing it again.

Anyway, I digress. After finishing that little number, to copious internal applause, I moved on to ‘King of the Road’ by Roger Miller, which works well but I wish I had a better way of ending it. Then I did a bit of ‘La Mer’ by Charles Trenet, bluffing the French lyrics as best I can and morphing the entire hot mess into ‘Beyond the Sea,’ as I tend to do. After that, there was a bit of ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You’ by Tom Waits, from his very first album ‘Closing Time, back when he wasn’t gravelly. It’s an album beloved of a large number of Irish people of a certain age. Quite right, it’s a lovely record, but it’s a shame they don’t know more of his wonderful catalogue. As if to punch home this point, I did a bit of ‘Chocolate Jesus’ for the passing motorists. I wound the random little recital up with a brief refrain from the Broadway show ‘The Fantasticks’ with ‘Try to Remember.’ I think I can sing this one but, deep down, I know I really can’t. I was in Ballina by then and it’s not cool to sing in towns. It’s strictly an open road pursuit.

I figured I was done then but there was another bit of a remote road out the far side of Ballina and I was self-encouraged to attempt an assault on ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’ by Neil Diamond. It always amuses me to pretend in my head to be introducing the song and explaining how it is actually an ode to a sparkling rose wine. It’s a song that seems to be designed to catch the unwary car singer out. But if I start it off in a low enough register, I can sometimes get by just bawling out the higher stuff that unleashes in the middle.

Then I was at my destination, a little hoarse but ready to work.

I think my unprovoked resurrection of my truly awful car singing may be something of a good sign. Maybe I’m getting back to a little clear water after a short period of rocking and rolling on the high seas of life. I’ll try to keep at it if I can, even if it clearly benefits nobody but me.

It reminds me of an age-old Limerick I saw in some book once:

There once were three owls in a wood

Who always sang hymns when they could

What the words were about

One could never make out,

But one felt it was doing them good.

Til next time…

Books Etc.

I thought I might take a moment and mention a couple of books I read this year that I enjoyed a lot.

I am a reader and, although I have been called both, I am neither a ‘voracious reader’ nor a ‘widely read' person. I think it’s safe to say I have have read some part of some book every day of my teenage and adult life. But my reading is confined to one serious session before sleep, twenty minutes over lunch, and the odd ‘sit on the couch and just read’ sessions. With this occasional, erratic, but constant routine, I get through quite a few books and I’ve been doing it for so long it’s added up to quite a list of books read. But ‘voracious’? Alas, no.

As always, I am indebted to the Castlebar Library Book Club, where I’ve been going monthly for the best part of two decades. Every month, the good people there put their heads together and suggest a book that I probably would never have found all by myself. Because of this, my reading horizons have been broadened from the murky corners I would have previously habituated. Every month doesn’t hit 100% home but that’s kind of the point. It’s like a taster menu in a better class of restaurant than the ones you normally frequent.

So the two books I want to mention specifically were both choices at this years Book Club sessions.

Here’s the first:

West by Carys Davies:  A slender, but wonderful, novel set in Pennsylvania an 1819 in which a bereaved father sets out on a misguided and very lengthy expedition to find prehistoric animals which he believes could still exist. He leaves behind his 10 year old daughter, in the care of his sister, and off he trots. Along the way, he enlist the help of a Native American boy and, together, they face the immense hardships of the American Frontier while, back at home, his daughter has her own severe challenges to meet.

My Grandfather, Sammy, used to love ‘Cowboy Books’ and, as a lad, I used to delight in rounding up and driving home volumes of Louis Lamour and Zane Grey from the local library. I have since found much to admire in various books set in the so-called ‘Old West’. A friend pointed me towards ‘Lonesome Dove’ which carried me along with it like a tide. More recently, there was the wonderful ‘The Heart in Winter’ by Kevin Barry, 'Butcher’s Crossing' by John Edward Williams, and the unshakable horrors contained in ‘Blood Meridian’ by Cormac McCarthy. There is something rooted and without guile in so many of the stories set in this era. The older I get, the more I seem to appreciate them.

‘West’ is one of those books I would be happy to recommend to anyone. It is moving and insightful. It is unexpected and human and it rattles onward to a thundering (if slightly unlikely) conclusion.

And here's the second:

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden: I would never have read this, if it weren’t for Castlebar Library Book Club. I mean, never. This is one of those books where anything I tell you about it would tend to lessen its effectiveness. I had read one review before I read the book and, although the reviewer was ultra-careful in what they revealed, I still found myself primed for the arrival of certain moments in the story and subconsciously expectant of where it was going and where it ultimately went. Have I said too much already? I hope not. We give our reads star ratings out of five and I gave this a very rare five. The writing and the insight into the characters wrapped me up and engrossed me and the story, which is outside of that which would normally engage me, did exactly that. This one won’t be for everyone, I reckon. But, damn, it worked for me.

Other non-Book Club books that hit some this year included ‘On the Calculation of Volume – Book 1’ by Solvej Balle. I came to this with a lot of expectation. It sounded right up my street. And, in fairness, it turned out to be a little slower and more reflective than I expected it to be. But I am still looking forward to getting to the second (and, hopefully) subsequent volumes, so it must have done something right.

In retrospective reading, I became immersed in ‘A Fringe of Leaves’ by Patrick White. This book has been pointed out as including negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures and that should be taken into account. Respecting this, I found the heightened language and slowly unfolding misfortune of the story engrossing.

Finally, at the moment, I am reading, and having a good time with, ‘The Lincoln Highway’ by Amor Towles. Amor hit big with the Book Club some years ago with ‘A Gentleman in Moscow.’ And, whereas this book did not meet the same critical and general success, I am enjoying the ride, nonetheless. Towles writes in an accessible, straightforward style of a kind I always admire. He takes you along with him with a deceptive ease. If you enjoyed ‘Gentleman in Moscow’ and fancy an American road trip which doesn’t go quite where you expect it to go, then you might like this one.

Books are great. Whenever I crack the spine of my current one, at the end of any given day, I feel like I am home.

Goodbye Halloween Frog

The Halloween Frog is gone now.

This morning, while it was quiet, I went up the street with my trusty spade and I slid it under him, lifted him, and carried him to the copse at the bottom of the green. There, among the grass clippings and the secateured twigs, I laid him to rest.

This wasn’t good neighbourliness or even civic duty. The Halloween Frog had been playing on my mind, sufficient to be the subject of this week’s blog entry. So it was in my own interests to see him moved on to somewhere less public.

I can close the book on him now… right after I’ve told you a bit about him.

The Halloween Frog showed up a few days before Halloween. At first, I thought he was still alive. He was sat on the pavement, right on the corner where one street in the Estate becomes another. It was nice to see him, a perfect little frog right there on our street. It wasn’t a normal sight. It was kind of cool. Except. Well, except he was dead, of course. That became clear pretty quickly, on closer examination. I wondered what had killed him. He was in a perfectly natural Froggie pose and there wasn’t a mark on him. Not then at least. I gave a mental shrug and moved on. Nothing to see here.

He was still there on my way home from work and he was a slightly less welcome sight, now that it was clear that he had not moved since I saw him last nor would he ever move again. Not of his own accord anyway. If he was ever going to move again, somebody was going to have to move him.

And nobody did.

He was quite the little stroll from my house so I didn’t see it as my thing to be going up there and moving him. Maybe I should have. Eventually I did. But not soon enough. Not quite soon enough.

On the second day, the day before Halloween, the frog had developed an extrusion of white foam from its mouth area. It seemed a little flatter on the ground. Not quite the firm, rounded, figure of the day before. On Halloween itself, the foam was slightly more pronounced and the roundedness was slightly less so. Something was happening, that was for sure, and it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t fun.

And, because of the day and night that was in it, this thought started to rattle around in my head. Death is not fun. The rapid deterioration of the mortal frame is not cool or attractive by any stretch of any imagination. Yet here we were in that day and evening when little corpses come out and circumnavigate the neighbourhood in search of sugary treats. Their homes are decorated with long haired skulls that scream silently at passing folk, their front gardens boast half open caskets with skeletal hands groping their way out.

And, all the while, a very real creature was slowly turning to corruption, right out there on the front street.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Halloween. Always have. As a kid I was fascinated by walking skeletons and spooks and Hollywood monsters. Just like all the other kids. Hell, I still am. It’s just, this year, the little frog and its insalubrious public deterioration made me wonder a bit. I wondered about what logic drives us to encourage this fascination in death and ‘the skull beneath the skin’ in our little kids. Are we preparing them for something in the nicest, most fun, way possible? Or are we cocking a snook at the fate that inevitably awaits us all a little way down the road?

You can see why I needed to get my spade, this sunny Sunday morning, and commit the frog-corpse back the wood from whence it hopefully came. By this morning it was a flat jelly-like simulacrum of a reptile, covered in billows of grey viscous foam.

Halloween is a very good thing, to my mind. But it is also good that it keeps itself a considerable distance from the truth of the things it proports to celebrate. It also helps that it dodges two of the most unavoidable realities of death.

One, that we won’t really continue to look all that cool after we go.

And two, that we are not ever coming back.

Getting Back on the Horse

In any given year, there are two danger moments in the life of this little blog.

This is one of them.

The first always comes on New Year’s Day or, to put it more accurately, on the first day of the year when a new blog post is required. The second comes when the produced work for the year is finished, as it is just now. This year, just like last year, it was the plays with Castlebar Musical and Dramatic Society. A wonderful experience but, as the man says, it’s all over now.

The two moments are the same but different. Try to imagine a little writing demon sitting on each of my shoulders, one being bad and one being good, and both of them whispering in my ears. At both of these danger times, the bad demon’s whispers are way, way louder than the puny good demon perched on the other side.

“What’s the point?” she says.

“Blogging died ten years ago, yet here you still are. Give it up. Instead of piddling it up against the wall, why don't you put this bit of writing energy into something that might actually become something, that might actually do something,” she says.

“Just stop,” she says.

The good demon, on the other shoulder, stays largely silent.

The reason that these danger moments occur is straightforward. On each of these two occasions, you see, I simply fall off the horse. The first occasion has a reason that is both straightforward and universal. Christmas. Once again, as with other years, I will have gleefully allowed my brain to stew in an orgy of old movies, family visits, and tins of Cadbury Roses. By the time the New Year comes around, I can no longer remember how to ride the horse that is my blogging habit. 

It’s much the same thing when the production of the plays comes to an end. Although I’ve been writing blog posts all the way through that process, the majority of those posts will have been about the plays, the rehearsals, the actors, the production. They sort of write themselves. Now that the plays are over, here is that famous blank screen in front of me once again and that girthy little demon sitting at my ear, telling me over and over that I simply shouldn’t bother. It’s a persuasive voice.

Yet here I am, scribbling.

Why is that?

Easy.

I don’t listen to my little demons, good or bad. I listen to myself. Also I find it hard to stop doing things… any things. If I have a pair of old shoes with holes in the soles and catastrophised uppers, I find it hard to stop wearing them. The Status Quo must be maintained wherever possible. This imperative drives me back, time and again, to the blank page. Even when the current blog post will only be a directionless ramble, as this one will clearly be, I am still here. Putting down the words.

But it’s more that that. This thing that brings me back and back to this rather fruitless endeavour, after 15 plus years of it.

Simple.

It’s good for me.

It’s good for my head and it’s really good for my writing. This almost-weekly act of compiling some increasingly elusive thoughts into a passably coherent thousand word post is an exercise that keeps my writing muscle in trim. When I come to write my other stuff, my fingers know where the keys are and my brain largely knows what is readable and what is not. (Said he, in a largely unreadable sentence).

I’ve said it before. I love it when people come and read these silly words and I love it even more when they tell me what they think of them, good or bad. But, over the years, this exercise has become far more about me than about you. Sorry about that, but it’s true. The thing that drags me back here, after Christmas revelries and Theatrical adventures are all done, well, it’s not good demons or force of habit or anything like that.

It’s just me.

So on we go. What will the next blog post be about, or the one after that? Not a clue, sorry.

All I know is, if I don’t get hit by a tram or something, I’ll be here working on them.

Be still, bad demon.

I’m writing here.