It's a dog's life hating dogs

This is a big weekend in Melbourne and not just because it’s the start of the spring racing season. This is the weekend when the by-laws change and the new summer rules come in. The main one as far as I’m concerned is the one that stops dogs being off leash on beaches. I’ll be honest, I don’t like dogs and if my daughter ever asks for one, I can only hope it’s the stuffed or porcelain variety she’s after.

I reached a ripe old age not realising that people like to take dogs onto beaches early in the day with one of those silly plastic things that flings a ball a great distance. But my daughter is 22 months old now and over Spring she developed an engineering skill that has led to towers being built out of bricks at home and sandcastles at the beach.

So on the few occasions when the mercury rose above 20c these past few months, we’ve headed down to the beaches around St Kilda to see if we could recreate Dublin Castle. As my daughter has not yet realised that Saturday mornings are for sleeping, we’ve tended to arrive at the beach at the same time as those early morning dog walkers. We would just get ourselves settled and have the first sand based construction ready when a leashless fido would come bounding over, tongue dangling and tail wagging and make a bee-line for the castle or my daughter. Seconds later, our hard work would be demolished under a torrent of hooves while a nonchalant owner would watch from 20 meters away, telling us that “Samson is very friendly and loves kids”. It never seems to occur to them that the kid may not like Samson.

My daughter likes dogs but even she doesn’t enjoy being bailed over by an Alsatian running at full pelt. Once, a dog stopped and had a pee on top of our sandcastle while his middle aged, well dressed owner chuckled and told us what a frisky little thing her mutt was.

Incidents like this happened every time we went to the beach over winter. None of the owners ever apologised and some even got irate if I was a little two vigorous is shoeing their canine away. One even mentioned that we should stay away from beaches if we didn’t want untrained dogs bounding up to toddlers.

Thankfully that all changes this weekend when summer regulations come into force and dogs aren’t allowed on beaches. Mind you it will be interesting to see how it’s enforced. Dogs aren’t supposed to be within 50 metres of a playground but that doesn’t seem to stop them. Playgrounds tend to be in parks and that’s the other favourite haunt of dog owners keen to show off the athletic prowess of their pets.

I’m not generally a fan of Frankie Boyle but when he says that dog owners are people who have failed to find love within their own species, I have to say I agree to some extent. This will upset many of my friends who are fans of four legged fanged animals and I’m sorry about that but I have to come clean. I’ve hated dogs for as long as I can remember. It started out as raw fear but as the years went on and I realised that I wasn’t going to be bitten by every mutt I came across, I developed a dislike for the smell of dogs and the drool that seems to permanently seep from their puss filled mouths. And on the few occasions when I’ve been eager to impress someone and have been forced to pet one of their pets the feeling of their rib cage expanding gives me the hibbee geebies.

I trace all this back to a little spaniel called Penny that I had the misfortune to bump into at the age of four. I was four I should point out. I’m not very good with dog ages. I grew up on a rough street where the favourite pastime for anyone under the age of ten was to tease the pets belonging to the posh people who lived around the corner. Penny was allowed to run around their garden which was ringed by a small wall. She was an angry dog who would run towards any passer-by and yap incessantly. Each time she did this, she would leap up on the wall in a vain attempt to get at the imposter. But she was never able to breach the barrier.

That of course was a source of great amusement to us kids. So when we weren’t playing dare on the railway line we’d head down to Penny’s house and tease the hell out of her. We’d line up at the wall to her garden and shout at her until she came charging over. Each time we’d retreat in a gale of nervous laughter until we realised she had failed to leap the wall again.

We would return each time and increase the intensity of our teasing. This of course made the little mutt very angry and on one fateful summer day she found energy she didn’t know she had. Suddenly she was on our side of the wall and heading for us at a rapid rate.

We turned and ran and it was then that I had a terrible realisation. I’d spent my short life until then trying to be cool and the best way to do this was to hang around with older kids. And so I found myself as the youngest person in that fleeing possie and by a long way the slowest. Even as I type this I’m having flashbacks to those fangs sinking in to my backside.

Since that day, I’ve avoided dogs like the plague. I’ll let my kid make up her own mind while reminding her that teasing angry animals is generally not a good idea.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. But don’t get me started on cats.

The Tyranny of Liberty

Gerd was a postman in Berlin in the early eighties with a small gambling problem. The discovery of this led to his recruitment into the Stasi, or at least its unpaid snooping wing. His job was to steam open any letters coming from the West and to read the contents. His conscience, in so much as a habitual gambler can have one, was soothed by the thought that he was exposing illegal activity, such as discussions about escape attempts or propaganda.

Pretty soon however, he found that his handlers were more interested in gossip than they were in crime. They wanted to know if the letters suggested a secret lover, a drug addiction or even a mild fetish. Anything that could be used to embarrass the recipient and thus give the Stasi another recruitment opportunity. Gerd realised quite quickly that his own recruitment had come about after he wrote to a cousin in the West looking for a loan to pay off some gambling debts.

All of this seems spooky and unnecessarily over the top. But is there any difference between this and the activities of the American spy agencies? Electronic messaging (E-Mails and text messages) have replaced handwritten letters as the means by which the general public communicate. The Americans don’t need a giant kettle to steam open the contents of these missals. The co-operation of Telecom companies and the likes of Google and Apple do all the work for them.

Gerd could only get through a couple of hundred letters a week. A computer program can scan millions of emails in a second. The purpose is the same however. If reading peoples letters or emails uncover a criminal activity than that is a bonus. Criminals are generally too smart to communicate through these channels as anyone who has watched “The Wire” can testify. The real purpose is to find a hook to somebodies embarrassment. Infidelity and homosexuality are probably the most common means to this end. The spy agencies realise that the best way to get at terrorists is through a vast network of informants living in the communities in which the terrorists live. And the best way to recruit this network is to threaten to expose that which they will do anything to keep secret.

So we live in a society where our government are intent on finding out as many secrets about us as they can, so as to potentially use this against us in the future. If people believe that you have nothing to worry about if you’re not doing anything illegal, then they should ask the former citizens of East Germany. What better way to keep an eye on a suspected Islamic terrorist for example than to find out something embarrassing about the person who sits next to him at work or the lady who cleans his house and to recruit them as unpaid spies?

This may seem like Orwellian conspiracy theory but it’s been used in every society since biblical times. Judas after all was paid to spy on his mates when they were out having supper and a few beers. Why people think that we live in benevolent times now and that “those sort of things couldn’t happen” is beyond me, particularly when technology affords our current masters the opportunity to do things that previous tyrants would have only dreamed about.

So when Edward Snowden disclosed that every email and text message in the world was being recorded on a giant database in the US, I wasn’t surprised. I’d always assumed they did this sort of thing anyway. I was actually surprised that it took so long to become public. I’ve always kept my name out of this blog but assumed that anyone with a modicum of technology skills could figure out my Google account or IP address. So the mention of “Islamic terrorist” and “conspiracy” in the same posting has probably triggered off an automatic search and the robotic descendent of Gerd is currently trawling through my Gmail. He’ll be sorely disappointed as it mainly consists of marketing spam from websites I have been foolish enough to put an email address into.

I did find it funny though that the recent news coverage of secret spying systems has centred on people passing through airports. Snowden was holed up in the transit area of Moscow airport for weeks. Dante would have mentioned airport transit areas in his circles of hell, had they existed at the time. The journalist who broke Snowden’s story (Glenn Greenwald) was also caught up in airport shenanigans when his partner was intercepted in Heathrow and detained for nine hours. It’s taken me nine hours to navigate the tunnels beneath Heathrow in the past, so I think he should count himself lucky that he had a chair for most of this time.

Airports have also spooked me, particularly since 9/11. If you want to see the full reach of the tentacles of state snooping, then visit your local terminal. I’ve had my iris photographed, my body scanned to the amusement of the queue behind me who got to see an outline of my Michelin man shape on the adjacent screen and my body patted down more intimately than an Amsterdam hooker.

As a result, I’ve always felt uncomfortable passing though airports, even though I’ve never so much as smuggled an apple into New Zealand (a capital offense it must be pointed out). But I still get nervous every time I pass through immigration or security. Which is probably why I always get stopped by the random explosives check just after security scanning.

George Orwell said “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt”. That might explain why the powers that be are intent on finding as much ‘dirt’ about us as possible and to maintain us in a world of fear and anxiety. If it is, then I think it is too high a price to pay. Gerd lived to see the wall come down. Will we ever experience the same release from tyranny?

Arsenal in rare of old times

I have a confession to make. I’m an Arsenal fan. I make this confession because I’ve been in denial about this fact since 2005 (which coincidently was the last year Arsenal won a trophy). And yet I find that news about the club is the first thing I look for on the Internet.

 

I’ve started supporting the team in 1971 when Charlie George scored a magnificent goal to win us the FA Cup and to close out the league and cup double for that year. My memory of it suggests a forty yard screamer into the top corner, but Youtube shows me that it was more of a tap in. That’s the problem with memory. It makes everything in the past bigger and more impressive than it actually was, which by default makes us believe that the present is a little bit shit!

 

I do support other teams, such as Carlton in the AFL (who at least I get to watch regularly), Dundalk in the League of Ireland (at least when they are winning) and Louth in Gaelic Football. Louth are probably the only team that would prompt me to get on a plane and fly to the other side of the world at short notice, if they managed to make it to a final. I can make this statement however, comfortable in the knowledge that everything that has happened since 1957 makes this a remote possibility.

 

I have wavered in Arsenal support over the years, mainly coinciding with fallow periods at the club but also with significant changes in my life. I moved to Luxembourg in 1993 and found myself in Amsterdam on the weekend of the FA Cup Final. I was in a pub and somebody mentioned that Arsenal were playing in the match and it was on a TV screen down the back. I was more interested in the thrill of living in mainland Europe by then and Arsenal seemed part of my old and boring life in London.

 

I moved back to Ireland in 1996 at the beginning of the satellite TV revolution in Football. It coincided with Arsene Wenger becoming Arsenal manager and the start of their Golden era. It was impossible to live in Ireland and watch football without picking a team to follow in much the same way as anyone in Melbourne with even a vague interest in sport must pick an AFL team or banish themselves to internal conversational exile.

 

I kind of lost interest again when I moved to Melbourne, because the games are on at strange times of the night and the team were rubbish. But technology has dragged me back into the tent. For a start, I tend to listen to podcasts now rather than music on my way to and from work.

 

And the smartphone I bought at Christmas has lots of football related Aps that can be read everywhere. This is particularly useful in the toilet as it avoids having to hide a newspaper in your pocket.

 

For the past three months I’ve been following the soap opera of Arsenal’s summer transfer policy. This has taken up hours of time on podcasts and consumed gallons on digital ink on the web, despite the fact that Arsenal have not actually signed anyone.

 

The Internet has been a god send to the English Premier League. There is a hardly a news related site in the world that won’t have some reference to it. If you contrast that to one of my other sporting loves, Gaelic Football, you’ll see a startling difference. Soccer is statistics based and at the click of a few buttons you could find out who finished bottom of the West Cork under 12 league in 1993.

 

Gaelic Football treats its audience in the same way we were treated by our Irish teachers in secondary school. They assumed that after 8 years of primary school, you were fluent in the language and they could spend their time teaching us how to interpret 15^th Century poetry written by some blind harpist.

I’ve read match reports in the Irish Times for example headed “Tribesmen too strong for Saffrons” and not find the names of the teams anywhere in the article, any reference to the competition they were playing in, whether it was football or hurling or even whether it was men or women involved.

Gaelic games have a long way to go when it comes to harnessing the web. I just looked up my local clubs website, which in fairness seems mainly geared towards renting their all-weather pitch out as much as possible. Their “latest news” talks about an upcoming match on 26^th September 2012.

 

I do wonder if I’m being sucked into the English football hype. It’s so easy. They repeat all the games here at reasonable hours and there are plenty of people at work to discuss the sport with, including many Australians who have spent a year in London and now think they are experts.

 

So I’ll sit back and enjoy the new season. We lost our first game and still haven’t signed anyone but there is always hope. If I was Arsenal manager, I’d make the team sit down and watch the 1979 FA Cup Final, which is probably my favourite game of all time. Arsenal were leading 2-0 with only 5 minutes left to play when the hateful Man United scored two quick goals to equalise. Momentum plays a key role in Football and United had all that. But equally important is mental attitude.

 

After Man United’s second goal, Arsenal legend Liam Brady picked up the ball for the kick-off. The expression on his face said “I’m not having this” and he drove at the United defence before laying the ball off for a quick cross and a Sunderland tap in at the far post.

 

That’s how you win football matches. So come on Arsenal. Win something so that my time spent reading about you in the toilet won’t have been a waste of time.

Come on the Town

The 23^rd April 1995 is a day I’ll never forget, even if I did have to look up the Internet to find that date. There was no internet back then of course, at least not to the unwashed masses like me and smartphones were ones with push buttons rather than a dial.
 

So it was the lack of instant communication that made that day memorable. I was in the middle of my last year in Luxembourg, recovering from a breakup the previous year and living on my own in a lonely apartment on Rue De Vianden. I was starting to think about moving back to Ireland as I’d been living abroad for eight years at that point. There was a vibrant Irish community in Luxembourg in which I was immersed, playing football every Tuesday night and acting with the Round Tower Players. I also frequented “The Black Stuff” pub on more occasions than my liver would like. This probably explains how I came away from three years in Luxembourg with an inability to speak French or German but with a stronger Irish accent than the one I arrived with.

In the course of this interaction I discovered that it was possible to source “The Irish Times” every Monday for a modest fee (which was actually greater than the cost of the paper). I subscribed and suddenly found that I had access to all the weekend’s sports results. I now get these on Score.ie or numerous other websites, but back then you had to wait until Monday lunchtime and the arrival of that week’s papers. I can’t help feeling that kids today are missing out on that thrill. Anticipation is often better than gratification.

Throughout the winter of 1994/1995 I followed one story with particular interest. My hometown team of Dundalk were making a charge for the League of Ireland title. That in itself wasn’t unusual. We were regular visitors to the top table in the two decades before 1995 but I had been there for all those wins. I wouldn’t be able to make it in 1995 if we made it to the last day so I needed a way to stay in touch.

As it turned out we were rank outsiders. We sat in third place and needed to win and to see the two teams above us screw up. I contacted a mate in the lead up to the last game and arranged for him to call me from the phone box outside the ground after the game was over. That’s how we did things back in 1995. You had to be organised and plan ahead.

I waited silently by my phone in Luxembourg on that faithful Sunday. Unbeknownst to me, the last game of the season turned out to be more exciting than anyone could have predicted. My team accounted for their opposition early and the crowd turned their attention to the two games going on elsewhere in the country.

News came through that one of the challengers had lost and that meant that our league win depended on Derry City failing to win their match. Due to a long injury break, their match still had seven minutes to play when our game finished. My friends were part of a large crowd waiting in Oriel Park for the result. The club sensibly tuned the tannoy system into the national radio station so the crowd (who had gathered on the pitch) could listen to the commentary. The Derry match was tied going into extra time, which would mean that we would leap frog them to the league title. Then word came across the tannoy that Derry had been awarded a penalty. The crowd in Dundalk groaned and held their breath until “It’s saved” was shouted across the tannoy. People hugged strangers, kids were thrown in the air and a rousing chorus of “Come on you lilywhites’” was struck up. The final whistle in the Derry game followed shortly afterwards and the real celebration began.

And of course, I knew none of this, marooned as I was in a distant land where the result of a football match in Ireland was of insignificant importance.

I waited and waited for my phone call until I started to believe it would never come. Then a sharp ring woke me from my slumber. My mate was at the other end trying to shout at me through a cacophony of sound. The phone outside the ground had a massive queue he said. 1995 was pre Celtic Tiger Ireland and pretty much everyone at that game would have had a friend or relative living abroad who they would want to contact with the good news.

So my mates made it to the local pub where they imbibed several celebration beers before they remembered that they were supposed to call me. “We’ve only bloody won the league” he said before recounting the highlights of the day. I left him to a night of merriment and returned to my silent living room. I was determined to party, to find somebody in that God forsaken land in middle Europe who could share my joy.

I headed out to “The Black Stuff” which was quiet, it being a Sunday. “What brings you out tonight”, Joe the Belfast barman asked. “Dundalk won the League today” I said. “What League is that?” he replied.

I finished my beer and returned to my hermitic lifestyle. I moved back to Ireland the following year and lived there for twelve years, most of which Dundalk spent in the second division and were rubbish.

It’s now 18 years since that faithful day in 1995 and for the first time since, Dundalk have a chance of grabbing the title. These days I can listen to commentary live on the internet and text my friends during the game. I may even be able to stream live video. But if we win, I’ll still feel that emigrant’s pang that I’d not there to share the joy with my friends. That and many other things are the price you pay for starting a new life.

Come on the Town!

Music in a cynical age

I read an article in today’s Guardian newspaper that suggested that Cynicism kicks in when you turn 44. I was cynical about the article to be honest because I don’t believe that everyone is the same. The world would be an even more boring place if they were. But I did start to get cynical myself around that age. I stopped watching reality TV as I recognised that it was an evil attack on my self-esteem by making me doubt my ability to cook or decorate a house. I cut back on watching sport as it became clear to me that results were decided by corrupt referees who always seemed to be in the pay of teams that my teams were playing against.

But the biggest change came about in my appreciation of music. I don’t buy much music these days, mainly because it’s actually hard to find a physical music store in the modern world. Itunes has taken over and I’m cynical about that too. When I started buying music, part of the enjoyment was the look, feel and smell of the packaging. My first purchases were back in the vinyl days, when records would come in gloriously decorated covers. Meat Loaf’s “Bat out of Hell” is one fond example and if truth be known, my only access to artwork in my teenage years came through this medium. Those record covers had a smooth feel to them and the smell was unique and made you think of happy times. You also had to pay special care to the vinyl when placing it on your turntable. This made you appreciate the music more. Nobody ever put a vinyl record on a turntable and then instantly forgot about it as we do in this multi-media disposable age.

I was disappointed when music changed to a digital format. The quality was better, but static was part of my childhood and I’m somewhat hardwired to believe that music is supposed to be played with a faint crackling sound in the background. And as with many developments in the technology space, the promise rarely lives up to reality. I was hoodwinked into replacing all my vinyl recordings with CDs on the grounds that the digital format was indestructible. I now see ‘disk error” more often than I ever had a record that skipped.

But at least CD’s came with the same artwork, albeit on a smaller scale and they included a handy booklet with lyrics and details of writers and backing singers. I’ve always been a nerd when it came to music and the first thing I’d do when I bought a new CD was to pull out the lyrics booklet and marvel at the rhyming couplets within. I was also tickled when I’d find one of my favourite singers doing backing vocals on another album, as though this had validated my choice.

Music downloaded from Itunes gives you none of this look, feel or smell. It is a sensory desert, with allowance given only to sound. Even this is not as good as it was in the old days. Back then people would pay more for their speakers than they would for the turntable. Woofers and surround sound were the buzz phrases in the 1980’s music loving fraternity. The modern music world has made a lot of noise about the improved quality of digital music, but most of it is played through tinny speakers at the back of laptops or on low quality headphones attached to smart phones. Kids today will never experience the pleasure of turning the volume button up to 11 and having the two metre tall speakers shake the foundations of their house.

I still like to buy real music in a package that I can feel and smell. The only problem is I’ve become like my Dad and think that all modern music is rubbish. I don’t think I’ve bought any new music since 2003. My only purchases in the past ten years have been of old music, originally recorded in the 1960s or 1970s. I’m ashamed to say that I frequent a shop called “Dirt Cheap CDs” in Melbourne that specialises in ten dollar specials, most of which are compilations.

There was a time when I’d sneer at compilations. My friends and I would put the characters in “High Fidelity” to shame with our devotion to concept albums and the early works of English folk artists. I remember one night in the pub when we were asked to name our top three albums. We tried to out-do each other with the obscureness of our choices, apart from one mate who declared that his favourite albums were “Queen’s Greatest Hits” and “Now That’s What I Call Music volume 37 and 38”. We scoffed at his lack of sophistication.

Now “Queen’s Greatest Hits” is exactly the sort of thing I look for in Dirt Cheap CDs. But I wonder how long that emporium of bargain music will be around because record stores are becoming as rare as hen’s teeth.

When I was back in Ireland in June, I went searching for some diddly eye Irish sounds.

I was unable to buy anything however as my go to record shop has gone out of business. Without realising it, I was a HMV devotee and bought all my music and DVD box sets from their shops in Dundalk and on Grafton St in Dublin. They have fallen victim to the global financial crisis and the growth of online purchasing. This has left my home town without a record shop at all, as HMV voraciously gobbled up all the independent players years ago. And while there must be other places in Dublin to buy music, it was beyond my investigative skills to find one.

This in hindsight is a good thing because I’d probably be listening to Phil Collins now or some other attack on good taste.

But in fairness to Phil, maybe I’m just being cynical.

Racism in Australia

I was in a pub in Dublin a few years ago with a work colleague and some of his friends. They were all well- educated middle class guys from the posh suburbs and we spent most of the night talking about football and politics. But I only really remember one thing about that night. One of them mentioned an absent friend who was a big hit with the ladies. An element of envy in their voices was clear until the subject of their friend’s latest sexual conquest came up. He had picked up a girl at a nightclub and brought her back to his flat in the well to do suburb of Blackrock. A night of passion ensued and they went for breakfast the next morning when the prospect of a second date was a strong possibility.

Then she mentioned that she was a member of the Traveller community. At this point in the story the group erupted into howls of laughter interspersed with comments such as “Are you serious, he shagged a knacker” and facial expressions that made them look like they had just swallowed a wasp soaked in castor oil.

I remained stony face and eventually this made them uncomfortable. One of them asked me what I was thinking and I said that I suddenly realised what it must have felt like to be in bar in Mississippi in 1954 when the locals found out that one of their friends had slept with a black woman.
The group were horrified. Nobody likes being called a racist because most people don’t think they are one even when they start sentences with “I’m not racist but…..”. They honestly couldn’t see the connection between how people in the South of the USA thought about coloured people and the way many Irish people think about Travellers.

I mention this because the conversation in Australia this week is all about racism and to preface what I’m going to say by pointing out that no country in the world holds the high ground on this subject, not least the Irish. You only have to watch “Gangs of New York” to see our ancestors exploits in American or to note how many O’Briens and Murphys there were in the Police Force of apartheid South Africa.

It’s ironic then that the controversy in Australia this week surrounds the Collingwood Football Club, a team that has its roots among the working class Irish community in inner city Melbourne. 

 

Australian Rules football was a sectarian battleground in the late 19^th Century and Collingwood gave a chance to struggling Irish immigrants to band together as one voice and get a start in life. And once they had that start they did what their cousins did in London and Boston. They abused and vilified the next community which was on the bottom rung and trying to climb up.

Last weekend the AFL celebrated the indigenous round, an annual event when each game of footy is supposed to be a tribute to the aboriginal players who have graced the game. In Melbourne in particular, it’s a chance for fans to think about their relationship with indigenous people, because if truth be known, the only place most football fans see indigenous people is on the sporting field.

The first match of the weekend was Collingwood versus Sydney at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The star player on the night was Adam Goodes, who as well as being a gun footballer is also one of the most articulate and well respected aboriginals in Australia. Towards the end of the game, he went to retrieve the ball from beside the boundary fence when a 13 year old female Collingwood supporter called him an Ape. He called over the stewards and she was escorted out of the ground, leaving her embarrassed grandmother behind to face the glare of 80,000 spectators who were watching the incident unfold on the big screen.

The incident had all but died down by Wednesday when the Collingwood President fanned the weakening embers. As well as being a footy man, Eddie Maguire (Irish name and it would have to be) is also host of one of those jokey morning radio shows that are as common as ragworth in Australia. The formula usually involves two blokes with a sporty woman occasionally thrown in. On Eddie’s show, they were talking about King Kong which is about to open in Melbourne.  What Eddie meant to say about it remains unclear, but what he actually uttered was one of the greatest Freudian slips since Sigmund meant to ask his wife what was for tea but actually told her she ruined
his life.

Maguire basically said that Adam Goodes should be employed to advertise King Kong. Eddie has spent the days since with a shovel, fruitlessly trying to dig himself out of the hole he has dug.
It has at least kicked off a conversation about racism which has been badly needed. I have stood in the social club at football matches surrounded by Carlton fans and heard dogs abuse being hurled at Carlton’s own indigenous players. When it comes to abusing players on the opposing team, the abuse is more subtle. Many AFL players have blemishes in their past, mainly due to earning too much money at a young age, or coming from a poor background and doing the sort of thing that is endemic in that community and would generally go unreported at a national level if it wasn’t for the fact that you were on telly every week.

To remind every opposition player of their past indiscretions would be exhausting for even the most beer fuelled football fan. But if you are aboriginal and did something dodgy when you were young then you will be reminded of it whenever you play.

This is a country that still hasn’t come to terms with it past but maybe this week and the fact that people are finally talking about this issue, suggests that a better future lies ahead.

Bruce is still the Boss

The first record I bought was “The Green Fields of France”. It was a single recorded by The Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur and I bought it sometime in the 1970’s, when I held down a pub job for pocket money. Most of my mates were into punk, ska or the other weird forms of music that were knocking around at the time. But for reasons unknown to me, I was a fan of traditional Irish music.

I didn’t pick this up from my parents. They seemed to be into the sort of country music were everybody mentioned in the song was dead by the end of the song and most of them horribly mutilated into the bargain. Our house was full of vinyl records by women who only appeared to have first names and men with large cowboy hats. My older brother, who might also have influenced me, was into a strange combination of psychedelic and heavy metal music. So if my friends and family weren’t to blame, who was? It’s not as though Trad music was cool. Its practitioners were shaggy haired drunks in thick woollen sweaters and generally the only place you could hear the music was in smoky pubs (although not the one I worked in). So I don’t know where I developed a taste for it. Perhaps it was the first awakening of my national pride.

Over the years I have drifted more towards country folk. But every now and again I wander into Youtube and bathe in some nostalgia. That led me to the guy who wrote the “Green Fields of France”; a Scottish gentleman by the name of Eric Bogle. To my immense surprise Mr Bogle and the lead singer from the Furey Brothers were booked to play at this year’s Port Fairy Folk Festival and for old time’s sake, I thought I’d better go.

Port Fairy is a lovely little seaside town in Western Victoria that hosts a dinky little festival each March that attracts folkies and aging hippies from all over Australia. All the food is authentically ethnic and people actually talk to each other in the queue for the toilet. Most people bring little chairs to sit on and many can be seen doing the cryptic crossword in The Age in between and sometimes during shows. I think it’s fair to say that everyone who goes to Port Fairy does the cryptic rather than the ordinary crossword.

So all in all, it’s the perfect music festival for people who don’t like music festivals.

We had planned to camp, but the forecast was for 35c and as we had a 15 month old baby with us, we made a late decision to book into a motel. We found a place in Warrnambool that I suspect was last used as the set for Psycho and spent two days listening to great music (my favourites were Chris Smither and Xavier Rudd if you fancy a bit of Youtube surfing). Eric Bogle and Finbarr Fury were both fantastic, although sadly neither sang The Fields.

But Port Fairy wasn’t my only musical outing in March. Last week I had to pleasure of seeing Bruce Springsteen for the 5^th time. My previous visits to The Boss had been in Ireland and Britain and were all outdoor, including his legendary gig at Slane in 1985. My only memory of that day (apart from the realisation that all his songs mentioned cars) was that my then girlfriend wanted to go up the front to join in the mosh pit. I was a timid lad even then and offered to look after her bag while she ventured forward. She returned about an hour later, covered in mud and missing her jeans. The relationship didn’t last long enough to get an explanation for that.

Bruce played at two venues in Melbourne. The iconic Hanging Rock, made famous by the Peter Weir movie and the less iconic but highly functional Rod Laver arena, home of the Australian Open tennis. Because I’m old and crabbity, I decided that Hanging Rock, being 100km from Melbourne, would be too hard to get home from late at night, so I opted for the indoor charms of Rod Lever.

The first thing I noticed was the average age of the crowd. Bruce is 63 these days and it looked like most of the audience had been to school with him. In Ireland, the profile would have been a lot younger. Irish people don’t mind following acts that their parents were into and if it’s good old fashioned rock and roll like Springsteen, then they’d love to be up the front sporting inflatable guitars as a tribute to Steve Van Zant.

The other thing I noticed is that Australian crowds at stadium concerts like to pretend that they are in Idaho or Colorado. Maybe they were just trying to make Bruce feel at home, but holding pieces of coloured card with handwritten messages is a cringingly American habit. Most were requests for particular songs, some of which he picked at random and performed, as though the concert was a late night radio phone in request show. Some were expressions of love or longing, or plaintive requests for a hug. And some were just funny, like the one that said “The Guy behind me can’t see”.

But I was willing to put up with all of that, just to wallow in three hours of majestic music. Bruce Springsteen has been a part of my life since I was sixteen when I first heard “The River”. I bought “Tunnel of Love” on cassette in 1988 and played it endlessly in my first car and I think it’s fair to say that the acoustic version of “Thunder Road” is probably my favourite piece of music.

I’m feeling older these days, but when the opening chords of “Born to Run” play like they did during the encore last week, I felt like I was transported back to 1985 and age doesn’t matter.

Home thoughts from abroad

I've been reading Browning, Keats and William Wordsworth
And they all seem to be saying the same thing for me
Well I like the words they use, and I like the way they use them
You know, Home Thoughts From Abroad is such a beautiful poem

A couple of weeks ago we went to the “Leaving Dublin” exhibition at the Melbourne Immigration Museum. This was a collection of photographs taken of people who were about to emigrate from Ireland. The accompanying stories were sad and despairing, telling of families ripped apart, economic necessity and the safety valve that emigration offers whenever Ireland gets into trouble.

I noticed that most of my fellow visitors at the exhibition were also Irish, not only from the accents but from their facial appearance. Most Australians don’t believe me, but it’s possible to spot an Irish person at 50 meters here. Sometimes it’s the ridiculous red faces from inappropriate exposure to the sun that gives them away. Sometimes it’s the GAA and Glasgow Celtic jerseys they wear (you never see anyone from Glasgow wearing a Celtic shirt, but that’s a discussion for another day).

But more often than not, it’s the freckles, frizzy hair and deep blue or green eyes that tells me that these people are Friends of Seamus. I obviously share these looks (although my hair lost its frizziness years ago) because I’ll often pass a similar looking person on the streets of Melbourne and we’ll raise an eyebrow to each other or mutter “How’s it goin’” as we pass.

We moved around the exhibition slowly and quietly. Most of us it seems, were pondering our own reasons for leaving Ireland. By their ages, many could have arrived here in the 1980s during the last deluge from Ireland’s shores. Some, no doubt, came for adventure and stayed. And some, like me, left for a number of reasons. Because we could see Ireland was going down the toilet in an orgy of consumerism and right wing politics. Because Ireland is a small and suffocating place and because there is a light beyond these woods and we should go and see what makes it shine.

That last aspect probably drove me onto the plane more than any. I’ve always felt like a citizen of the world and not tied down to a particular place. It’s a big and varied place and those of us who come from rich western countries have the opportunity to travel around it and live in many different places. Most of the world doesn’t have this luxury which makes me wonder why more people who can don’t try it. I do love my home country but I love the world too and if I could afford it, I’d live in Ireland for 6 months each year and somewhere else in the world for the rest of the time. Many people do this already, including the great and good of the racing scene and those property developers who got their cash out before the market went belly up. These guys spend one day short of six months in Ireland so that they can avoid paying any taxes there.

But unless I win the lottery, that’s not really an option. So I’ll have to make do with reading Irish papers on the web, listening to Irish radio on my digital radio or watching Irish television on DVD or on a live stream. The Internet has changed an emigrant’s life, that’s for sure. When I lived in London in the late 1980s my only connection to Ireland was through a weekly mad hatter phone call with my Mother when I would be read a list of the recently deceased on our street with a hushed summary of their past indiscretions. Occasionally, if I found myself in a certain part of the City after crashing on somebody’s floor, I’d be able to pick up a copy of the Sunday Press, which was a paper I’d never dream of buying when I lived in Ireland.

Now I can spend any free time I have indulging in Irish media or consuming goods bought from the Taste of Ireland website. Close your eyes and you could imagine you were in Connemara, if it wasn’t for the lack of rain banging on the roof or the need to wear a sleeping bag in doors.

In that respect, you have the best of everything here. The good weather, the exotic and multi-cultural food, clean streets, beaches, bicycle paths, efficient trams and trains and a health system that prioritises patients on the size of their ailments and not their wallets.

At the same time you can access a lot of the good things about Ireland from the comfort of your sofa in Melbourne. The humour that is unique to us Gaels, the story telling and intelligent writing. And curry Chips and Guinness if you look hard enough. The only thing that’s missing is the spontaneous fun you get from meeting friends and the tactile comfort you can feel from your family that is not available through Skype.

A friend here said to me that it’s actually harder to be an emigrant now because the Internet (and Skype in particular), make you feel close to home but not close enough. There is something very tantalising about a nephew’s hand reaching for a screen 17,000km away and trying to touch you.

The picture that will stay with me from the Leaving Dublin exhibition was of a young woman standing by the Royal Canal in Dublin. She was wearing a pair of vibrant red shoes. In the caption beside the picture, she said that she was bringing the shoes with her to her new life in Australia. “If I get very sad”, she said, “maybe I could just click my heels and I’ll be back in Ireland.” If only it was that simple.

Swings and a roundabout way of talking about them

Swimming Pools were a constant source of conversation in my youth.  Or the lack of them to be more precise. I grew up in a town of 25,000 people with no body of water bigger than a family bath. Ireland was a poor place back then to be fair but as we lived beside the sea; the council probably thought it was an indulgence to build a pool when God had already provided swimming facilities.

That sea was just 120km from the Nuclear reprocessing plant at Windscale on the English coast however, which polluted the water but did nothing to raise its ambient temperature from the icy levels it maintained all year round. As a result, only mad dogs and gents in wet suits ventured into it. We grew up as a town of non swimmers where the sea was as alien as deep space and we only ventured into the water when we went on holidays. Then we would flap about like drowning men (which wasn’t far from the truth) before giving up and retiring to the nearest bar. Unlike swimming pools, there were 168 pubs in the town I grew up in. So that was an area we had lots of experience in.

On the two or three occasions in my younger years when we found it desirable to visit a swimming pool (which was around the time that we became interested in girls in swim suits) we would venture over the border to Northern Ireland which was well endowed with facilities provided by the British taxpayer to placate the locals. We would then bob around for an hour or so like pasta shells in a pot of boiling water. There were no lanes in that pool because the users were mainly Southern day trippers who were unable to swim in a straight line if they could swim at all.

I’ve been thinking about this recently as my one year old daughter has started swimming and we are spoiled for choice in Melbourne. Every school here seems to have a pool and the local councils compete to have the best facilities.

But it wasn’t only swimming pools that our town lacked when I was growing up. There were no playgrounds either. Kids had to make their own fun in half built housing estates and on railway tracks. It didn’t bother us to be honest. If you’re inventive, there are lots of things to slide down or swing from and they are more enjoyable when done outside of the sanitised confines of officially constructed facilities.

Yet again, Northern Ireland was different. My grandfather died when I was five and he spent the last couple of years of his life in a nursing home in Warranpoint, a sleepy town just across the border from us. We would be piled into the car each Sunday to go and visit grandpa and while my Mother spent an hour or so with her Father, my Dad would bring me and my siblings for a walk along Warrenpoint’s foreshore.

Just across from the hospital was a well appointed park with a brightly painted playground. To my disgust each Sunday I would find the gates to the playground locked. My Dad did his best to explain. At the time, most councils in Northern Ireland were run by Protestants who had gerrymandered the boundaries to ensure that they were in power even in strongly Catholic areas such as Warranpoint.  And Protestants, he explained, wanted to respect God on Sundays by banning fun. As a result, playgrounds were shut, shops were closed and God forbid you’d try and get a drink anywhere.

This caused confusion in my five year old mind. To me, Sunday was the most appropriate day to do fun things like sliding and swinging and this inculcated my earliest understanding of the differences between Catholics and Protestants. When God said he rested on the seventh day, we took this to mean that he relaxed and what better way is there to do that than to go to a playground, watch a football match or have a beer with Friends. Protestants, or at least the fundamentalist type who lived in Northern Ireland, believed that rest involved pulling the curtains and huddling around a King James Bible.

My daughter doesn’t have to worry about any of this. There are ten playgrounds within walking distance of our house and none of them even has a gate that can be locked. She shows off her daring skills by climbing onto frames that petrify her Father and shows particular artistry in sliding backwards down slides with scant regard for what might be waiting at the bottom.

My hometown now has an Olympic sized pool, courtesy of the Celtic Tiger which also gifted almost every kid dwelling house with a backyard trampoline and assorted climbing and sliding paraphernalia. But outdoor pursuits require suitable weather and Melbourne provides more of that than Ireland.

So I can’t help thinking that my daughter is better off spending her formative years here where she can go to the park and meet kids of all colours and nationalities and play in a community environment. She might even bump into the occasional Northern Ireland Protestant and can introduce them to the concept of fun.

She loves other kids and finds them a welcome relief from her nervous and fidgety parents. Being a child is such a wonderful period time of your life. It should be spent in exploration and in the pursuit of joy. And every kid should have the opportunity to pursue these seven days a week and thankfully even in Warranpoint, you are now able to do that.

I’d like to think that on the seventh day God rested in a park, watching little children play and thinking to himself that for all its cynicism, this isn’t a bad old world that he created.