Let me begin like a churl. The Irish language (Gaeilge) is far from the beautiful, lyrical, poetic encoding of deep emotions and profound contemplation that some non-Irish speakers might like to believe. It’s a right bastard of a tongue to get your mind around if, like me, you’re a native English speaker.
However, once you’ve even the slightest inkling of what’s achievable with the grammar, the structure, the dialects, the aliveness of Gaeilge, even a sub-surface scratch of an inkling, the language is capable of rearranging the way you look at people, things, relationships, welcomes and goodbyes.
Before we go on, I have an admission. My first attempt at learning the language was back in the late 1980s when I lived in a suburb of Dublin for a few months. This is a long and sad story of lost love and family secrets, which I won’t tell here despite my deep joy in tangential storytelling.
Long story short though. Back then I hung around with students and ex-students from University College and Trinity. Intelligent, curious people, only two of whom spoke Irish. That pair were from Donegal.
Irish was a curiosity at best or more commonly it was more a lament of ‘Man, I hated it at school’ a keening for what was then considered to be the lost hours of youth haunted by the ghost of Peig: A Scéal Féin, “Peig: Her Own Story.
My latest effort to educate myself in Irish began after the debacle that is Brexit had begun to cast its foul shadow over us Brits because of the idiocy of us English and Welsh. Of course, I started with DuoLingo.
A caveat: if you really do feel that you need to know phrases of such utility as:
“D’ith mo thíogair an t-úll ar lá scamallach ach grianmhar i gCluain Aodha le mo dheirfiúr Pádraig”, which roughly translates to, ‘My tiger ate the apple on a cloudy but sunny day in Clonee with my sister Patrick’, then I take it all back, DuoLingo is for you.
Máiréad “Peig” Sayers – her words evoked tears. We’ll talk about Peig in later installments.
Soon I realised there are dual Irish/English language books, children’s books! Books that made far more sense than the A.I. infested Eire of DuoLingo’s hallucinating bullshit. Books available to me.
Dual language books are great for the sedentary learner. Also better than Duolingo or Rosetta stone are the growing arsenal of podcasts so rich and compelling that you might want to listen even if you’re just interested in languages.
Less specifically, I found that podcasts by people who speak Gaeilge to each other on a regular basis helped immensely with pronunciation. Pronunciation that differs between the three main dialects, Connacht (Cúige Chonnacht), Munster (Cúige Mumhan) and Ulster (Cúige Uladh). One of which you’re going to have to choose from if you don’t want to lose your mind and give up within minutes.
Obviously, I know but I took and still take a huge joy in finding my way from one end of the word ‘Comhghairdeachas’ to the other before I gave myself any Congratulations.
Next time in Part 2: I deal with the calumny, “No one speaks Irish anyway, what’s the point in learning it”. I also look at my encounters gender and I encounter the seemingly terrifying síneadh fada.
Before I begin, there’s one thing that I have learnt about myself from this whole thing – and it also explained something to my wife about me. I tell long, tortuous stories where the story itself is less important than the ending.
I always have, tá brón orm faoi sin (I’m sorry about this). Apparently this is an Irish take on storytelling, or so a chap in a pub in a place called Fethard-on-Sea in County Wexford told me before skinning me at pool.
So, please bear with me. I was born in the UK to English parents, one of whom was called ‘Murphy’. Brexit happened, much against my wishes. I loved travelling around Europe as if I actually belonged there. So, I started looking at the mythology-drenched Murphy side of the family.
This has been largely a lone hunt. My parents are dead. My grandfather and grandmothers on my mother’s (Irish) side are dead. My aunts are now dead. It was like the end of Hamlet there in terms of mortality. So, no oral history aside from one.
All families have their myth makers, and Aunt (Patricia) was ours. Patsy was a hardcore ‘Roman’ Catholic who lived with her longtime companion, Charlotte. Patsy attended Mass three times a week. She smoked copious fags and sank gallons of scotch whisky. So, I started with the dear lady.
Over the phone what she told me about our heritage was explosive, stunning and changed my entire perception of my bloodline. It was deeply inserted into the history of the proclamation of the Irish Republic (Poblacht na hÉireann) and the 1916 Easter Rising in particular.
She told me we were related to Count Joseph Mary Plunkett. A Count! Like Dracula or Fosco or Arthur Strong. Nope, none of that nonsense, he was a Papal Count no less. We were important.
I wasn’t to know that Patsy was aggrandising our family history – although I should really have guessed. So, off I went down a false trail for my Irish nationality citizenship… for a year.
Patsy was wrong. Very wrong. Our Plunkett didn’t sign the proclamation on the steps of the Dublin General Post Office. He was probably doing his other job around that time.
We are indeed related to the Plunketts. However, the branch who I shared DNA with was a coal merchant from one of the less salubrious parts of Dublin. Not only that, it was a part of Dublin that held both a major gaol and a British army barracks.
Even worse from the perspective of my grand and glorious Irish heritage was that his daughter – my granny – had left Ireland with a British soldier. She’d only married him.
The history of Ireland has a special place for British soldiers who were in Dublin around 1920, but more of that later. Suffice to say that special place was not in heaven.
Now, ever let it be said that a year researching something entirely based on a mostly drunk aunty’s ramblings can’t be useful though.
I discovered that many of the records that I would have expected to find; births, marriages, deaths, basic stuff, were not available via a central office. Not even the many pay-for-your ancestral records sites had all the records. Why?
Well, the Public Records Office in Dublin was destroyed by fire in 1922, during the Irish Civil War. So, this meant finding alternative routes. It was time to hunt down the Parish registers. At this point in the story, everything becomes a laborious and labyrinthine series of hunts and phone calls. I won’t bore you here.
I managed to discover my coal merchant background and also about my Granny Murphy née Plunkett. It was time to consult the English records and to follow her life in, as it turned out, Camberwell in London.
What I learnt was that my ‘dear old gran’ had died at the age of 35 in 1940. Her death was caused by something terrible called mitral stenosis and atrial fibrillation. She had only two children, my mother Teresa and another aunt, my beloved and departed Aunt Grace.
It was time to head back to Irish records. Along the way, well the side ways (as it were), it became clear to me that the Irish language (Gaeilge) was fascinating. It called to me. Not for anything particularly mystical. No, it’s fascinating to a curious mind brought up in English. The two languages bear next to no similarities to each other. It was when I discovered that there are different numbering systems for ‘things’ and for people.
I had to find out more. That’s what this series is about. Please be warned though, I don’t have nice things to say about Duolingo. I do have very good things to say about the Irish national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) and its Gaeilge offshoot TG4.
Occasionally, a young, green, wet-behind-the-axons, an eager junior nerve ending is thrown into the fight, only to be made cynical and bitter the veteran funiculi in its weary fascicle.
Real insomnia is a relationship wrecker, it’s a straight road to madness, it’s a hallucinogen, it’s a soul sapper. So, where’s the fun side?
I sleep about two hours a night from 4am until 6am if I’m lucky. On a Saturday or Sunday I nap from 1pm until 5pm just to get some sleep. It’s been this way for a year now. I’ve tried no end of helpful suggestions from lovely people with my best interests in their hearts.
These pieces of advice have included and still include again and again: heavy drinking, mindfulness, more exercise, dog walking, meditation, cannabis infused butter, smoking good quality weed, giving up smoking, giving up drinking, audiobooks, blind folds, magic bean filled “hot boots”.
I have to report that every single one bar one of those cures proved to be, at best, of short term effect (booze!) or utter nonsense. The efficacious pair resulted in day-destroying hangovers. The outlier, the one that makes me feel less like beating my head on a rock just for some eternal rest, well I wasn’t expecting it. We’ll get to it soon.
Also thrown into the bargain were people saying thoughtful and encouraging such gems as:
“I’d love to have all those extra hours” “You must get loads done” “Sleep’s just wasted hours anyway” “Have you tried crystals?”
When you have next to zero sleep on a regular basis, you can’t concentrate on anything, let alone anything productive. Seeing 03:58am again and again and again, when you’re not on the Night Bus, or beneath the Eiffel Tower, or in the air looking down on Sydney, Australia.
Seeing 03:58am without being anywhere interesting except your own head is not a capital B, capital T Bad Thing. It is a shattering, continuing reminder that you’re alone, in the dark at the mercy of yourself.
What’s yours?
My insomnia derives its hellish existence from a mixture of physical pain and mental shenanigans.
The former is due to a combination of two very waring physical changes that occurred decades apart. Also involved, well maybe, is a strange waterborne infection I picked up as a very small boy paddling in a shallow pool in a public park in Southampton, a town I took against forever after, but I digress. Insomnia does that to you.
The second cause is neuropathy, better known to fans of horror films more than medical dramas as ‘nerve damage’ and then ‘massive nerve damage. My neuropathy is due to my Type 2 Diabetes, which was diagnosed at least two years too late to save me from that massive nerve damage (I hyperbolise because that’s what needed at times like these).
My diabetes is now well under control, in fact I’m now technically only pre-diabetic. However, the massive nerve damage is here to stay.
Look I’ll come clean. It’s not just the diabetes, it’s probably also 40 years of almost constant booze taking (I had a year off in 1986 due to pissing blood… turns out that was a kidney stone).
I’d imagine (I’ve been told by people who know) that 40 years of heavy, heavy smoking might have something to do with it. I’m talking French Gitanes, American Marlboro Reds, Sobranie Black Russians, roll-ups, butt rescues and more disgustingly, morbidly, suicidally pleasurable inhalations plus Thunderbird wine, paddy whiskey and red lemonade, and Guinness, and you get the idea. The ’80s were a blast.
Neuropathetique
My particular form of neuropathy uses my feet as its natural battleground. It wages and has waged an uncivil, guerrilla war on my small blood vessels, the ones that supply life to my nerve endings. That’s where it’s not destroyed those nerve endings totally, it has reduced them to demented, uncommunicative body weeds.
They fire off as and when they feel like it with absolutely no deference to what is actually required of them.
Some nights my right foot is not only on fire, it is also – and at random frequencies both in time and in size – shoot tiny electrical shots up or down or in or apparently outside my leg.
On other nights my left foot will feel like it’s not only soaking wet, but it’s also freezing cold.
Drift off to sleep and out of the pedal-undergrowth emerge the remnants of a once proud and highly trained set of nerve endings. I imagine them a rag-tag squad of shell-shocked, bewildered and hate filled veterans with stained and torn epineurium.
Occasionally, a young, green, wet-behind-the-axon, eager junior nerve-ending is thrown into the fight, only to be made cynical and bitter by the veteran funiculi in their weary fascicle.
Madness, they call it Madness
As drowsiness gives way to full, deep, enriching, nuturing, deathly beautiful sleep: the assault of nerve-shredded madness starts with a sniper in the distant upland of the big toe. And then: Boom! Zing! Peeee-owww! Fzzzzzt!!! Half a minute of tiny, teeny, deeply penetrative, icy, fiery torture begins.
It’s started to attack my spine somehow. Probably some kind of bastardly psychosomatic sympathetic mind/body fuckery.
The mental or psychologic aspects of my insomnia are baseborn psychopaths. It’s self-sabotage on a Charge of the Light Brigade scale. My own brain has some exquisitely unpleasant tricks, some real mindbending nastiness. My least favourite came slowly but is now an ever-present. It’s a deep anxiety, and consequent adrenaline flood, as the time clicks past 7pm and the night begins to come in. Night means insomnia and loneliness as all my household compadres go to bed, and are soon asleep.
Night means trying to read, trying to watch or listen to or feel anything makes the time pass, that relaxes but doesn’t stimulate brain or body. Stimulation is fatal to sleep. It spooks it so that sleep runs for cover, hiding itself. It sends out its with the charlatan of ‘napping’ or the confidence trickster of the drowse.
Night means stuffing your head into a pillow on the couch downstairs to stifle the occasional and involuntary sobs of frustration and loneliness so they don’t wake anybody else in the house. Occasionally there I hear cries of pain coming out of me.
As for Sleep Cycles and Circadian Rhythms and those marvellous events that are legends and epic poems spoken only in whispers by me people, by which I mean me because, as all my Insomniac comrades know: I am the only one in my timezone who is awake. I have never felt so lonely and meaningless.
Fun! Look away now
Earlier in this piece I mentioned fun. By this I mean that I have discovered something new. This he to help me through the dead, empty hours between 02:00 and 05:45 when my wife and dog wake up.
In 1977 in rural Hampshire I discovered Punk rock music, cheap cider, fags stolen from my mum. I was kissed with tongues by a girl called Helen. I played a lot of cricket but my commitment began to wane into a useless past. All pasts are insignificant to teenagers, and rightly so.
That’s context you see, it’s important for the creation of bathos, and what’s coming next is bathetic to say the least.
Knocked it out of the park
About six years ago I fell for baseball, a sport I had never thought before about in my English/Australian lives. Why? It started with annoyance at myself of course.
I was laying in the darkness hoping for either death or breakfast. YouTube was randomising and I heard what sounded like code. I drifted off to sleep and back again, the game was still going on. This happened a few times and made the code even more enticingly impenetrable, so much so that I found myself watching old clips of the Metsies to help me sleep.
This was the code I heard (or close to it) before I drifted off.
“Conforto hits into 1-4-3 double play but advances Nimmo to third or a possible suicide squeeze. Here comes the Polar Bear to the plate. Pete’s is currently slashing 315.300.399 so we can expect a bomb.”
What in the living hell (that I was in) could this possibly mean? Bombs? Suicide? Polar Bears? I was ignorant and therefore I had to decipher all it. I don’t know why either: nerdery?
The sound of a baseball crowd on a drowsy July afternoon is my background white noise now. Commentary, smooth, biased, gentle bleeds in and out as I drift around sleep.
I fell specifically for a ‘franchise’ called the New York Mets. Perennially mid-table, a bit mediocre just like me.
Formed in 1962, so around my age, I chose The Mets because because I only knew that about them. I’ve visited New York. I liked it, I still like it. Unlike LA or Atlanta or any of the other places in the States I also visited but have never taken too.
I like it even more now that Mr Mamdani is to be mayor.
The Mets are famously, and aside from a few very exceptional years, not really very good. They show great promise… again and again and again. Millions of dollars available to the Mets and they’re just mediocre. It took me five seasons before I realised this. I love them for it.
As the legendary New York journalist, Jimmy Breslin, once wrote: “You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn’t manoeuvre himself to lunch with the boss enough.
Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?: The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year
It could have been kites
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting baseball as a panacea for insomnia. Certainly not. I struck lucky finding a way to relax, if not to sleep, by learning an entirely new thing with your eyes closed and your muscles relaxing. It distracts from the electric shocks, the dread and fear, the sobbing and self-doubt that insomnia brings.
My empty soul, my hypercritical mind assure me everything will go wrong. I’ll go wrong. My inner voice seemed to be that of a whiney teenager.
I’m 60+ years old. Until a few weeks ago I was a KP (Kitchen Porter) and ‘potwash’ – the lowest form of life in the professional kitchen. It was great. I worked with some lovely people in some heated moments. Now I have to complete my Masters degree, spend time with my wife, be a regular human being, a ‘civilian’. Being a potwash, a KP, saved me from a sticky end.
I’ve been a journalist, an editor, a TV captioner. I had been a book editor in London and a managing editor in Australia. I had owned and run a bakery. Meeting old friends and colleagues as I occasionally did by phone or email, has been ‘challenging’ to say the least.
My bakery in ‘Yorkshire’s food capital’ had closed for good a few years before and I was shorn of all confidence. I was terrified about going into work with a group of top-of-their-game professionals. I was scared even of putting my foot out of my front door. I was scared of other people. In my late 50s. Scared of people. My grandfather Murphy would have snorted in derision.
Difficult for a frail male ego that is. Mine that is.
I’ve still not baked a loaf of bread or made a scone or a flan or a quiche or a pie that I’m proud of or feel anything for since the place closed down. My motherdoughs are in the fridge with a thick black ethanol liquor on their surfaces. I could bring them back to life. It could bring me back to life.
It’s just washing pots
So anyway, I began my life as what the French call a ‘Plongeur’ on a hot, humid night in July. I was in my late fifties, fresh from a crashing failure, overweight, skint and taking no joy in anything.
Here’s what went through my head on my first day.
I know I’ll drop those dishes and glasses, smash them, not be fast enough, not be fit enough. I know I’ll hold the team up on one of the busiest nights of the year. I am old and slow and overweight. I just happen to know some really good people who are short-staffed.
I’m worried about what to wear: it’s pot wash. It’s just washing pots. I’m worried about what to say: no one will see me. It’s just washing pots. I’m worried about fucking up: it’s just washing plates and pots and glasses. I’m worried about everything: I’ve worked in kitchens for years. It’s just washing pots.
I had a business, it failed. The death of my bakery left me in a lot of debt. It left me with no energy and also with the certain realisation that it was my fault entirely.
Don’t believe my hype
I made good bread. Good pastries. I know I did. I think I did. I probably didn’t. I probably made horrible food.
“Chase your dream. Open that bakery. You only live once! It’s your passion!” said my friends. Said other chefs and professionals. I fell in love with the ‘You got this’ vibe.
But, but, but! Looking back, I was like the people I saw on TV saying, “Mum told me I was a great cook so I opened a restaurant”. The people who sane people yell, “Noooooo, don’t!” at the TV about.
“You fucking idiot”, my grandfather Murphy would have said.
First night jitters
My first night was a busy one, it was university graduation day for a city with two universities. Proud families with brilliant children looking into bright futures, out of their special meals. Rites of passage. Important moments in life. I don’t want to let anybody down.
As I walked in to work for the first time, I bullied myself in my lately unsupportive manner. My empty soul, my hypercritical mind assure me everything will go wrong. I’ll go wrong. My inner voice seemed to be that of a whiney teenager.
So, of course I didn’t want to go in. I was sick with foreboding. I’m a 55 year old crumb. It’s just a pot wash job.
I will hide in my house, away from my wife, away from the work, the people. Let the furies go elsewhere. Maybe I could die here tonight if I wished hard enough? I am wishing hard enough.
But I’ve made an agreement. Those pots and plates and glasses need washing. The good, gracious people at my favourite restaurant where I used to eat when I had money, where I would take my wife, those good, gracious people are expecting me to turn up, do a shift, wash some crockery and cutlery, and go home. After the work is done. I’ll walk home through the night to my wife and my dog and my home and I’ll hide until tomorrow night.
I breathed slowly in and out. I looked up at the city-blighted night sky. I fought back tears. I opened the door to work.
I was living in Sydney, Australia the day that my daughter died of a combination of pneumonia, a badly administered anaesthetic following dentistry work and her cerebral palsy. She died in the bedroom next to mine. I discovered her in the morning.
She died in July 2005. Twenty years ago. She was called Zuzu and she had a form of cerebral palsy called holoprosencephaly. It’s a rare and extreme version of CP. Zuzu was fed by tube. She was unable to sit up or speak. She couldn’t crawl or do anything really other than be happy unless people were being angry. She was very, very happy.
“Zuzu’s condition was extreme wasn’t it Tim? That must have been very hard for you…”
We loved her very much indeed. Once other people had got used to her drooling constantly, and her tube button in her stomach, and the fact that her life was going to be a short one, they grew to love her very much too. People are scared of all of those things and more with disabled people.
Lots of things about disabled children – especially kids with such extreme and obvious disabilities – make people very uncomfortable.
Tim and his daughter at Taronga Zoo in Sydney.
I had separated from her mother a year before Zu died. But we were on good terms. I would look after Zu for two weeks each month, and her mother would care for her for the other two weeks. There was some flexibility in that schedule. The night Zuzu died, my ex-wife was over at my place, we chatted. It felt a bit like we could have patched things up. We didn’t.
I am writing this now because time has passed. I have moved back to the UK, I have a new partner who I love. My ex-wife is still in Sydney with her new partner. She and I Skyped this morning.
“I bet it was exhausting too, wasn’t it, Tim?”
This forced me back in time to a police station in Balmain. To two rooms in that police station: I was in one with my interrogator. My ex-wife was in another with her interrogator. This was four days after my flat had been turned into a crime scene, which always happens in the case of a sudden death at home, I had been told.
My officer, a woman in her late 20s. I forget her name. We hadn’t been arrested but questions had to be asked. Her first question was:
The room was on the ground floor of the police station in Balmain. I was on one side of the desk, I think it had a green formica-like surface. There was a window, maybe a metre square on my left.
I asked the policewoman to repeat the question because I honestly didn’t believe what she was trying to get at. Everybody knew I loved Zuzu. But bringing her up had been hard, she was right. Other kids were running around, walking, talking, saying that they loved their daddy and mummy way before the age of 7. Other kids didn’t make people haul their kids away in some irrational fear that CP might be catching. Other kids weren’t fed by a tube in the stomach.
She repeated the question and I replied, “Yes, very hard sometimes.”
She left the room to get me a cup of coffee and some tissue paper and left me to think…
