The Lone Ranger

Panned by many critics, I decided to see this film for myself. Fond memories of the stirring William Tell Overture from the 1950's American TV series, repeated throughout my childhood on British television, drew me into the cinema.

I found an adventure film that was clunky in places but pretty entertaining overall, in a Pirates of the Carribean sort of way (after all, it was directed by Gore Verbinski). In other words, a film destined for repeat TV broadcasts on Boxing Day afternoons for semi-desperate families in search of distraction. And given the reputed $150 million loss on the film that the studio is said to be facing, there would need to be plenty of repeats.

Johnny Depp plays Tonto. With grey and black facepaint rather than Jack Sparrow eyeliner, he is a wily Commanche with a raven on his head and the witty narrator of the story. What unfolds is a myth of origin in which John Reid, a somewhat inept Texas lawyer, becomes transformed into the Lone Ranger after an ambush by outlaws that almost kills him. In the same ambush, his brother, a Texas Ranger, and five deputies are killed. Tonto rescues this gravely wounded tenderfoot and helps him to become the the legendary defender of justice who will right the wrongs perpetrated by the lawless on the frontier.

The film stays faithful to the original features of the Lone Ranger story, played out over 3000 American radio shows in the 1930's and 1940's, but at the same time cutely sends them up. This creates a tension which at times is funny and at others is rather grating.

Furthermore, the wrongs that the Lone Ranger now has to right have become much greater and include: gangster capitalism, the extermination of Native-Americans and the subversion of the military. This makes the film overlong and somewhat indigestible in places.

Yet there is great cinematography, the frontier West has rarely looked more starkly beautiful, and some dramatic action sequences. Overall I'd give it three stars.

Switch on Rossini and pass the Christmas cake. High-ho Silver, away!

The Writers Group and Seamus Heaney

A workshop group for writers was begun in Belfast by Philip Hobsbaum in 1962. It was based at Queen's University and attracted young writers such as Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty and Seamus Heaney.  

The writers group met weekly to share and discuss work in progress. In the early days, it also hosted an annual dinner and writing competition, as the pictures below show, with young Heaney and Longley to the fore. In 1966 Philip Hobsbaum left Belfast for Glasgow and Seamus Heaney became chair of the group.

This writers group has continued to meet ever since. Its membership list would almost read as a veritable roll-call of writers in Northern Ireland of the past 50 years. For example, the group has included Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson and Sinead Morrissey, to mention but a few of the many writers that have brought drafts of their work for fellow writers to read and comment on.

This is a very important and developmental process for any writer. I have been part of the writers group for the past 12 years and in that time the group has been led by Colin Teevan, Daragh Carville, Sinead Morrissey, Ian Sansom and Ciaran Carson who have helped a new generation of writers to come to the fore.

The writers group is holding its own tribute to Seamus Heaney on Weds 11 September. Please bring one poem of his to read that has a special meaning to you. We meet as usual in the Heaney Centre of Queen's University from 4-6 pm. All are welcome.

Seamus Heaney

In June I went on a tour of the Heaney Country with a group of friends. The tour was led by Eugene Kielt, a native of Magherafelt and a Heaney enthusiast who has many Heaney artefacts in his guest house.

We travelled to Heaney's birthplace at Mossbawn (between Toome and Castledawson) and visited places in rural South Derry that had featured in many of his poems. At the age of 12 he began to move away, gaining a scholarship to a boarding school in Derry and from there he went to Belfast to study at Queen's.

His early life experience features so much in his poetry. This trip showed me just how formative his childhood wanderings and close observation of rural life had been. And just how much had changed in that country during the sixty years or so since. Instead of being populated by thatched farmsteads on wee lanes through the bogland, the country was filled with large detatched houses with wrought-iron gates and agribusinesses. But we went to two special places that were pretty much unchanged.

The forge: a tiny thatched cottage, where we were given a guided tour by the retired blacksmith, a contemporary of Seamus's, who had grown up there. The tiny cottage was divided in two by a curtain: on the one side the forge and bellows, surrounded by anvils, hammers and all manners of blacksmiths tools; on the other, a hearth with small black range and two armchairs, the family slept in the eaves on a wooden platform.

Lough Beg: not a true lough, but a widening of the river Bann into wetlands where cattle grazed and Seamus used to play with friends, most notably his cousin who was murdered by paramilitaries in 1975. This was the source of one of his finest poems.

May he rest in peace.

The Strand at Lough Beg

In Memory of Colum McCartney

All round this little island, on the strand
Far down below there, where the breakers strive
Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.
--Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3


Leaving the white glow of filling stations
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills toward Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars--
Along the road, a high, bare pilgrim's track
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of yew.

There you used hear guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought the shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.

Across that strand of ours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
 

RLS and Shetland

Robert Louis Stevenson is connected with Shetland in a number of interesting ways. Orkney and Shetland were the destination of his first sea voyage in 1869. He travelled there with his father (a renowned engineer) on a tour of inspection of the many lighthouses he had built in the islands. The most spectacular of these being on Muckle Flugga, a rocky outcrop off the wild north shore of Unst, the most northerly island of the Shetlands.

RLS was eighteen and his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a lighthouse engineer. He trained for this career for some months, but then went on to study Law at Edinburgh University. Here he began to write and gained his first publications. Towards the end of his life he wrote a series of essays about this early part of his life, explaining that he enjoyed the outdoor adventure part of being an engineer but not the office-bound majority of the work.

RLS was a prolific travel and adventure writer. And despite always being in poor health, he managed a great many adventurous journeys in his short life: travelling by canoe, donkey, train and boat across Europe, America, the Pacific and Australasia. He ended up living in Samoa and died there aged 44 years.

After publishing many articles and essays, his first major success was 'Treasure Island'. This work was started in 1881 and first serialised in a childrens magazine under the pseudonym Captain George North. The manuscript was revised and published as a book under his own name in 1883. RLS's map of Treasure Island bears a strong resemblance to Unst, the most northerly of the Shetlands.

I still have my copy of this book, given to me as a present on my seventh birthday.



The Sea Dog

 

I'm a plain man

 

been where it's hot as pitch

 

and colder than winter frost

 

huge sea tossing the fore-deck

 

ropes and mainsails thrumming

 

nor-easterly cutting yer bones,

 

many's the shipmate never come back

 

left under stones in a cove

 

wreck-wood across the grave -

 

skerries groaning, gulls screaming

 

black crags cleaving the surf.

I talks square I do

 

none can tell why he picked it

 

the Cap'n always a careful man

 

atop the cliff with his spyglass

 

no fields, not a tree

 

nary a lubber on the land

 

and us hauling the sea-chests after

 

cursing the wind and sleet.

Buried 'em?

                         I reckon us did

 

The map?

                         I won't peach

 

Another?

                         Thank'ee kindly

 

Rum...

                         it's been meat and drink

 

man and wife to me.

Lughnasa, Cycling and the Wild Cat

Monday was Lughnasa, the pagan festival that marks the midpoint between the Summer and Autumn Solstices. Traditionally this festival celebrates the beginning of harvest and is marked by ceremonies of thanksgiving that often take place at the tops of hills and mountains.

Like many pagan festivals, Lughnasa has been assimilated by the established church in Ireland; for example, the blessing of fields and the annual pilgrimmage that takes place to the summit of Croagh Patrick in Co Mayo.

I havent been to the tops of any mountains recently. Although I have been climbing hills, for I have begun to ride my bike again after a gap of three years. It feels very good to be back in the saddle with the fresh air on my face, especially in the warm weather we've been having.

There are plenty of fine rural rides that begin from my front door and proceed through back roads towards the Mountains of Mourne. This country is full of drumlins and you cannot go far without coming to steep little ascents (and descents). The old legs spin in my lowest gears and I just about manage to get up the hills with my thigh muscles complaining. Then the delight of sweeping downhill at speed, fields and hedgerows rushing by - before you reach the next uphill. I'm steadily getting fitter, but after the long layoff it's a slow process.

As I was nearing my home on my last ride, I spotted one of the wild cats that lives in the old graveyard. They arent true wild cats but are feral cats of a domestic breed; they behave like wild animals and keep well clear of people (they will run off if you get within thirty feet).

The wee cat leapt down from the hedge with something heavy in its mouth and began to trot up the road ahead of me.  Noticing my approach, the small cat (not much bigger than a kitten) tried to speed up, but was weighed down by what it was carrying. As I gained on it, the cat dropped its burden in the road and disappeared into the hedge.

I rode towards the little grey lump it had left lying in the road and saw that the cat had killed a baby rabbit (only a little smaller than itself). The cat had been hauling its prey back to its lair when I had startled it. I passed by feeling sure that the wee cat was watching me carefully and would retrieve the dead rabbit just as soon as the coast was clear.

Summer School

I've just returned from the John Hewitt Summer School. A writers' week of readings, talks, workshops and performances; all taking place in the Market Place Theatre of the dual-cathedral town of Armagh. A short stride across the leafy Mall (not a large shopping centre, but an Eighteenth Century racecourse) and you were soon immersed.

I particularly enjoyed the readings of Carlo Gebler, Penelope Shuttle, Gavin Corbett, James Byrne, Deirdre Madden, Conor O'Callaghan and Anne Enright. The Voice Squad in concert were great too - celebrating the melancholic in popular song. But my highlight was The Play of The Book by Ian Sansom and The Wireless Mystery Theatre. This was a very witty and inventive insight into the life of a writer and the trials of the creative process. It managed to be funny as well as profound - no mean achievement.

Writing is of course a solitary pursuit. Writers create things and interact with characters inside their head. So for me the past week has been a veritable overdose of stimulation. Each day filled with writers and talk about writing from nine in the morning till after closing time. Plenty of recollections and banter with old friends as well as the delight of making some new ones. It's all been great and now I'm coming down, like an addict from crack cocaine.

The Old School

I recently revisited my old secondary school in Gloucester. This trip was not driven by nostalgia, for I have already written here that most of my teachers managed to instil in me a sense of inadequacy and failure which was reinforced by a culture of sadistic violence. Indeed, there was just one teacher who stood out as quite different, who managed to instil in me an enthusiasm for words and literature. His name was John Passey, and I wrote a tribute to him on 10 July 2012.

This return trip was driven by curiosity, for Central Technical School for Boys was about to be demolished. I felt the need to have one last look around the old place before it became rubble. It would then be transformed into playing fields for the new Gloucester Academy.

The old school hosted an open day for former pupils - in truth, a farewell. There were 55 years of memorabilia: old photos of pupils and staff, school magazines and files of newspaper cuttings. There was even a former teacher: Pierre, the spiky French teacher (nicknamed The Twitch), who was only 15 years older than us (although, at the time, he seemed ancient). On the day, Pierre was sought out and upbraided by Steve Pitman for a particularly humiliating exam mark given to him some 45 years ago - as they say, revenge is a dish best served cold!

Around 400 people attended this open day - a surprisingly large number. As I walked around I noticed how small everything seemed. The interior of the school was altered but I could still reel off the name and nickname of each teacher as I walked past their classroom. Few rooms were open. One of these was Nero's - the forbidding Welsh Maths teacher, who would prowl around while you slaved silently over your equations. Nero was well named, for he would often erupt into random violence. His speciality was repeatedly banging a kids head against the wall whilst getting the victim to recite the correct answer. I once saw him hit a kid so hard with the long pole that opened the top windows that he broke it in half across his back. To this day I have a fear of anything mathematical.

Astoundingly, some parts of the school were completely unchanged. The woodwork and metalwork rooms still had the same battered old benches with vices attached. And the gym still had the same wallbars, ropes and changing rooms. I remember Benny Hill standing at the exit from the showers with a cricket bat, whacking each kid across the buttocks with it as punishment for using too much warm water.

There were many such reminiscences and plenty of humour too. One of the exhibits was photos of graffiti found inside the small cupboard of the Geography room, where Basil Harris would exile kids in the dark after he had spreadeagled them over a desk and beaten them with his dap. The dap had a name, written across the forefoot (which for the life of me I cant recall). The kid that was to be punished was forced to go to the cupboard to collect the dap and bring it to Basil for his beating. The graffiti in the cupboard was a series of scratched names and dates effected by the kids in exile, one of which had the rider - 'the boy that Basil couldnt tame'.

I took lots of photos. I was glad I went back to see the place before it was demolished. In retrospect I still gained a great deal whilst I was at Central, despite the violence and humiliation that was normal there. I was young and a good learner, I made many friends, some of which I am still close to. But I dont believe they were the best days of my life. For, after I left the school at 18, it took me another decade to discover that in fact I wasnt stupid (the overriding message of the education I had received). At a turning point in my life, I took the plunge and returned to study as a mature student. I really enjoyed the challenge but was very surprised to gain a distinction in the Masters degree at Manchester University. Following that I was awarded a bursary to study for a Ph. D. and this led me into a successful career in academia.

 

My class photo, aged 15. Can anyone pick me out?