An informant told me that his distant English cousin had attended a funeral in Ireland as a C-lister. During the wake, the Irish cousins had persuaded him to carry the coffin to the grave. It is a great honour to be asked to be a pallbearer, especially if you are a C-lister. For practice, the proposed pallbearers – five Irish and one English – marched around the garden carrying the dining-room table between them. The Irish ones insisted that the tradition was to use a goose step, which they demonstrated in the rehearsal. Then the five Irish sobered up and forgot about it. The next day, however, because the English apprentice pallbearer was the only one of the six goose stepping, he inevitably fell over, knocking the coffin against a headstone and catapulting the corpse into the arms of the assembled mourners, who immediately learned that undertakers dress bodies by cutting the clothes along the back so that they can be wrapped on from the front. The naked-backed body was hastily rewrapped, relaid into the shattered coffin and gingerly lowered into the ground. The English cousin returned immediately to Coventry.
If you don’t humiliate the deceased and his A-list relatives by dropping the coffin, you may be invited to the after-burial lunch.
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There is a very old tradition in Ireland that, disappointingly, is no longer practised. In the past, several of the mourners would run to the home of the deceased while the rest made their way to the burial in the graveyard. At the house, they would quickly paint the outside walls, usually a dramatically different colour. This was to make sure that, when the spirit of the deceased found his way back to the house, he would fail to recognise it and wander off, thereby leaving the home free of his haunting presence.
Nowadays, after the funeral is over and the mourners have dispersed, it is not clear where the spirits of the departed go. What is clear is that, wherever they are hanging out, they read the Indo. This is not just to find out who may be joining their ranks but also to see if their relatives are keeping them in mind. This is why each year we write messages, usually in the form of poems, to our dead grannies and relatives in general to let them know how much we still miss them. Ideally, if you really miss them the meter and rhyming should be just slightly off. The most devoted poems are not professionally composed.
This one is for my grandfather hovering up there in heaven. Hi Granddad, I hope you like this:
Granddad, you were taken so quickly,
We hardly knew what to do.
Okay, maybe we didn’t paint the house so swiftly
Because, next day, we knew it was you
When we woke to the sound of Elvis tunes,
That familiar humming and singing;
The arthritic creak of your pelvic bones
On the stairs where you’re jiving and swinging;
Your unique aroma of tobacco and farts
when you bang the doors and flush the loo.
If you cease your haunting arts,
I’ll write an Indo memorial for you.
2
In the Pub: Whose Round Is it Anyway?
The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.
(William Butler Yeats)
Happily, there are no pretend ‘good old days’ in Ireland that we can withdraw to in our imaginations. If you are Irish, you have no opportunity for nostalgia because, as you know from your history, the future is the best of times. We have to stay firmly focussed on our possibilities.
History looks for the truth of a narrative, while anthropology recognises that meaning is often found in places other than in the company of the truth. The first principle of Irish pub life is that boring reality should be left at the door because the facts should never get in the way of a good story. Our stories help us to give our lives meaning by reinventing ourselves anew every day. The pub is the nearest we get in our culture to what anthropologists call liminality: being on the threshold between several states of consciousness, either psychological, metaphysical or alcoholic. Anthropologically, if you want to discover the meaning of our everyday lives, you have to go to the pub. Naturally, the appropriate research methodology is participative drinking.
* * *
The Rules for Assembling Your own Pub
We have become famous, or perhaps notorious, for our pubs. The pub is the best place to talk, and it’s good to talk even when no one is listening. In fact, it is best to talk when no one is listening. In that regard, the pub is like psychoanalysis. The traditional Irish pub is now available in a self-assembly flat-pack that can be shipped all over the world. If you can’t be bothered going out or you live in Nepal, why not get yourself your own Irish pub? Imagine the scene in Minsk when an eager would-be publican excitedly unpacks his boxes of pub on his bedroom floor, and organises the step-by-step instructions which are printed on the back of forty-six beer mats. These itemise the included stools, counter-tops, pint glasses, beer taps and barrels, stuffed representatives of indigenous Irish fauna, cut-out leprechauns, and fatigued-pine tables and chairs, which are the elements of the traditional pub. The directions will helpfully indicate the precise arrangements of these components to maximise the craic (pronounced ‘the craic’), hitherto supposedly only available on the Emerald Isle itself. The craic, as explained in pub-assembly kits, is the name given to the spontaneous outbreak of unpredictable social interaction in Irish pubs. This is a bit of a swindle because back in Ireland you only use the concept of the craic if a) you are a sociologist carrying out research into Irish behaviour in pubs; b) you are drawing up self-assembly pub instructions; c) you are an historian of ideas; d) you lack spontaneity and should be at home in your own pop-up pub and not bothering people in an actual pub; or e) a group of tourists comes into a pub looking for it and you point at a stuffed badger.
But how are you supposed to know that there is no craic in a real Irish pub if you come from a place where there is no Irish Diaspora and no knowledge of Irish pub life, or even a tradition of drinking pints? Pity those from the Mediterranean, brought up on effete glasses of wine, or the Japanese, who are accustomed to shots of Sake, having to down twenty-two pints of Guinness for the sake of the craic. Our leading export success, that is the ersatz pub, is evidence of the power of the idea abroad that only we Irish know how to really enjoy ourselves. If the proper pub parts are provided, this enjoyment can be shared by anyone. But this idea is a huge marketing lie. We don’t have any craic in our pubs. That is a myth created by the tourist industry.
Picture the scene: a pub packed with Irish people quietly sitting doing nothing. When a pair of tourists walk in, at a secret signal from the barman, the place erupts into an explosion of laughter, shouting and mayhem. This is true except that I am exaggerating slightly. We don’t sit there silently. Before the tourists arrive we are engaging in messing.
Messing is to the Irish what the craic is to tourism. Messing is what we do all the time in school. ‘Slattery stop messing down there at the back and get on with your work,’ was a familiar reprimand from my childhood. Messing is also what you do at the back of a bus. As an Irish child, you learn messing in school as training for your later pub life. In order to know how to mess properly, it is best if you went to school in Ireland. But messing is a form of spontaneous behaviour that can conform to rules. Unfortunately, the would-be publican in Minsk is missing the instructions on how to mess in an Irish pub. He only has the ones about the craic.
How to Mess
The physical environment of the Irish pub is not its defining characteristic. Rather, it is a three-dimensional stage on which we play out the dramas of our daily lives through the social interaction we call messing. There are rules that determine one’s success or failure at messing. If you meet people in the pub on a daily or weekly basis, conversation should focus on relating the events of your life during the previous day or week. The more often you meet, the greater effort is required in thinking up new things that happened to you. This is a branch of messing called talking shite. When you are more practised, it’s called talking pure s
hite, which is one of the highest forms of messing.
Shite should be reported as if it is true and should be delivered with such frequent and blatant reference to customary techniques for demonstrating its veracity that your audience cannot but believe it. Pub conversations usually contain such phrases as ‘May God strike me dead if I am lying’ (lean away from the speaker for safety), ‘As God is my judge’, ‘I am not telling you a word of a lie’, ‘I swear on a metre of Bibles it happened’, ‘To be honest …’, and ‘I am not lying.’ In talking shite, there are no facts. The more outrageous the story, the harder you should work to make it believable. If your best rhetorical skills fail you, say, ‘Right so, I can’t help it if you don’t believe me. There is no point talking to thick bastards like ye who think I am a liar.’ Then move to the next table and see how you get on there. Talking shite is very challenging because it is the act of balancing the completely fantastical with the just credible. Alcohol will play a part in breaking down the natural resistance of your audience to shite. That is why so much alcohol is served in pubs. Remember, be prepared to stop instantly when any tourists enter the pub and start the craic immediately.
Topics for pub conversation can relate to your own relationships in the past, present and future, and the relationships of your friends, family and complete strangers that can be made interesting. It is okay to discuss politics, religion, sport, sex, the state of the country, travels past and planned, and personal traumas from home, work or college, as long as you are sure that no one is actually listening. But pub conversation etiquette does demand that when someone is talking shite, you should demonstrate you are pretending to listen to the points being made. This can be achieved through the use of a number of customary expressions of interest. These expressions allow you to think what you are going to say next while looking like you are listening. Examples of these useful Hiberno-English expressions of evidence of listening, when you are really not, along with their English translations, are:
‘I don’t believe you’, which is ‘I do believe you’ in Hiberno-English.
‘Go away out of that’, which translates as ‘Don’t go away out of that.’
‘Fuck off, will you’ translates as ‘Do not fuck off, will you.’
‘God preserve us from all harm’ translates as ‘Nice One.’
‘You’re some bull-shitter’ translates as ‘I am nominating you for a Pulitzer Prize.’
‘Christ Almighty’ translates as ‘Wow.’
‘Jaysus Christ Almighty’ translates as ‘OMG.’
‘That’s very interesting’ translates as ‘You’re an anorak.’
‘That’s pure shite’ translates as ‘That is very interesting. Keep going.’
These expressions are useful because it is difficult to drink, think and listen, let alone drink, think, listen and talk all at once. If under pressure, it is normal for you to cease thinking. But, helpfully, there are many guides to how much you should drink. You have drunk too much when you become boring. However, unfortunately, when drunk, it becomes impossible to recognise that you are boring. You need to nominate a trusted friend in advance to tell you. They will do this when you make the same point fourteen times in a row. You have also drunk too much if you are illustrating your shite with standard violence such as the familiar headlock or sitting on your interlocutor’s face. An essential rule of pub life is knowing exactly when to go home: not too early and not too late. The memories of the night before are better when you can just remember them and when you vaguely remember ‘acting the eejit’ rather than ‘acting the maggot’.
Pub conversation may begin with reference to actual news items or major world events and build on this foundation. These topics can form the basis for elaboration. Boasting is acceptable only as a prelude to describing self-inflicted disaster. ‘My boss said I was brilliant. He gave me a promotion and a fifty per cent pay rise that brings my pay to almost three euro an hour. I was so happy I lost track of what I was doing and set fire to the building, which burned down. So we had to move to a cowshed twenty kilometres outside town.’ Your respondent may say, ‘Jaysus Christ Almighty’ or ‘Really?’ Then you typically say, ‘No. I’m only messing,’ leaving doubt as to which part, if any, of that day’s news was real. Talking about people who no one knows, particularly the opinions of people no one knows, can be boring. ‘I sat beside a guy today on the bus and he told me that he was a Shamrock Rovers fan’ is boring. You should add a little context to make it interesting: ‘I sat beside a guy today on the bus. He told me that he kidnapped a Shamrock Rovers player, strapped a bomb to his chest and held him captive until after a major match’ is not boring. The standard response in this case is: ‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘Are you messing?’
‘No, I am not. Ask Mike – he was there.’
‘So what did the Shamrock Rovers fan demand?’ And on you go.
One of my favourite pub stories is the following, which has the virtue of being true. Feel free to use it, inserting yourself into the action in whatever role you like. Four second-year medical students broke into the mortuary in their college in the middle of the night and stole a cadaver that had just been made ready for dissection, having spent two years immersed in formaldehyde. At home they dressed the corpse in trousers, shoes, an Irish rugby jersey, a woollen overcoat and a hat, because the weather was cold. They took it to support the Irish rugby team in a match against Scotland. The Irish team won so they took their companion, who had proved to be an excellent talisman, to the pub to celebrate. Following a mighty session in the pub, they headed off home in an old car belonging to one of them. They put their dead friend between two of them in the back seat. Driving at ten miles an hour, they had not gone very far when they were stopped by a garda. The garda put his head through the driver’s open window. Shining his flashlight around the faces of the occupants, his light eventually fell on the face of the cadaver who had been dead for two years. The garda asked the inebriated driver, ‘What is wrong with your man in the back of the car?’
‘Ah’, said the driver, ‘he’s had a few too many to drink. He’s sleeping it off. He’ll be all right. He’s in good hands. We are medical students. We are taking him home to bed.’
‘Get him home and pour a few cups of hot tea into him,’ says the garda. Off they drove to the medical faculty where they returned their companion to the dissection room, none the worse for his adventure.
It is not important what you are drinking in the pub as long as you have an uninterrupted supply. A few of us actually like Guinness. The rest of us just pretend to like it while recommending it to tourists, for the craic. If you are a tourist visiting Ireland and you want to find a good pub, just hide your guidebook and enter the first one you find that is crowded but with just enough room to accommodate you and your party. There may be an unemployed Japanese subway shover at the door to help you squeeze inside. If you want to find a good pub, bring good friends. You are allowed to talk to strangers and you can make an auspicious start by introducing yourself in as complicated a fashion as possible, using appropriate hyperbole. For God’s sake don’t say, ‘Hi, I’m from Chicago.’ Say: ‘My plane just made an emergency landing at the airport after the two wings fell off. My wife and luggage are scattered all over Longford. I thought I would never see another pint of Guinness.’ Then you are in.
Smoking Rules
The ban on smoking in pubs in 2004 became the basis of new pub etiquette with a whole new form of interaction, whereby the pub population cyclically breaks into the two groups: smokers and non-smokers. Smokers must congregate on the streets outside pubs or in the specially assembled plastic annexes, hastily erected on the sides of bars, with enough air holes to meet the regulations. Non-smokers should stay inside.
When the ban was initially imposed, I travelled to a small bar in the midlands to assess its effects. Everyone said it was harsh on auld fellas who enjoyed a harmless few fags in the local. Fags are always harmless when smoke
d by auld fellas whose wives may have come to the view that they have lived long enough. When I arrived at my destination, I found the entire population of the small isolated bar, including the barman, standing outside the front door trying to shelter from a light shower, and all happily sucking on cigarettes. Inside, it was warm, dry and empty. On the small round tables stood the abandoned pints of stout, which were covered with beer mats to indicate that their owners would be back.
There are rules of behaviour in smoke-free pubs. Initially, both smokers and non-smokers assemble inside. If you are a smoker, you should wait until a high point is about to be reached in a non-smoker’s pure shite. Then you should loudly interrupt by announcing that you have to go outside for a fag and that everyone should wait until you get back before the non-smoker proceeds to the punch line. One or two others will join you outside. Regardless of the quality of the experience in the cold and rain, you should laugh loudly on returning to the non-smokers inside, giving the impression that both the company and sublime knowledge shared outside are huge compensation for dying younger than those remaining on the prosaic inside. If you are a non-smoker, you will be asked to ‘guard the drinks’, which is the signal that now is a good time to talk about those smokers who have just gone outside. Talking behind people’s backs is a mainstay of pub conversation. In fairness, smokers are effectively saying ‘You can now talk about me’ when they go outside for a cigarette. They are outside in the rain talking about those inside with their fecking pink lungs.
If you don’t smoke, to maintain social contact you can take up the habit or go outside with the smokers for, say, every other cigarette. It is clingy to go outside for every cigarette. Such behaviour may attract comment behind your back. Be mindful of the fact that, in Ireland in general and in the pub in particular, a breach of social etiquette will not give rise to a comment made directly to the offending party. Such a confrontation will be avoided at almost any cost. No one will ever say that they think your behaviour is inappropriate. The strongest rebuke may take the form of your being asked to ‘Cop yourself on.’ This reprimand is kept for dire emergencies.
How to Be Irish Page 3