April 25th is Anzac Day and is the closest thing I’ve seen to Good Friday in Ireland. Not so much because of the celebration of death (one person died in 33AD on Good Friday and thousands died on Anzac Day in 1915) but more because of the lack of alcohol. Pubs close on two days in Ireland. Good Friday and Christmas Day. You’re generally sorted for the latter through the generous quantities of Whiskey and Blue Nun wine that your parents have been stocking up since September. And it’s rude (and usually too cold) to leave the house on Christmas Day anyway.
Good Friday is another thing altogether. Modern Ireland has lost most of its spirituality and sense of tradition. In the old days, we fasted on Good Friday having endured 40 days of chocolate or sugar in tea denial. Fasting wasn’t quite starving yourself. You were still allowed one main meal and two collations. The collations exercised my mind as a youngster. As a young child I thought my Dad was saying “relations” which pleased my immensely. The Good Friday main meal was normally frugal, consisting of smoked fish and some indigestible white sauce that tasted like the nasal outpourings of a diseased skunk. So the thought of eating two cousins for breakfast and tea was a thrilling prospect. I had some very fat cousins.
As I got older, I learned that collations are a meal not exceeding seven ounces. My Dad used to wind us up by getting the baking scales out and weighing our cornflakes on Good Friday morning. I guess in his own way he was trying to make us feel the pain of Christ on his way to Cavalry. The Catholic Church has some weird similes like that.
Now as an adult, I’m able to look up Wikipedia and see that “In the Roman Catholic Church, the term collation is used to describe each of the two small meals allowed on days of fasting (with or without abstinence). The term originated in Benedictine monasteries where the reading of excerpts from The Lives of the Fathers (Collationes Patrum), written by John Cassian, was followed by a light meal.”
And there was me thinking that Dad had made it all up.
All that is gone now of course, along with Corpus Christi processions, getting soot on your forehead on Ash Wednesday and standing round rock pools on August 15th waiting for the water to miraculously rise. They were part of a simpler, more innocent Ireland before Starbucks and pre marital sex.
But for some reason, the pubs still close on Good Friday. This leads to panic stocking up on Holy Thursday (although I don’t know why we still call it that when nobody treats it as Holy anymore) and impromptu house parties. For those of us who grew up close to the border, Good Friday was the only day of the year when we applauded the Protestant controlled government of Northern Ireland. They might have closed the pubs up there every Sunday but they opened them on Good Friday just to annoy the Catholics. In one of those beautiful ironies that comes from bigotry, most of the patrons in the pubs were Catholics. Feckless alcoholics that we are.
We’d sneak across the border and drink guiltily in the gin palaces of South Armagh. Getting back was always fun as you’d be three sheets to wind and so had to avoid the British Army, Police and IRA checkpoints. The IRA ones generally didn’t care if you were drunk, but you didn’t want to accidentally run over one of those boys in the dark.
Anzac Day in Australia is similar. People go to extremes to drink, like visiting RSL pubs (the only ones allowed to open during the day) to sit at formica tables and watch ninety year olds play cards. Ninety thousand of them pitch up at the MCG to see the two most hated teams in AFL take lumps out of each other just so they can drink at the bar at halftime.
Many Australians will rise at dawn and make their way to War memorials to remember those who fell at Gallipoli and other far flung shores. Gallipoli is seared into the Australian psyche; mainly it provides an opportunity to bash the English for poor management and to exert Australian independence. Few people here mention the fact that Australians traveled half way round the world in 1915 to invade somebody else’s country and had their arse kicked in the process. And I wonder how the large Turkish population in Australia feels on April 25th? They won the battle of Gallipoli but don’t seem to get invited to the party.
Isn’t it strange though how countries prefer to remember military defeats rather than victories? In Ireland we commemorate the glorious failure that was the Easter Rising. The English like nothing better than to talk about the Dunkirk Spirit, as though running away was anything to be proud of. If it was, the Italians would have a celebration every day of the year. And even the jingoistic Yanks love making movies about Vietnam.
There seems to be something nobler about glorious defeat as opposed to the jingoism of victory.
I guess that there is nobody left who stood on that beach in Turkey in 1915. But there are plenty of old men left who fought in Malaya and Papua New Guinea in World War Two and maybe they’ll be joined by Vietnam and Iraq veterans. Every generation of Australians since the founding of the Federation have found an excuse to spill their blood upon a foreign field. Their battles become less popular but it does nothing to diminish their sacrifice. To die in Kandahar in 2008 is just as miserable and pointless as falling on the beach in 1915.
In sixty years time, the survivors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will gather at the war memorials as tired old men. One can only hope that the pubs will be open then for them to enjoy a pint afterwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment