So there you are, some nuggets from another age. Now it’s time for me to surf the net… whoops, I mean, do some more work. I’m so EXTREMELY busy I’m hardly going to waste any time visiting my favourite websites, now am I?
I mean, would you… ?
First published in the Sunday Times, October 2000.
Catholicism: Cheaper than Prozac, But is it Good for You?
The Sunday Times had done a survey of Irish thirty-year-olds, canvassing their opinions on everything from spirituality to recreational drugs. To accompany publication of the survey, they asked several thirty-somethings to write articles on the various subjects. Mine was on – no, not on recreational drugs. Do you mind! But on spirituality.
Ireland, at the close of the twentieth century, is straddling a spiritual fault-line. Spiritually speaking, we’re two nations, and the split is almost entirely along age lines. Above a certain vintage – and it’s hard to see exactly at what age the cut-off point is – devout Catholicism is still the name of the game. Below that the waters become muddied, and a trawl through several thirty-something acquaintances indicates that they have a smorgasbord of beliefs, where some of the more attractive superstitions and rituals of Catholicism are included – we’re still big on white weddings. And some of the more onerous ones – like the ban on sex outside of marriage – have been jettisoned.
This is a relatively new situation. After all, seven out of eight thirty-year-olds were born Catholic, the ‘special’ position of the Catholic Church is enshrined in our constitution, and as recently as the mid-eighties Ireland functioned almost as a theocracy.
So why is ‘holy Catholic’ Ireland no longer so holy or Catholic? There are many reasons, among them the energetic foot-shooting the Church itself has been doing. Contemporaneously, Ireland has finally come of age as a nation. While we were a fledgling semi-state existing in the shadow of Britain, we needed to cling to whatever defined us as anything other than British. Catholicism was one of the cornerstones. But now we can be whatever we want, and it appears that what we want is to be secular. Up to a point.
Then there’s the effect of US culture, insidious and subtle. It affects every area of our lives – from what we eat and wear to what we believe in. And we seem to have developed a fast-food attitude to God – we want instant gratification spirituality. In the old days, people used to take the longer view: life might currently be a vale of tears, but big-time reward was a-coming the minute you popped your clogs. But nowadays no one is interested, to quote thirty-one-year-old Jenny Butler, in ‘that martyrdom stuff. I want to be happy now, not when I’m dead, and if the Catholic Church can’t guarantee it, I’ll find something that can.’
I tried to trace the line of belief through the life of an average thirty-something. Apparently support for God was at an all-time high when we were children. But as Owen, a twenty-nine-year-old civil servant, says, ‘When you’re a child you’ll believe anything. Let’s face it, I believed in Santy Claus and the tooth fairy too.’
Then came our teens, when we rebelled against everything our parents held dear. It was as automatic as breathing. We turned against their choice of wallpaper, their choice of friends, and while we were at it, their choice of religion. No thought went into it, it was just a knee-jerk reaction.
Moving on into our twenties, we think we’re ‘immortal and untouchable,’ according to Patricia, a thirty-two-year-old call-centre manager. ‘We don’t need God.’
But by the time we hit our thirties, something changes. People often start feeling a little more fragile, a little less resilient, and many experience a catharsis or watershed. Which can manifest itself in a myriad ways – ending a long relationship, getting married, changing jobs, buying a house, hitting the bottle hard or stopping entirely – certainly there’s some kind of shakedown and rearrangement of priorities. The reasons are many. Our parents are either dead or ageing. We’ve been shunted forward so that often there’s no other generation between us and death. We have to be the grownups and it’s an alarming realization.
The death of a loved one – usually a parent – often triggers a search for ‘something else’. Patricia, the call-centre manager, said that when her mother died, ‘I couldn’t get my head around that she’d just disappeared. I felt she had to be somewhere.’ So a long-dormant belief in the afterlife was resurrected to give comfort.
Or else we’ve had children. One couple I know lived together for years, got married in a civil ceremony on a boat in the Caribbean, and never put a foot in a church except on Christmas Day. But now that their eldest child is approaching school-going age, they’ve started going to Mass en famille. ‘Neither of us believes,’ thirty-two-year-old Sinead explained. ‘But I wanted to teach my little girl the difference between right and wrong.’ Sheepishly she said, ‘I don’t think it does me any harm either. It’s half an hour a week where I get a bit of peace and quiet. It gives me a chance to think.’ Then she added, ‘It’s particularly good when I’m feeling down. Cheaper than Prozac!’
The one thing I’ve noticed about those neo-Catholics who have recommenced a flirtation with the Church is their à la carte approach. I know nobody in their thirties who is a fully paid-up card-carrying Catholic on the issue of contraception. Or on the sacredness of Sunday Mass – if someone has to miss it, it’s no biggie to them.
However, not every thirty-something who has become aware of the spiritual vacuum in their lives re-embraces Catholicism. Joe Rehill, a thirty-year-old software writer, insists he doesn’t want to be hidebound by the rigours of organized religion. Unless it’s an exotic, glamorous one. Like Buddhism, for example. There’s been a proliferation of alternative spirituality, especially in recent years. A quick survey of my friends and acquaintances indicated we have tried, variously: meditation, I-Ching, Ogham sticks, crystals, reiki, white magic spells, rebirthing, chakra unblocking and Feng Shui. ‘And why not?’ a woman who wished to remain anonymous said of Feng Shui. ‘The idea that changing the layout of your flat will bring good things into your life is no less extraordinary than accepting a round wafer from a man in an embroidered white frock and expecting good things to happen.’
But the one factor that seems to mark all thirty-something approaches to spirituality is the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude. We insist on utilitarianism – it has to enhance our lives in some manner and make us feel better. This is a wild reversal of how it used to be, when people loyally obeyed the dictates of the Church, no matter how unpleasant the consequences.
And indeed, I’ve discovered that even though thirty-year-olds are likely to have some interest in spirituality, it’s certainly not the first port of call in the pursuit of happiness. Winning the lotto is still the favoured route to a blissful existence. We’re also very exercised about our jobs, houses and house prices. As Aiden Baker, a thirty-one-year-old sales rep says, ‘I haven’t time to go to Mass on Sunday because I’ve to go and worship at the temple of DIY. Homebase is the new God.’ He was only half joking.
But to paraphrase the Jesuit spiritual teacher Anthony de Mello, ‘In a hypothetical situation, if I could promise you perfect happiness, would you take it? It would mean giving up everything – your job, your car, your house, all your possessions, you’d be living on the street, but you’d be blissfully, joyously content. How about it?’ Anthony de Mello suspected that no one would want to take him up on it. And when I put it to the people I interviewed, they said, ‘Give up everything? Even my house?’ I pointed out that they’d be sublimely happy, that they wouldn’t care that they possessed nothing, but they all looked uncomfortable and eventually confessed they’d rather stay as they were.
Admittedly I’m writing from an urban situation and popular opinion has it that people are more devout in rural Ireland. But it seems that in the pursuit of happiness, though spirituality matters to a lot of thirty-year-olds – even if it only plays a walk-on part in their lives – at the end of the day, their money is riding on other things.
First publis
hed in the Sunday Times, October 1999.
THAT’S ME AWAY!
Now and again I take time off from writing and go on holiday.
Beside the Seaside
Lahinch, County Clare – the scene of my summer holidays every year in the sixties and seventies. The run-up to it featured: a) unbearable anticipation, and b) running battles with my mother as she spent the week before departure washing, ironing and packing clothes and as fast as she was ironing them I was wearing them. Which isn’t on. Everyone knows you can’t wear your shiny, good holiday clothes until the whistle is blown to officially launch the holiday.
Then the appointed Saturday morning would roll around and we’d be off. A Morris Minor with five children, two adults and one roof-rack. Mam attired – no matter how fine the weather – in a red, plastic raincoat to guard her travelling rig-out from puke-stains (other people’s, not her own).
Nowadays, people drive from Cork to Clare in a couple of hours, but back then journeys took longer. These were pre-radio, pre-tapedeck days and we had to make our own entertainment. No bother to us! The singing usually commenced before we were out of the drive – ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’, ‘Two Little Boys’ and ‘The Men Behind the Wire’. Not knowing the words or the tune was luckily never regarded as any impediment to taking the floor.
Punctuating the singing were the usual questions: ‘Are we there yet?’ ‘How long more?’ ‘Can I make my wees?’ ‘Can I make my wees again?’ ‘Would I be in trouble if I got sick on my clean dress?’
Once we were the far side of Limerick, excitement burgeoned, and built as the towns swept past – Clarecastle, Ennis, Inagh, until we reached the metropolis of Ennistymon. By then we’d be nearly uncontainable, leaning into the front seats to urge the car forward. Out past the church, up the road, down into a little dip, up again to the saddle factory, over the brow of the hill, and suddenly there it was – the Atlantic, winking and twinkling magically, a blinding, dazzling expanse of silver diamonds.
We’d park at the prom, and open the car door to be hit by the intoxicating, powerful smell of clean, salty air, our namby-pamby city lungs astonished by its freshness and purity. Then down the worn stone steps to the unfeasibly vast sweep of flat, clean, wheat-gold sand.
There was never a rainy day during any of those holidays, or so it seems. In my mind’s eye the sun was always splitting the stones and the sky was an intense blue with cotton-wool-ball clouds. The only concession I’ll make to any kind of less-than-perfect weather was that sometimes there was a stiff breeze, causing the khaki-green marram grass to bend and sway. The sea was a powerful blue and green animal, thundering in, each wave trying to be bigger than the last, then sucking back out again. The white foam creating ever-changing lacy patterns, which stretched and expanded, got washed away, only to reappear in a different form with the next wave.
Into the togs immediately. The year I was six I’d outgrown my yellow, ruched-cotton togs, so was decked out in a homemade, lime-green, towelling bikini. I thought I was it.
The daily drill was that Mam sat on the Foxford rug, undressing, drying and dressing again a conveyor-belt of children, while everyone else paddled, jumped waves, swam, built sandcastles, dug moats, found sticks of driftwood and wrote – as you do – insulting messages to each other in the sand, fished tiddlers out of rock pools into nylon nets (and then, not really knowing what to do with them, just spilled them back in again).
Dad taught me to swim the year of the green bikini. Persuading me to float on my back, to put my head back into the muffled, bubbly silence, to let the cold water fill my ears, to bob and shunt on the swell and retreat of the waves.
After every swim, to get warm again, we all had a race along the strand in our bare feet – beaches littered with broken glass or rusty cans were still far away in our future.
Then into O’Connors to spend our meagre holiday money, temptation at every turn. The ceiling was festooned with buckets, shovels, beachballs, rubber-rings and fishing nets in fluorescent pink and yellow, and the shelves were arrayed with a dazzling choice of Summer Specials. (Jinty, as I remember, was my reading matter of choice until I graduated to Jackie.)
But it was cones I couldn’t resist – the hum of the machine, the louder rattle as Mr O’Connor lowered the throttle, the sight of the thick luminescent-white rope of ice-cream squeezing from the nozzle and winding around and around itself on the cone, pinnacling with a little kiss-curl where it broke away from the machine. The moment before I began to eat was almost a mystic one as I absorbed the smell of the wafer, the smooth perfect ripples of pristine ice-cream. And I prayed that one day, when I was big, I’d be able to afford a 99 and raspberry syrup.
Unlike the fleshpot of Kilkee further along the coast, Lahinch didn’t have much in the way of what my father called ‘merries’ (he meant amusements). There was a ‘big’ wheel – even to my starstruck, credulous eyes I could see that it was fairly small – and a couple of weary-looking bumper cars that held no interest for me until my teens (when overnight, heat and the smell of grease and cordite suddenly seemed sexy).
Mostly, funds didn’t run to ‘merries’. But the year the ghost train appeared on the site of the defunct chair o’planes, I realized I’d be going without a cone or two. I was mad about things I’d read about in Enid Blyton books like mazes, haunted houses and, most of all, ghost trains. Too nervous to go on my own, I persuaded Mam to come with me.
Oddly enough, we were the only takers. I couldn’t understand why. Surely anyone with an ounce of sense would be spending all their holiday money on it? Into a little cart yoke we sat, and the minute the boy pulled the lever to move us forward I saw him breaking into a run. We disappeared through one of the plastic-ribbon room-divider things they have in chippers. After a few seconds of meandering around in darkness something began to tickle me and my heart nearly stopped with fright. Then I felt the ghostly hands move over to my mother to tickle her also. ‘Stop that this minute,’ she ordered and gave something a resounding slap. ‘Ouch. Sorry, missus,’ the ghost said contritely, in a Clare accent. The rest of the ride passed with absolutely nothing happening. We trundled around the area of an average sitting-room in the pitch black with not even the sound of an unearthly cackle to put the fear of God in me. When we got out we saw the boy who operated it, sitting down, nursing his eye. Someone appeared to have given him a puck. And when we came back the next year the ghost train was gone.
First published in the Irish Independent, September 1998.
The Lucky Suitcase
Holidays from Hell? Don’t talk to me. A couple of years ago, Himself and myself went on a last-minute thing to Greece. We hadn’t a penny so we signed up for one of those cheapo jobs, where you don’t know where you’re going to be staying until you get there. ‘What do we care if it’s a kip?’ we laughed to each other, clinking celebratory start-of-holiday glasses. ‘So long as it’s sunny, won’t we be grand?’
The sting in the tail was the compulsory insurance which almost doubled the cost of the holiday and wiped out most of our spending money, but we took it on the chin.
We landed in glorious, afternoon heat and in jaunty, holiday mode proceeded to the carousel to reclaim our bags. Spirits were high as we waited. And waited. And waited… Spirits weren’t so high then, especially not ours, as it became clear that everyone else from our flight was on the bus, and Himself’s bag hadn’t yet appeared on the carousel.
Far from being helpful, Warren, our cheeky cockney chappie rep, was in a panic because there were rumblings of a mutiny from our fellow-travellers. They were officially on their holidays, and were none too happy about sitting in a hot, stuffy bus waiting for someone else’s bag when there was retsina to be drunk. Warren abandoned us to go and soothe them by standing at the front of the bus and telling patronizing stories about the locals and their produce. (‘They call it wine, but I say it’ll come in very handy if the bus ever runs out of petrol! Hahaha!’)
Meanwhile, we had to go to a small, dark, st
ifling office, with constantly ringing phones, where sweating moustachioed officials in military-type uniforms shouted at each other in a foreign language I can only assume was Greek. They kept coming in, shouting, picking up a phone, shouting, sweating, shouting, glaring at us, shouting, leaving. Then coming back for a quick shout. For some reason it put me in mind of Midnight Express. The only attention we got was when they relieved us of our passports. Oddly enough, this did nothing to reassure me.
A long time later, after they’d taken the scantiest of details and had done nothing to convince us we’d ever see the bag again, we were free to go. We stood on the steps, gulping in clean, free air, our elation screeching to an abrupt halt when we saw the sea of furious faces on the bus glaring out the windows at us. Sheepish and apologetic, we clambered aboard and off we went.
Every time the bus stopped outside a hotel, I was all agog, wondering if this was the beautiful be-swimming-pooled palace where I would spend my holiday. It never was.
But things were looking good when our names were called. Though there was no sign of a pool, we were led to brilliant white pristine modern apartments – and past them… Eventually, the rep stopped at something that can only be described as an outhouse. It was dark, dingy and depressing, and the bathroom looked as if a colony of spiders lived there. ‘Home sweet home, mate,’ Warren guffawed, then legged it.
A quick scout round the village showed that the beach was a twenty-five-minute walk and that there were no restaurants other than a wealth of chip-butty outlets, run by formidable Yorkshire women. When I tentatively enquired if I might have some traditional Greek food, I was told, ‘Eee, luv, no call for it ’ere. Folk won’t eat it.’