A Funeral in Lockdown

My Mother-in-Law passed away recently. She was a lovely woman but had been sick for a long time. So long in fact, that I have no memory of her being healthy. I met her first thirteen years ago and she was frail then. Parkinsons and several other diseases wrecked her body and she spent the last two weeks of her life unconscious in hospital after a stroke and my wife spent almost every night with her.

Needless to say, when the passing finally came, my wife’s family were exhausted and full of the emotional conflict that arises in these situations. Part relief, part grief and mostly tiredness.

It happened on a Friday night and my wife’s family gathered the next day to arrange the funeral. They had shared the strain of looking after their Mother in those last few weeks and it showed on their faces and in their thoughts. Somebody suggested a slide show at the funeral, another suggested that the congregation should be invited one by one to come up and give voice to the memories. It was then that my wife pointed out her Mother was a devout Catholic and at the very least she would want a Catholic funeral. Nobody saw a problem with this. Surely the local church would be amenable to them changing the entire service to suit their needs.

It became clear to me at this point that I was in a room of Atheists and Protestants (my own Mother would have said they were one and the same). I stepped forward at this point and offered myself as the representative of the Holy Church of Rome. I spent the first 22 years of my life going to Mass, so I could still remember the basic rules.

I didn’t let on that I had stopped believing in God in my twenties, around the time that I realised that there was very little evidence that God believed in me. My attendance rate at Mass had diminished ever since. But I’ve still gone along at Christmas, Easter, Weddings and Funerals and knew that the words hadn’t changed much in the interim.  

And while I no longer believe in God, I still have respect for the Church. I saw how they helped when my parents died, how the Church provided structure and support. I was married in a Catholic Church and it provided a foundation to the day and some mighty fine hymns.

So, I set about choosing the readings and prayers of the Faithful. I arranged to meet the Priest and to become the family’s point of contact for all things Churchy.

We adjourned at that point to the living room and tucked into a bottle of whiskey to toast the dearly departed. The plan was that we would all drive down to the Coromandel coast the following day, to the seaside community where my Parents in Law had retired. We came home and my wife went to bed to try and get her first decent night’s sleep in a week. I tucked into a six-pack while researching appropriate readings from the Letters of St Paul.

The first thing that struck me was his diligence. He kept writing to the Romans, Corinthians, etc with no evidence that any of them ever wrote back. He never starts his letters with “I refer to your letter of the 4^th inst”. The other thing that struck me was the number of readings that dealt with violence and misogyny. I realised from our Saturday discussion that I was dealing with a congregation that used secular funerals as their point of reference. They were used to Joni Mitchell's lyrics and not the rantings of a wandering disciple from the first century.

I was on my fifth beer when my wife’s phone rang. I ignored it. She was deep into a well-deserved sleep and I didn’t want to disturb her. Then my phone rang and I realised it must be important. It was my brother-in-law telling me that Auckland was just about to go into one week of Lockdown. The road South was due to close at 6am the following morning, which meant that if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be stuck in Auckland and unable to make the funeral.

I immediately woke my wife who was bounding for the car before I could stop her. I reminded her that we had a sleeping child upstairs and that both of us had drunk more than we should if we were to take command of a heavy vehicle. We compromised on going to bed and rising at 4am to get through before the check-points were installed.

New Zealand has largely escaped the trials and tribulations of Covid. We had one serious lockdown last March and April, but otherwise, it has been life as normal here. But when something happens the country takes it seriously. While we had escaped Auckland before the shutters came down, others who had intended to come to the funeral weren’t so lucky. That included the Priest who initially was supposed to take the service. My first job on the day we arrived on the coast was to source a new celebrant and venue. While we were away from the hotspot of Auckland, the rest of the country was in level two which meant a maximum of 100 at the funeral. It also required two-meter distancing between groups in the congregation. A quick Maths calculation suggested that this will limit the funeral to about 25 if we used the small church in the township my in-laws lived in.

Luckily another Church in the neighbouring town was found and the Funeral Mass went off without a hitch. We even rigged about a laptop and set up a Zoom call for all those overseas who couldn’t make it.

My Mother in Law would have liked it, I think. And my Mother would have been proud of me too. All that Mass going as a child had finally paid off.

Social Networking

2020 has now passed. I guess a lot of people did things they would never have dreamt of doing in that year. Homeschooling, drinking wine at midday on a workday, googling ‘how to turn the microphone on for Zoom’, wearing masks, bumping elbows rather than shaking hands.

I’m lucky enough to live in the western country with the best record for managing Covid. But the pandemic has coughed over the land of the long white cloud too. We went into lockdown in March at the same time as I had been given what turned out to be a false cancer diagnosis. I was put into the high-risk category and banished to the garage. I fashioned a work station in the corner and prepared to face the world for the foreseeable future from that lonely space on an Auckland suburban street.

One morning back in March, in that bubble of boredom and isolation, I did something I swore I’d never do. I signed up for Facebook and Twitter.

I’d always felt that I was initially too old for Facebook and then too young. When it emerged in the early naughties, I was already in my mid-thirties and still obsessed with socialising in that old fashioned way of meeting people face to face. Facebook was used by teenagers locked in their bedrooms and raging with hormones and desperation to connect to the wider world.

Somewhere along the way, Facebook became uncool for this generation. Tik Tok and Snapchat better suited their short attention spans and when they discovered that their grannies had just befriended them and you risked your inheritance if you continued to post pictures of drunken orgies on a channel shared by your relatives.

Around this time, laptops and Ipads dropped in price and they became a common Christmas present for the over sixties, so they could email their kids who had emigrated to Australia. Email was the entry drug but Facebook became the crack cocaine for the older generation. Once they realised they could trace that girl they used to fancy in school fifty years ago, they were hooked.

Clever old Facebook then filled their timeline with racist and conspiratorially rubbish and we ended up with Trump and Brexit. But that’s a story for another day.

When this pivot to an older audience happened, I thought I was too young and hip to be on a crinkly’s platform. Facebook had become uncool but I found that as well as being a forum for gossip and racism, it was also the practical place on the internet for updates and information. I’m a keen amateur actor and wanted to know about upcoming plays. Groups don’t bother updating their website anymore. They just have a link saying “Check out our Facebook page for details”.

FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, is another term I only became familiar within 2020. Stuck in that garage in March, I clung to the possibility of the world reopening and feared that if I wasn’t on Facebook, I’d still there while the rest of the world partied.

There was also the added attraction of our local community Facebook page, which along with an annoyingly high number of cat pictures contains many hidden gems in local xenophobia and naked racism.

I came to Twitter for different reasons. When it launched, I was hesitant to sign up. I’m a master in coming up with a witty retort days after it was needed. Twitter seemed to require instant smart and clever responses. But over the years, I noticed that the mainstream media I was consuming had become simply a conduit to Twitter. Journalists no longer researched stories independently. They simply scrolled through Twitter and published the best of what they found there. This accelerated in the age of Trump when entire articles would be based on his Twitter rants.

I would read articles in the Guardian that would link to a Twitter account. I could look at it but not see the replies or reply myself. I knew this was Twitter trying to tease me in and eventually I succumbed.

So, how are things now in the bright new dawn of 2021?

This morning I deactivated my Facebook account. It turns out there a lot of other ways to find out what’s going on and even though I only “Friended” three groups, I was inundated with nonsense about what people I hardly knew were having for lunch. It was like peering into the diary of a five-year-old with similar grammar and spelling capabilities. These were ordinary people, living ordinary lives and I had no interest in them. The people I’m genuinely interested in, stay in touch with Whatsapp and email and other ways of direct communication. I had no desire to seek them out on Facebook. And I’m far too settled into domestic life to need to seek out ex-lovers or long forgotten schoolfriends.

Facebook is a social network, but I didn’t find it very friendly. My brief visits were peppered with hostility and anger. In the end, we drifted apart. But like all those relationships were you still have to share the house because you can’t afford to pay the mortgage on your own, Facebook will always be living in the back room. Deleting it completely is almost impossible.

Twitter on the other hand has become invaluable. I check it five or six times a day. It’s the quickest way of getting news and because I’ve followed smart and witty people, my timeline is filled with clever commentary and sharp-witted responses. Facebook is full of the awful detritus of daily life. Twitter is a window into the minds of people you like and are interested in.

There are downsides, the need to trawl through lots of chaff to find the wheat, the disappointment of following somebody who turns out to be crushingly boring and the risk of being called an anti-semite after making a badly structured joke. But if this blogging business doesn’t make me famous, there is always the chance that micro-blogging on Twitter will.

Kiwi Experience

 Twenty-five years ago, this week, I dipped my toe over the equator and set foot in New Zealand for the first time. I’d spent three years in Luxembourg and was still smarting from the end of a relationship that caused that city to be filled with ghosts. I planned to move back to Ireland after a long time abroad to start my life again. But I had a mate in Christchurch and he convinced me to come south first and sample life in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

I can still remember that first drive down the coast from Picton to Christchurch. The Pacific Ocean licking the coast on my left-hand side while the Southern Alps rose majestically in the distance. It started an itch that I scratched several times before I finally talked my wife into moving here.

Many people assume I moved here because I have a Kiwi wife, but the truth is that I was the one who was keener to move here when the opportunity arose.

I crashed on my mate’s couch for a few weeks on that first trip. Spent my first ever Christmas away from my Irish family and then in January 1996 set off on my odyssey around the South Island. My chosen mode of transport was Kiwi Experience, a company that has been dragging backpackers around this fine country for years. At thirty, I was probably the oldest person on the bus. Most of my fellow travellers had just finished Uni and were trying to discover themselves before entering the working world. In most cases Dad had given them five grand to help with this search. They were generally posh and entitled and full of tales about finding beaches in Thailand that no European had ever seen before.

The older ones were working class like me. Nurses and teachers in their twenties who had saved up enough for the trip of a lifetime. I tended to bond with them more.  But my best mate on that trip was a German guy called Andreas. He wore a wide brimmed hat that made me think of Puddleglum from the Narnia chronicles in one of those wonderful moments that triggers happy memories from your childhood.

We had a few raucous nights on our way around the South Island and he left a poignant message in my diary “to my only friend who thinks beer is more important than oxygen.” That pretty much sums up that trip.

It’s also the fifth anniversary of our move to New Zealand. I’m now married with a nine-year-old daughter and the world has changed a lot in the interim. I used to pass the queue of back packers on Queen St waiting for the Kiwi Experience bus to pick them up at 9am. Most of them were as young as that crowd back in 1996, bleary eyed from a night on the Auckland tiles, or from a long-haul flight from God knows where. In the old days, we all had battered back packs. These days it’s all designer suitcases and high-end casual clothing. But their eyes were still full of the wonder that comes from breaking the umbilical cord from your family and travelling to the other side of the world.

There are no queues for the Kiwi Experience bus now of course. No cruise ships filled with American tourists in the harbour. No mini buses outside posh hotels dropping off Chinese Tourists.

New Zealand closed it’s borders back in March when the pandemic started roaring. Kiwi citizens and business people willing to endure two weeks in quarantine are put up in posh hotels, which has at least has kept that sector of the hospitality industry going. Kiwi Experience is trying to attract locals to take a tour around their own country but I don’t see any of their buses around and the back packer hostels are boarded.

As I walked up Queen St this morning and passed the bus stop where the big green bus used to stop, my mind was drawn to all the young people who weren’t there. The ones who had reached the stage of their life that my companions and I had reached back in 1996. All those memories of broken relationships that needed to be banished. All the years of hard work that needed to be rewarded with a long-haul holiday. All those friendships that needed to be celebrated with a common odyssey. I booked my trip in September 1995, convinced that only a trip to the other side of the world would banish the ghosts that haunted my mind. Many others would have made a similar plan at the end of 2019. They may have a thirst for adventure, a quest for discovery or a need for escape. Whatever their motivation, they would have stumbled into a travel agency and booked the trip of a lifetime.

And then Covid arrived and left them stuck in the circumstance they were trying to escape. For most of us, Covid is an inconvenience that keeps us tied to the location we planned to stay in anyway. Most of us weren’t planning to go anywhere, so not being able to go anywhere is no big deal.

But at any time, there will be a small percentage of people who need to escape. Who are curious about the light that shines beyond these woods and need to go and see what makes it shine.

I was one of those people in 1995. Lost within the world I lived in and desperate for change. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I’d been told to hold to put my life on hold for a year back then. Apart from anything else, my contract in Luxembourg was about to expire and I might have found myself there for a year without a job.

I feel sorry for those young people now. The world is a theme park and they are restricted to just one ride.

 

My Life as a Socialist

 On the 17^th July 1975, Apollo CSM -111 docked with Soyuz 7K-TM somewhere up in space. This was also the day I flew for the first time. I know this date because I was glued to the TV watching the space docking and my parents had to drag me out of the house to get to the airport.

My brother, sister and I had been packed off to my aunt in Reading for a month in an attempt to give my mother a bit of peace and quiet. My aunt had moved to England in the fifties and “did well” in an unspecified way. She lived in a rambling four-storey Victorian house on the better side of town and while she had five kids of her own, she had plenty of room for the three of us and lots of love to spare too.

 I was ten and it was my first-time outside Ireland. I was a shy kid and a bit of a loner at the time. I said I was getting nose bleeds sleeping on the fourth floor (in reality, I just didn’t like climbing all those stairs) and my aunt fashioned a bed for me in the laundry on the ground level.

After that I became her favourite. She took me into town shopping and bought me my first watch. Her kids were all a little older and had passed into that teenage mentality of finding their mother to be the most embarrassing person on the planet.

I filled a maternal gap and my daily outings expanded beyond shopping to the other activities that caused my Aunt to leave the house each day. That introduced me to the source of her wealth. It turned out that in the previous twenty years she accumulated properties, mainly Victorian houses like her own but in the less salubrious parts of Reading. She turned them into individual flats with shared kitchens and bathrooms and specialised in providing accommodation to west of Ireland building labourers and people on council subsidised housing.

Tuesday was rent day and she brought me along for company. Forty years later, I can still remember climbing the steps into that first tenement hovel. The smell addressed me first, a sickening cocktail of cigarette smoke, stale beer and human sweat. Emaciated figures were slumped across stain sheeted beds and when I asked why they were still in bed at 11am, my aunt calmly explained that they were day sleepers, fresh from a night shift building Britain’s motorways and had come back to a warm bed that housed a different navvy who had a day contract.

My aunt walked from floor to floor collecting rent, her voice taking a sinister tone when she was met with a request for credit.

I walked out of that house a Socialist.

I probably had a social awakening before then but that day is etched in my memory. My aunt, who I loved dearly, had become wealthy through the misery of others. People need to live somewhere of course, and landlords are a necessary part of this process. But they can still provide decent accommodation, care for their tenant’s welfare and not squeeze every last penny from those miserable souls.

I came back to Ireland a changed boy. I’d seen the big world and it sucked. A couple of years later I was in secondary school and wrote my first essay in English class on the ill-treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli Government. It didn’t go down well with my teacher. In my last year of school, I had an English teacher who was a well-known member of one of Irelands right-wing parties. He commented on an article I had written for the school magazine with that well-worn cliché, “He has no heart who is not a Socialist at twenty. He has no head who is still one at thirty.”

I only wish I had the presence of mind to go back to him with the opposite. “He has no head who is a right-winger at twenty and no heart if he is still one at thirty.”

I didn’t change at thirty and I’m still a fiery renegade at fifty five.  I have done well on a personal level from Capitalism. Acquired a nice house with a low mortgage, travelled the world, living and working in exotic places and working for the rapacious American banking industry got me the opportunity to eventually end up here in paradise. But I’m proud to say that I haven’t sold my soul. I have never knowingly underpaid somebody, never abused another to further my career and never earned income through somebody else’s misfortune. I have also voted for the most left-wing candidate available in every election I’ve taken part in.

One of the manifestations of this is my approach to rental properties. During the Celtic Tiger years, it was common to buy ten apartments from the plans in Bulgaria. Every man and his dog had a holiday home that they rented out for eleven months of the year. But I resisted. The memory of that tenement visit in 1975 is still raw.

Property is a sensitive issue in New Zealand. The rich own too much of it and the poor can’t afford to get on the ladder. Most people see it as a pension plan, which is pretty depressing because it pushes up prices and leads to a huge wealth disparity. One person’s pension plan is another person’s need for a warm dry home they can call their own.

I’m happy that we only own the house we live in. I don’t want to be part of that other world. The world that robbed me of innocence on that bright July day in 1975. That first plane ride was memorable though.  I’ve flown regularly since but not for a while now because of the “thing”. If my aunt is up in heaven, perhaps she could make up for screwing all those poor navvies by fixing Covid and letting me fly again.

England, what have you done to yourself?

 Back in the dimly lit days of the early 1980’s, I happened upon a quote from Kevin Marron, who at the time was editor of an Irish Sunday newspaper. He was discussing some friends of his who were English and said that “English people on their own or in small groups are the nicest people you will ever meet. It’s only when they are in large groups at Football matches or on ships on the way to the Falklands that they are a problem.”

I remembered this because it slipped smoothly into my world view at the time. I liked individual English people such as Alan Sunderland at Arsenal or various pop singers. My comedy heroes were on Spitting Image or Not the Nine O’Clock news and I had an unhealthy obsession with dead World War One poets. At the same time, I could tut tut at the antics of England Football fans or the actions of their Army in Northern Ireland.

But if truth be told, I had an inferiority complex when it came to our neighbours across the Irish Sea. I grew up watching their telly, reading their Sunday newspapers and devouring their literature. I remember in particular sitting up late to watch their election results and marvelling how they had a proper left/right split and could get their results out within two hours of the polls closing.

Everything England did seemed better than we could manage in Ireland. They had a professional football league, well funded and adventurous TV, an alternative comedy scene and a liberal attitude to sex, divorce and abortion. The England I watched on TV every night was a confident, modern and sophisticated democracy. A vibrant, multi-cultural nation with wonderful food and lots of money.

The country I lived in was poor and was controlled by a medley of corrupt politicians and conservative bishops. We had mass unemployment, pot-holed roads and the threat of eternal damnation if you even thought about sex, never mind partook in it.

When my opportunity came to leave Ireland, I didn’t let the door hit my arse on the way out. I arrived in London in February 1988 and it was like I had been re-born. I fell in love with Indian food, pizza and kebabs. I marvelled at the Underground system, night buses and the motorway network. I walked around the West End every weekend, dipping into book shops on Charring Cross Road, wolfing down dumplings in China Town and drinking in pubs in Covent Garden with new found friends from Australia and New Zealand. I spent five wonderful years there, gulping in the fresh air of opportunity.

Having watched and admired England from afar for so many years, I was nervous when I arrived in London. I was from a small town in Ireland, suddenly finding myself at the centre of the World. I quickly learned that I needn’t be afraid. The England I arrived in was welcoming to newcomers. They had a genuine interest in my background and found me funny. I made English friends then that I still have to this day.

In the years since, I have kept up my interest in England. I gravitate towards English media on-line, love the output from the BBC and make a point of visiting London whenever I’m in that neck of the world.

But something has changed since I left England in 1993. Ireland became a lot richer. One of the reasons we emigrants departed en mass in the eighties was because of the riches you could earn in England. Now, the average salary in Ireland is higher than the UK. Ireland has also become more liberal, abandoning the church and becoming the first country in the World to legalise Gay Marriage by referendum. The Irish Motorway system is the greatest legacy of the Celtic Tiger years and there is now a greater percentage of overseas born people in Ireland than there are in the UK.

I look on England now from New Zealand and I see a small minded, bigoted country, cutting its own nose off to spite its face. It is no longer a place welcoming to strangers, the far right stalk the land and dominate the government. And then, of course, there is Brexit. The English colonised much of the world, promoting English exceptionalism to the far flung corners of the globe. But they think having rules set in Brussels is an abomination.

In my lifetime, England has gone from a country that I looked up to and admired to one that I pity. When it comes to managing Covid, most countries make a choice between health and the ecomony, pretending that they care about both, while in practice leaning towards one or the other. England is unique in that they are worst in class for both health and economy.

They have also managed to elect a leader who makes Donald Trump look like a serious politician. And strangely enough, Boris Johnson is not even the biggest idiot in the British government. It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. Brexit is heading towards a no deal scenario which will do more harm to Ireland than the Black and Tans.

I was last in London in July 2019. I noticed that the trains were decrepit, pound shops were more common than boutiques and the buildings looked like they had been rebuilt after the blitz in World War Two and not touched since. I still loved it but it’s not the city I remember from thirty years ago. The English flag flew on many lamp-posts, posters for right wing groups adorned the walls and a cynical undercurrent of racism could be felt on the streets. Brexit allowed the monsters who were always there to breathe in the open air. It makes me feel sad. Despite the history between Britain and Ireland, it’s a country I still have a lot of affection for.  But at least, I no longer have an inferiority complex.

Jack Charlton Tribute

It was late in the game and we were chasing a rare victory. The ball was punted into the corner and I went in pursuit, as fast as my chubby thighs could drag me. Sweat and condensation had combined around the edges of the Muirhevnamore indoor sports centre that cold November night in 1987 and while I had recently qualified as an Accountant, I wasn’t earning enough to afford decent trainers.

I slipped and twisted my left ankle to such an extent, that thirty three years later, I still feel it when the barometer falls or a stone in a road tilts my foot more than five degrees.

I was hauled off the court and driven home by my boss, who made up for the crap salary he paid me by telling me to take the next day off and to stay in bed resting my ankle. That next day was the 11^th November 1987, a day that will go down in Irish History, although few expected it at the time.

Ireland were in group 7 in the qualification process for Euro 1988. A promising campaign was petering out, as many others had since I started watching football in the early 70s. We had completed all our games but Bulgaria only needed a draw at home in their last match to finish ahead of us and take the only qualifying place. Their opponents that damp and dreary night in Sofia were Scotland, a team that were the definition of being less than the sum of their parts. They had nothing to play for apart from their pride, a commodity that seemed to be of low value, if the first eighty seven minutes of the game were anything to go by.

My dear old Dad had rigged the portable telly up in my bedroom and perched my stricken ankle atop a bed of pillows. RTE, the Irish state TV service, had secured rights to show the game in a fit of optimism that wasn’t shared by the general population. The match was meandering towards its expected conclusion and the Bulgarians looked happy enough to settle for a point. Then something happened that changed my life and the life of millions of Irish people around the world.

Scotland had shown no ambition and seemed to be in a hurry to get of town as quickly as possible, given that communist Sofia in 1987 must have made Glasgow look like Las Vegas. One of the Scots was ambling towards the side-line when he was needlessly hacked down. The ref played advantage and the violence of the tackle seemed to finally rouse the tartan dragon, as the ball broke to Gary McKay and he slammed it into the net.

What happened afterwards is probably the cause of my still occasionally aching ankle all these years later. I jumped up and ran into the living room to hug my Dad. We held onto each other while injury time was being played and wept when the final whistle blew. My Dad was 54 at the time and this was the first time he’d ever seen Ireland qualify for anything.

Seven months later, I was living and working in London. My mates were in Germany for the Euro 88 finals. I had tickets for the games but couldn’t get off work and so I watched them from behind a sofa in a mates flat. Two years later I was in Italy for Ireland’s debut at the World Cup. I look back now and those years were among the best of my life. I was heading out into the wide world at the same time that Ireland was playing itself onto the world stage.

Jack Charlton was the Irish Manager then and he captured the zeitgeist of a country bursting to be free. We danced in fountains, we strove to outdo each other in garish 1990s attire and we murdered “The Fields of Athenty” in pubs from Stuttgart to Seoul. It was a gift to be an Irish person during those wonder years. To stand tall among the nations of the World and to burst with pride. But I feel particularly blessed that I got to experience this during the years when I was most able to enjoy it. When I still had a sense of wonder for what the world might offer and had the appetite to go out and gobble it up.

I started a relationship just before the World Cup kicked off in 1990. That relationship fizzled out during the World Cup four years later. The team was getting older and more cynical by then and so was I.

Jack’s final game in charge was in December 1995. I watched that in a pub in Auckland on my second day ever in New Zealand. That was when I first came here and fell in love with the country, a love that led to move here when the opportunity arose in 2015. In many ways then, the Jack Charlton era book marked my life.

He died last week and those memories came flooding back. It seems I’m not the only one. There has been an outpouring of nostalgia and sympathy in the Irish media, often from people who weren’t even alive when Jack Charlton was in his pomp. He is being credited with kicking off the Celtic tiger, something that I guess will be passed on to Mary Robinson when she passes away.

But I’ll remember the packed pubs, the away trips and the fact that it is now thirty five years since England last defeated us in Football. There were many magical nights, my favourite being one at Wembley when my mate climbed the fence that separated us from the English fans and screamed “You’ll never beat the Irish” at what turned out to be the wheel chair enclosure.

I miss those lazy hazy days. We’ll never see the like again. Rest easy Jack. You made us realise that not everything needs to be shit.

 

Black Lives Matter

I was racking my brain to try and think of the first black person I ever met. I went on holiday to England when I was ten and there were certainly a lot of Caribbean’s living in the streets around my Aunt’s house. My brother also had a Nigerian friend in college who called down to our house once or twice and sparked off lots of ‘behind the curtain’ curiosity from our neighbours.

Then I remembered a story my Mother used to tell me about the moment of my birth. She loved regaling her five kids with tales about stitches in places sons didn’t want to think about and blood soaked sheets. In my case, the main point of the story was that Mam had paid for an expensive doctor who was supposed to be present at my delivery. But I popped out early and so the first person I saw in this wide old world was an African midwife as I dropped into her welcoming hands.

I wish I knew her name. I wrote to the hospital when I was 18 to ask for the details of my birth. I spent the first three weeks of my life there and wanted to find out what was wrong. It turned out to be pretty mediocre but what struck me was that it mentioned the white middle aged male Doctor who never showed up, but not the black midwife who did all the work.

I like to think that I’m pretty ‘woke’ in respect of Black Lives Matter. I’ve certainly tried to avoid racism and treat everyone equally. But I don’t pretend to be perfect.  When I was twenty two I left the mono culture of 1980s provincial Ireland and headed for the bright lights of London. I got a job with an Insurance Company on the outskirts of the City. There were 120 of us in the department, including twenty Accountants who held all the management positions. All twenty (including my then young self) were white males. There was a smattering of Asians among the general staff but only one black person. His name was Leroy and I became quite friendly with him. He HYe

 He had an easy going manner and a sense of fun that mirrored my own Irish personality. He was also a big hit with the ladies on our regular social outings and I clung to him then in the hope that I might gather some of the crumbs that fell from his table.

I have to say that I envied him in some ways. He was relaxed, cool and better dressed than anyone else on our floor. But I ended up sitting beside him at lunch one Friday, just after the annual promotions had been announced. He wasn’t his normal ebullient self and I made the mistake of asking what was up. I didn’t get up for another hour or so as Leroy downloaded centuries of racial oppression and how it stopped him from ever getting a promotion. I tried to be as empathetic as possible, but I’ll admit that inside my opinions were mixed. I was a young Irishman who grew up in a working class background and fought hard to qualify as an Accountant and to get to the position I held in work. I figured if he’d worked a bit harder he could have achieved the same.

If I was charitable, I could argue that I didn’t see his skin colour and thought he was just the same as me. But time has taught me that the world isn’t that straight forward. I faced a few hurdles growing up as a working class lad in 1980s Ireland. But it was still a world where an Accountancy office was willing to offer an apprenticeship to a seventeen year old from the poor part of town. And when I got my qualification and headed to London, my social background was unknown to those I met. I could hide my thick tongued accent if needed and even when I didn’t, a rough working class background held a certain cache in the burning embers of Thatcher’s reign.

Leroy couldn’t hide his colour and looking back now, there were lots of idiots promoted at that company, when he was stuck in the same role for years. He faced the challenge of being working class and black and that meant he had all my challenges and many more.

Class and classism has always been a burning issue within me. I used to think that if we could solve inequality and class discrimination, then racism and sexism would be automatically fixed too. But poor white people don’t get stopped and searched by the Police and don’t get their necks knelt on by the cops. Skin colour and sex are physical manifestations and can trigger responses on sight. Discrimination based on class usually starts with your address or the school you went to. A well-dressed working class person can often pass for middle class. It’s harder for a black person or a woman to hide their true selves. Not that they should have to anyway.

I have to accept then, that while I grew up with a sizable chip on my shoulder based on my social class, that truth is that I am now a middle aged white man with tremendous privilege. I have lived in five different countries and never once questioned my entitlement to live in any of them. I can go wherever I like at whatever time of night I like and not be accused of bringing harm on myself if anything happens to me. I’ve earned some of this privilege by studying and working hard, but I have to accept that I was born with much of it.

When I popped out of Mam into the welcoming arms of that African mid-wife I was a certified white male, born into a western European country. She had none of those benefits and that’s not right and needs to change.