Farewell Edinburgh and thanks for all the fish (and chips)

I went to a poetry workshop in Edinburgh last August. It was called ‘Nothing but the poem’ and they were discussing five works by WB Yeats. I was a bit intimidated until I realised that the group consisted of retired Scottish school teachers who knew as little about WB Yeats as I did. The first twenty minutes was spent debating how to pronounce ‘Aengus .

I mention this because the Annual Book Festival (of which the poetry workshop was one small part) was my highlight of our eighteen months in Edinburgh. It attracts a galaxy of writers to tickle the intellect of all and sundry. I attended interviews and readings with my three favourite newspaper and book writers within the space of a weekend. And is this is my memory of Edinburgh list I thought I’d start on a positive note.

But unfortunately not all my memories of Edinburgh will be tinged with such golden light. I arrived with an ache to get back to the Southern Hemisphere and that meant that I never quite threw myself into the Caledonian lifestyle and perhaps was more likely to notice the negative aspects of life in Scotland as a means of justifying my longer term lifestyle ambitions.

Let me start with dogs. I’ve never liked them it must be said. But Edinburgh takes canine adoration to fetish level. On manys the wet day (and there were plenty of those), I’d sit on a bus and have a dog sniff at my shoes as we trundled along before nuzzling my groin with his soggy snout. The owners invariably thought this was adorable. Dogs in cafes were also popular and they would sit staring at you mournfully as you struggled to finish your food above the aroma of soggy mutt.

But mention of cafes does remind me of the food, which I really enjoyed in Edinburgh. It’s not quite as eclectic as Melbourne, but as a British city, Edinburgh benefits from the fruits of the empire, in particular Indian food.  I also ate more fish and chips than was good for me, mainly due to living within 100 metres of “Scotland’s best fish and chip shop” (although in my eighteen months there I noticed at least ten places that made claim to this title). A friend of mine in Melbourne once looked at me sadly when I told her I was about to visit Ireland and said “Ah, real chipper chips”. I never really understood what she meant until I lived in Edinburgh. Chips in Britain and Ireland are infinitely better than anywhere else in the world, particularly down here in the Southern Hemisphere. I believe the difference is due to the liberal use of beef lard in Northern Hemisphere cooking, but just in case my doctor is reading this, I’ll say no more.

Edinburgh is a rich city and they certainly collect enough in council tax to make you think that they could run a clean and efficient city. But if you saw the litter on every corner you’d think otherwise. They don’t allocate bins to each house as they do in every other city I’ve lived in. Instead, a number of covered skips are placed on each street corner, one for general rubbish and the rest for various forms of recycling, apart from glass which needs to be brought to remote parts of the city, accessible only by car. Like many of our neighbours, we didn’t own a car, so trips to the glass drop off had to be planned with the detail of Scotts trip to the Antarctic and given the Scottish climate, was often done in similar weather.

These skips were emptied on Mondays and by Wednesday they were full to overflowing. Plastic bags would build up around them which the fat and frenzied seagulls would tear apart. The city gets 4 million tourists a year and yet it allows the streets to look like downtown Mogadishu.

But if you didn’t like the dogs and litter, at least it was easy to get away, whether it was the train down to London or a budget airline flight to somewhere in Europe. In our time in Edinburgh, we visited many places but I especially liked getting to Ireland regularly to visit friends and family.

There was also the Scottish countryside to enjoy. I have always been proud of the rugged beauty of the West of Ireland but I have to say that the Scottish highlands are even more spectacular. Glencoe in particular will live long in my memory. If God designed a back garden, I reckon this would be it.

Our Scottish adventure is now over and we have set sail for New Zealand. The rest of life’s adventure starts now. The trip over was pretty exhausting. Adults can adjust to time zone changes. Kids less so. But we’re over that now and getting used to living in a warm climate again. I became a complete woss while living in Australia and really struggled with the weather in Edinburgh. They say that there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. But no amount of clothing can stop the icy wind that whips off the North Sea from percolating into every fibre of your body. The rain seemed to be incessant in our time there and the daily commute in buses fogged up with condensation and reeking of wet rain gear wore me down.  I longed for the sun and the chance to wear shorts and sandals again.

It has been roasting since we arrived and too hot in fact to leave the house between 10am and 4pm. Ironically, it rained today and we welcomed it like mana from heaven.

Happy Christmas to all and I hope 2016 brings everything you hope for. From my point of view I’m hoping for a good job and to find a nice house to live in. It’s not much to ask for, is it?

Je Suis Aylan

It started with a lie and ended with the image of a small drowned boy on a beach in Turkey. Except it hasn’t ended, of course. In many ways the crisis caused by the invasion of Iraq is only beginning.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. We know that now but don’t know the real reasons why the West invaded Iraq. It might have been oil, ego or some dark Orwellian global power play. But whatever the reason, its impact has been catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in various wars that are the bastard children of that initial conflict. Disease and misery followed but worst of all, ancient enmities were stirred by the sectarian governments imposed by the West on Afghanistan and Iraq. Out of this hornet’s nest, ISIS appeared, Syria was thrown into Civil War and the rest as we know is history.

I don’t have all the answers. Sometimes I struggle to even know what the question is. But the image of a small dead child on a beach in Turkey had an effect on me like nothing has before. I was heading to bed when I decided to have one last flick through the TV channels. I happened upon the BBC news and the image of a Turkish policeman carrying a lifeless bundle filled the screen. I had clearly missed the “some viewers may find these images upsetting” message at the beginning of the report and the images hit me with no warning. I turned the TV off straight away and instinctively went to check on my own three year daughter. She was lying on her stomach breathing gently but in the same prone position as poor Aylan Kurdi was in that picture. A picture that has become as evocative as that of Kim Phuc, the napalm girl in that haunting photograph from the Vietnam War. I didn’t sleep well that night. I tossed and turned as though on a stormy sea and thanked God for my own healthy daughter.

Photos and TV helped to change public opinion in America and bring an end to the Vietnam War. Hopefully, that picture of Aylan will do the same to public opinion in Europe. It’s easy to demonise Asylum Seekers when they are a large unshaven mass of young men clinging to a barbed wire fence in Budapest. It’s harder when a photo shows that these are ordinary people desperate to escape war and find a new life.

Two weeks ago, I listened to Playback, a weekly summary of the best of Irish radio. They reported on two stories and failed to see the irony that connected the tales.

The first story concerned Walli Ullah who made his way from Afghanistan to an Irish motorway in July. He was picked up and despite not having committed a crime, was immediately put in Cloverhill Prison. He was then attacked by other prisoners. As far as I know he’s still in prison.

The second story related to an Irish girl who had overstayed her Thai tourist visit. You get 60 days to see Thailand, which you’d think would be more than enough for a student with limited funds. I’m assuming she had limited funds because she was unable to pay the fine that the Thai Police tried to impose on her when she pitched up at Bangkok airport. She was relaying the story to the Joe Duffy show, a daily staple on Irish radio that provides the lost and deluded with free airtime. She was laughing as she recounted her tale. She had called her Mother in tears to protest that those nasty Thai Police were threatening to throw her in Prison until she came up with the cash.

The Irish Mammy was outraged and demanded that her daughter put the Chief of Police on the phone, so that she could give him a piece of her mind. The daughter said, “There’s no point Mam, they just don’t get it”. A quick whip around the other Europeans in the airport departure lounge yielded sufficient funds to release the young Irish student from the clutches of her barbarian hosts.

When she said “They just don’t get it”, I assume she was referring to the God given right of white Europeans to go wherever we like in the world and to stay for as long as we like. As long as it not to another Western country. An Irish person who overstayed their visa in America and was thrown into prison there would receive no sympathy. But Asia, Africa and South America are seen as our natural play pens, to use and abuse as we see fit.

So the tale of an Irish girl who thought a Thai visa was an option rather than an obligation and a poor Afghan who was slung in jail as soon as he arrived in Ireland tells you all you need to know about how we see our right to the rest of the world and the rights of others to come to our country.

Like I say, I don’t have all the answers. But it seems to me that Europe was capable of the Berlin Airlift in 1948/1949 and was capable of raising millions for African Aid in the 1980s through Live Aid and other rock star ego stroking event. But most importantly to this argument, was able to raise an army of thousands to invade Iraq and waste billions in the process. So if we have the will, we can house and accept the thousands of war displaced refugees from Syrian, Eritrea and Libya. A fraction of the money spent on the Iraq War would be enough to solve the whole refugee issue.

And if we don’t have the will, then look again at that picture of little Aylan Kurdi lying dead on that Turkish beach. If that doesn’t stir us to action, then part of us is also dead. Our humanity has been drowned and tossed into the Aegean Sea.

The Greek Tragedy

When I was in Primary school we had a teacher called Skigger Hamill. Even by the standards of the 1970s, he was a throwback to the old days when teachers were teachers and boys were scared. We got him towards the end of his career when his reputation was fiercer than his bite. He smelled of chalk dust and stale tobacco and used to leave us with a tricky maths question to solve four or five times a day while he disappeared. Nobody ever questioned where he was going. In hindsight it was probably for a sneaky fag behind the bike shed, although he may also have been whacking his head against a wall while ruminating on his career choice. It can’t have been much fun teaching a class load of boys who would have sat all day in the clothes  they came to school in through the rain that seemed to be constant in my childhood.

While I have largely fond memories of Skigger (certainly in comparison to some of the other psychopaths I had the misfortune to be educated by), he wasn’t adverse to the occasional bout of violence. Corporal Punishment was a given when I was in Primary School and violent acts were visited on small kids on a daily basis, at levels that the UN would condemn you for if you carried them out on terrorist prisoners.

Skigger had a particular technique however, which has haunted me all these years. When he chose you for punishment, he would first decide on the number of slaps he would inflict on your open palm. This could range from one for a small indiscretion, such as coughing during the rosary, to six for a major offence, such as being dyslexic or innumerate and failing at a reading or maths test.

He would then offer you two sticks. A short stubby one, which would not hurt too much on impact but would bring with it a long, dull pain often rising in intensity. The alternative was a more traditional cane, beloved of “Just William” books and certain participants in S&M activities. This would come down at speed on your trembling open hand and inflict a sharp stinging torment. But the pain would be over in minutes after vigorous hand rubbing and strained facial expressions back at your desk.

Leaving aside the morality of a grown man taking pleasure from the pained expression of ten year olds while they laboured over the decision of which type of pain to endure, this process did at least provide me with an important life lesson. Quite often, life throws you two options, neither of which is particularly palatable. And the key is to choose the least shit.

I was reminded of Skigger this week, as the Greek Debt crisis unfolds. They are having a referendum this weekend which is basically a choice between two types of pain. A quick loan from the IMF to dull the initial pain, followed by twenty years of slow austerity, unemployment and general misery. The alternative is to reject the troika and throw themselves into two years of madness when money will possibly run out and barter will be reintroduced. And then in the nature of things, order will be restored and the Greek economy will take off.

Like many people outside Greece, I’d encourage them to vote No on Sunday and take the quick sharp pain. I know it’s easy to lecture other people on what they should do in times like this. I don’t have to live with the consequences after all. But it seems to me that it’s the only way to end the madness of the ECB. I was a big fan of Ireland joining the Euro. But now I think it’s a crazy concept. It means that private German Banks could lend money to private Irish and Greek banks who would then lend it to developers, industrialists and various other criminals. When things go sour, as they tend to do in the crazy world of international capitalism and the developers and industrialists can’t repay their loans, it’s the ordinary people of Greece and Ireland who have to pay back the debt. Pensioners, single mothers and handicapped people didn’t borrow the money in the first place. But the nature of the Euro is that they have to repay it through cuts in social welfare.

It’s so patently unfair that it hardly needs to be articulated. The system is corrupt and evil and is promoted by a right wing European media that seeks to portray the Greeks as lazy tax avoiders and reckless borrowers. Nobody ever mentions reckless lenders. When I was studying Accountancy we learned that lenders earned interest because of the risk that the other side may default. And lenders have a responsibility to know the people they are lending to.

It turns out that they earn interest because they are greedy bastards and if they are a German bank then they don’t have to worry about the other side not paying the money back because if that happens the German Government will insist that some kid in a wheelchair in Greece will bear the burden.

We live in a world where the rich are allowed to avoid tax, pay bribes and destroy the environment. Those of us in the normal world pay our taxes in the hope that the money will go to help the less fortunate in society. It is the great unspoken civil contract. But that contract is being broken in Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece. The Greeks at least have the chance to throw a spoke in the wheel of this madness this weekend.

I hope they vote no, take the sharp pain and then get on with running their own economy and currency. Short, sharp pain was always the option I took with Skigger. Two years later I was in Secondary school and corporal punishment was banned. We look back now and think that hitting kids is madness. Hopefully in a few years we’ll think the same about the Euro.

Pride, In The Name of Love

I got married in a small church in New Zealand, shared between different Christian faiths. I guess there was no  storage room because you'd see the detritus of each congregation when you visited. The Methodists would leave behind an overhead projector, which always looked odd in a church. The Presbyterians would scatter stern looking hymn books around the place and the Anglicans were fond of flags relating to dead Anzacs.

We Catholics liked to add the occasional crucifix or morbid statue.

I chose my sister to be my best man, because she was best friend and because I could. I got married without having to worry about tradition or venue. I took all of this for granted as straight men tend to do. Only our shyness and ineptitude with the opposite sex stops us from getting married. Society and the law put no other impediments in our way.

Unfortunately not everyone is so lucky. The marriage equality referendum in Ireland made me realise a lot of things about the gay community. While we tend to only notice the most flamboyant members of the LGBT community, there are thousands more living quiet lives and desperate to be as ordinary as the rest of us. That includes marrying the person they love and spending the rest of their life watching box sets and doing house work. Most of the world denies them this ordinariness. And the few countries that have allowed gay marriage have done it grudgingly.

That's why I have never felt more proud to be Irish than I did last weekend. That was when Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage through a public vote. The significance of this is that gay people in Ireland can now get married knowing that the vast majority of the public think nothing about it. In countries where the government brought in legislation, there must be a suspicion that the public still look at it with a strained eye.

I got strangely emotional during the campaign and don't think I've been as motivated about an issue since I stood for class representative in 3rd year and launched a passion fuelled campaign (I won on third count after the teacher imposed a single transferable vote procedure). The issue seemed so black and white to me, but I also sensed a new mood in Ireland and I wanted to surf on that wave.

I'm not sure when I met my first gay person. It was probably in primary school, although I didn't realise it at the time. He probably didn't either as sexuality wasn't discussed at that age. At least not in the Ireland that I grew up in.

I do remember the first gay person I definitively met. He was a friend, called Michael, that I knew when I was about 19. Michael didn't drink and owned a car. Two things that were as rare as hen's teeth when I was 19. The best night clubs where in country hotels set in idyllic countryside miles from town. Michael was happy to drive us there, observe our wild alcohol abuse and mainly futile attempts to shift (for that was the parlance of the day) members of the opposite sex. And then drive us home.

While we had a poor shifting record, we did all manage to find a girl occasionally. Michael never did but we passed no remarks of this. We all needed to achieve a delicate balance of inebriation. Just enough to get you jolly and to help you forget about your insecurities around girls, but not so much for it to turn you into a gibbering wreck. Most nights, we fell on one side or the other of this delicate nexus. But when it was achieved, it was devine.

We called it Dutch courage and assumed Michael's lack of success with the ladies was because of his deficiency in this area. Then he went to Sydney for a year and came back gay. Or more to the point  he came back from Sydney with the courage (and it wasn't even Dutch) to tell us that he was gay.

I remember the night that he told us in the pub and how little impact it had. We were only concerned about whether he could still give us a lift to night clubs.

The truth is that while most gay people in Ireland in the 1980s would have been nervous about coming out, the reaction they would generally get amongst friends and family would be positive. While the Church still exerted far too much control over people's lives, in the real world Irish people have always been understanding and generous. The best thing about last week's referendum was that it finally gave the Irish people the opportunity to express this.

I emailed a friend during the week expressing my pride in the election. He agreed and mentioned that his brother's civil union in September could now go ahead as a full wedding. I've known this guy for 17 years and never knew he had a gay brother. Now we can talk about these things as easily as saying that we have a sister with red hair. The ordinariness of the situation is the best thing about it.

I don't know where Michael is these days. While he discovered himself in Sydney, I hope he's not there now. While I love a lot of things about Australia, its social backwardness is sometimes shocking. They haven't even got around to legalising civil union yet and their Neanderthal Premier has set his stall out against gay marriage.

I hope Michael is still in Ireland or in one of the other countries that treat gay people as full citizens. We live in an often cold and unfriendly world. On May 22nd, 2015 Ireland opened the blinds and let a little warmth in. 

Anyone for tennis (or would you prefer a drink?)

Heinrich took up tennis when his knees gave out on him and he could no longer play central midfield for the West Dusseldorf Old Boys XI.

He wasn’t much good at tennis, the gammy knees saw to that, but he didn’t need to be. Nobody else at his local tennis club was either. There would be a cheer from the bar when anyone managed to get a first serve over the net. It was more a social activity and the highlight was the annual trip to Majorca for the tennis camp. His club went to the same place every April with a view to honing their court skills before the summer inter club tournaments took place.

The truth however, was that Heinrich and his mates were less interested in having their tennis skills improved and more concerned with being first to the poolside bar back at the hotel. They had some competition in that regard as several other German Tennis clubs were making the same pilgrimage.

Tennis is not a mixed sport in Germany for some reason. So the groups were single sex. Seven or so middle aged men at one table, struggling with the concept of sporting fashion and the smoking ban. Beside them, but at a discrete distance, sat a smaller but better dressed coven of female German tennis mums.

Never the twain shall meet it would seem, apart from at the mixed doubles tournament that the Hotel organised and which the all trundled off to reluctantly.

The Germans are nothing if not efficient and Heinrich and his mates would rise early to get the awkward tennis stuff out of the way before racing back to the Hotel for midday and their favourite table by the pool. The pool it must be stressed was merely there to provide a picturesque backdrop to their drinking activities. They had as little interest in swimming as they had in tennis.

I had spotted them on our first day in Majorca. I saw straight away that none of them would be troubling the Grand Slam circuit. Their gear as much as their physique told me that. I guess we’re used to seeing Nadal and Murray arrive on court with a bag as big as a family would take on a month long safari. Five or so rackets, a couple of changes of clothes and enough isotonic drinks to pickle an elephant’s kidneys.

Heinrich and his mates had perfected a more minimalist chic. They carried one racket each, the cover for which had clearly been lost years ago on a similar trip. If a string broke at 9.05am, just after play had commenced, it would have generated a nonchalant shrug from its owner and a look of envy from his colleagues as he bade his farewells and headed back to the Hotel for three hours extra sleep before the drinking started.

Apart from his racket, Heinrich carried a tracksuit top which was old but not quite old enough to qualify for retro coolness and a small towel that spent the rest of the year soaking up beer spills when he watched Schalke on TV.

All of these were packed into a small non-descript backpack. He was a paradigm of sporting fashion compared to his buddies however. One of them carried his racket and towel in a Lidl carrier bag!

We have been travelling a lot recently. Apart from this jaunt to Spain, we travelled to Luxembourg for Easter with a couple of days in Germany at either end of the trip. The people I met in Germany all worked in shops or restaurants. Even if I tried my schoolboy German, they would reply in perfect and slightly patronising English.

In Spain however, I got lots of opportunity to speak the tongue of the Fatherland. There were lots of English people there too but they tended to be older and interested in doing nothing, apart from drinking by the pool that is. So when the German tennis crowd turned up at lunchtime, the scrum at the bar resembled Juno beach in 1944. 

We borrowed bikes on most of the days we were there and headed out along the majestic Mediterranean coastline. The people we encountered along the way were mainly German and I guess they assumed we were to. As a result, I spoke more German than I did in my five years of secondary school. By the Thursday, I was almost fluent and engaged in a profound conversation with a couple from Magdeburg. The subject was 1980s East German punk music, a subject I would not previously have felt comfortable discussing in English.

Once we had established that “Du Hast Das Farbfilm vegessen” was indeed a classic of that genre, we moved on to horticulture and a discussion on the trees of the Mediterranean and their Scottish equivalents. My Kiwi wife looked on in amazement at my previously unmentioned skill. Little did she know that to their ears, I sounded like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

I did make me realise however, that much of what we learned in school still sits somewhere in the dark recesses of the brain. It makes me feel more confident that when my daughter arrives home from school seeking help with her homework, I may be able to recall how to solve quadratic equations or to name the three longest rivers in Africa.

We think that most of what we learnt in school was useless (spending thirteen years learning the Irish language certainly falls into that category) but perhaps it does have one purpose. Apart from allowing us to help our children with their homework, it also provides a foundation for countless meaningless conversations with strangers on holidays. I’ve never used German for work purposes for example, but it did allow some sweet tongued mumbling to Frauliens when I travelled in my twenties, as well as to East German tourists now.

But most of all it gave me an appreciation that there is a big world out there, full of language, exotic food and clay court tennis.