How to Be Irish

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How to Be Irish Page 21

by David Slattery


  You should have a cool day. When you are awoken in your alley in Dublin 8 or 6W at 11.15 a.m. by the sound of your totally uncool neighbour galloping by your window on a piebald pony, you should stagger into your kitchenette to brew your first coffee of the day. Coffee and cigarettes are the ideal breakfast for the cool thin person, but it is essential to only drink ethical fair trade coffee. It often costs less than unfair trade coffee. Before you can go outside, you have to dress appropriately. Males should get their skinny legs into skinny jeans, a horizontally striped top with mismatching striped cardigan and a leather jacket that you imagine Joey Ramone once wore. This will also work for females, but they could also wear a floral-print or polka dot vintage dress with ballet-pump shoes. In summer, males can wear sports sandals that, with obvious irony, have nothing sporty about them. Females can wear flip-flops. If you run out of clothes or olives, go to the Georges St Arcade to pick up some environmentally sound pre-loved outfits. In winter, if you need to go out, place a layer of newspapers under your summer outfits. But if you have heating don’t go out. If you are not seen for three months, tell your friends that you over-wintered in Biarritz.

  The Rules of Economic Inactivity

  If you want to be cool you are allowed to be economically inactive but not unemployed. The difference is not well understood by those from the countryside, but it is important. It is possible to be economically inactive in a variety of ways, while there is only one way to be unemployed. Seasonal lecturing is a grey area because many people who – finger quotation signs in the air – “teach” sign on the dole during the summer. But you are allowed to do that and remain cool. There are several common forms of economic inactivity.

  Writing a PhD is a form of economic inactivity, as is pursuing any form of research, including not turning up for lectures on your taught master’s course. Being a sole trader is an easy path to economic inactivity. You can be inactive as a web designer, animator, journalist, anything graphical or musical, or by owning your own pop-up food or clothes shop that you should run in a fashion designed to be unsuccessful. In your pop-up shop you will quickly see the practical advantages of not studying either Business or Accounting as an undergraduate. Having a qualification in multimedia, as opposed to just one medium, will enhance your chances of becoming economically inactive.

  While in this precise economic condition, you can apply for funding from a variety of sources: tap your parents regularly for small amounts and threaten that you will emigrate if funds are not forthcoming; borrow money from your partner’s wallet, man-bag or designer purse, because having separate bank accounts is so unromantic; participate in an obscure arts grant that one of your friends secured (remember to reciprocate); accidentally make a sale in your pop-up shop; smoke fags because they kill your appetite; do some – finger quotation signs in the air – “teaching” in Dublin Institute of Technology, which involves turning up to tell the uncool students actually in class how cool you are; play a gig in Whelan’s on Wexford St, which will keep you going for ages; get your parents to give you your college fees upfront for seven years for your two-year course and only pay the registration fee;27 design a website for your mate’s band who just got a gig in Whelan’s, which will keep you going for two and a half days.

  The Rules of Dating Someone Cool

  Almost as effective as carrying something cool is the tactic of dating someone who is already cool. All the coolest women have letters instead of names: AD, B, JJ, KA, PJ, JP, L and M. If you have an actual name, hopefully you are called after a Jane Austen character. I asked Emma, who is cool, if she would go on a date with Steve, who aspired to be cool, in the interest of social science. She was to report back to me on how it all went. I proposed to pay her expenses. As she was economically inactive, she had to accept. I told her to think of it as a form of grant. She got herself introduced to Steve through their mutual acquaintance D. Emma is a friend of D, who is a friend of JJ, who is registered on the same music course as Caroline. Caroline knows Steve.

  After the initial introductions, they agreed to meet upstairs in the Working Man’s Club, which is the most ironically named venue in Ireland. Emma has long red hair tied up in a bun with elastic bands. Not the kind of red hair that is often accompanied by large freckles but a more subtle unnatural red. On her research date she wore black plastic framed glasses, a genuine 1950s red peasant swing dress, imported from New York for her birthday by her friend Fanny, and red pumps. Over all this she wore her matching 1950s leather jacket. She wore a flower in her hair. She informed me that Steve wore a red and black striped cardigan that was two sizes two small for him, with skinny jeans and black runners with white soles. It was love at first sight.

  Steve carried his ironically brick-sized S180 mobile phone with extra loud ringer and built-in hearing-aid function as well as his standard iPhone 4 for e-mail and web. Emma had an iPad. They immediately compared technologies by measuring site speed and resolutions. Up to that point, Emma swore to only use Apple technology rather than anything Android, because she was an economically inactive sound engineer ignoring her research into psychoacoustics specifically in wind instrument systems.28 While not doing research, it is important not to do that research in a very well-defined topic, otherwise you might not be allowed to register for the programme. Steve and Emma sat together, gazing into each other’s screens. He sipped a Black Russian while she sipped a Hendrick’s gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber.

  There was a very cool art exhibition hanging on the walls of the Working Man’s Club of Lichtenstein-inspired paintings of mouthless women with automatic weapons. There was a very cool communications student on the music deck playing Smiths covers. Emma asked Steve to dance with the other cool people who were clutching bottles of Corona and making ironically bad dancing moves near their table. They danced together for three songs, developing a hybrid salsa-waltz move in the process.

  He asked if he could take her to dinner and she agreed. They nervously walked northwards across the river to L Mulligan Grocer in Stoneybatter. To distract themselves from the local northside Neanderthals, they discussed their tastes in music, which was a subject really important to both of them. Steve told Emma that he plays a kena, which he explained is a bamboo flute played by the Quechua Indians of Peru and Bolivia, in a band that composes soundtracks for old episodes of Hawaii Five-O. He was embarrassed to admit that he actually learned to play a Korean twelve-string zither when he was studying philosophy at Trinners. She admitted that, while her very first instrument had been a Hohner accordion, she had moved on to the piano. Yes, while it was a mainstream instrument, it was amazing the sounds that could be gotten out of it by bashing the strings with a drumstick. While she was studying the psychoacoustic effects of wind instruments, she felt it was essential that you not get caught up in actually playing the instrument yourself. Therefore, it was best not to know how to play. Steve agreed. He admitted that the kena was endangering his real appreciation of music.

  They moved on to discussing their favourite bands. They both believed that Florence and the Machine had absolutely sold out and gone mainstream, and that anyone appearing on Later with Jools Holland was a traitor to authentic music. Emma admitted to liking some mainstream bands like The Postal Service, Alex on Fire and Death Cab and, of course, As I Lay Dying. But Steve wasn’t so sure. He preferred bands that laid down a few tracks for posterity and broke up on the same day as forming. He had been in three such bands and thought that at least they had set the benchmark for anti-commercial authenticity. But they could agree that, for those who are cool, music is not something you listen to – it is an accessory.

  When they arrived in L Mulligan Grocer, they sat at a small table for two. He ordered a Schneider Tap 2 Weissbier and she had a glass of Belfast Blonde beer. The menus arrived buried in old hardback books. Studying these naturally led to a discussion of their eating habits. Emma told Steve that she was big into the locavore idea and tried to only eat in places that supported it. As a result, sh
e didn’t eat out very often. Maybe you are not cool enough to know that the locavore diet promotes a healthy planet by encouraging its followers to eat produce sourced within a ten-mile radius, which in practical terms covers all of Dublin 8. Before locavore, Emma was big into the Gourmet Burger explosion until the novelty wore off. She would now only consider Rick’s Burgers on Dame Street to be authentic, while Jo’burger in Ranelagh does cool chips. They found they shared a love of sushi and Asian food in general, but ‘you can’t get decent Asian in Dublin – everyone knows that.’

  Steve told Emma that he was once a vegan who subsisted mainly on adzuki-bean burgers, but that now he was a strict vegetarian who sometimes ate fish, chicken, burgers, mince (only when it was really lean) and steaks (only when they were rare fillets), which he would only eat when visiting his parents every weekend.

  Emma decided not to order anything and Steve ordered the bangers and mash. While they waited for the food to arrive, they compared websites on their phones, texted their mates and discussed what they didn’t see on television. Neither ever watches television because it is far more authentic and, like, better, to watch box sets of The Wire and Mad Men than to watch them on telly. If you are not watching box sets you can download everything onto your laptop and watch it there. Anyway, why would you pay a television license when you don’t need a license for a laptop?

  They consulted the whisky list. Steve had a glass of Nikka whisky from Japan and Emma had a glass of Black Ram from Bulgaria. While chatting, they, like, amazingly, discovered that they had both done Australia and both had stopped off at Krabi in Thailand on the way back. They were both on a long boat on the same day exactly two years apart. They had almost met. OMG. But now Australia is over-run with tourists and backpackers so they would rather go to, say, Belize for an authentic experience. They wondered at how they used to think Barcelona was cool. Madrid maybe or Seville in an emergency landing, but Barcelona was so over; wouldn’t even crash land there.

  They consulted the whisky list again. Steve had a Mackmyra whisky from Sweden and Emma had a Penderyn from Wales.

  They were getting on so well together by this stage that they decided to bring a bottle of chardonnay, which is back in in Dublin 8 after being out in Dublin 4, to a BYO29 in the closed-down art gallery space across the road from the jail on Arbour Hill. Whatshisname, who was with the whatdoyoucallems, was having a free gig to launch his solo career on the balalaika.

  Emma told me that the rest of the night was none of my fucking business. If I ever told anyone, especially Steve, that they had gotten together for research, she would kill me. She wouldn’t even tell me if they were going to meet again.

  Thinking Like Hegel

  If you can’t find anything cool to carry around, not even a metallic lunch-box signifying your ironic relationship to heavy labour, and no one cool will go out with you, you can resort to the last rule of being cool. Sit around a café reading post-modern criticism; criticism of anything will do. You can apply post-modern theory to practically anything you are not doing at that time. Foucault is as passé as The Eagles, though you might hesitantly refer to his Histories of Sexuality as if you read all three volumes. Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Kristeva and Bhabha are as over as leg warmers. Leg warmers are ambiguous. When you see them on someone on the bus, you wonder whether they are on the way back in or if the wearer may have just been released from a very long prison sentence. Only be seen reading these post-modern critics if you can prove you haven’t been detained at the expense of the State. You can pass off Baudrillard and Bourdieu as ironic reading only in the original French. Have Slavoj Zizek to hand only as a prelude to your Zizek story. When someone asks why you are reading that, say, ‘When I met Slavoj in The Stags Head last week, he told me blah, blah blah...’. But you cannot go wrong with Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes in the original German. Tell people you have done with the contemporary because you have gone back to revisit the father of post-modern continental thought. You won’t find anyone who has read it so you can feel free to give café lectures on German Idealism. How cool is that!

  The inverse rules on how to be cool are also valid. If you have a well-paid responsible job in genetic engineering and you read the Indo, you are definitely not cool.

  Not Being Cool: How to Be GAA

  If you live outside Dublin or have migrated into Dublin from the countryside, you may be finding it difficult to live with the pressures of trying to be hip. Help is at hand in the form of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which was founded in the late nineteenth century to cater for the needs of people who are not cool, know they are not and don’t care: basically everyone living outside Dublin 8 and 6W. Currently, it is easily the biggest organisation in the country. It was originally formed as an amateur organisation for the promotion of Gaelic Games, specifically hurling, Gaelic football and camogie, which is hurling played by women.

  The Rules for Joining the GAA

  The GAA is not just for exercise. It provides an outlet for a range of social interactions: screaming at the referee, analysing past games and testing your memory against other members, practising your ability to sit on committees and refining bureaucratic procedures. If you prove to be a hopeless player, you can become an authority on the game and how it should be played, particularly in hurling. In order to be truly Irish, never mind learning to step dance, play the fiddle or speak Irish. Join the GAA. But first you have to learn the rules. Because the GAA has strict entry criteria, not everyone will qualify.

  The Rules of Hurling on the Ditch

  We know from anthropology that the behaviour of fans is culturally determined. We know from the GAA that their fans achieve the apotheosis of Irish experience. To be a great GAA fan takes practice, practice and more practice. You can practise at home in front of the telly before going public on the terraces. Just before the match begins, make yourself a large traditional bacon sandwich with two slices of oversized grinder, to be consumed with a large mug of tea or fifteen cans of Guinness. From the first whistle of the match, you should hurl abuse as loudly as you can at the television. Aim to be heard by the neighbours five houses away. Invite witnesses around to visit, place them on the couch beside you, offer them a can and then ignore them. Carry a cloth for wiping the spit and crumbs off the television screen. You should ask the GAA membership steward, who will have arrived with his clipboard to assess your application as a fan, to sit in the corner out of line of sight of the telly and ‘to shush’ while the match is on. Accepted commentary, which can be shouted by you in any order without reference to specific action, includes:

  ‘For fuck’s sake ref, get a pair of fucking glasses.’

  ‘Get up you lazy whore.’

  ‘Get up the fucking field.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a Munster final without a brawl.’

  ‘For Jaysus sake, that’s a penalty, ref.’

  ‘Ya bollocks, get your man. GET YOUR MAN. Ah, feck.’

  ‘Where did that go? Did anyone see where that ball went? I don’t believe it. It’s in the back of the fucking net.’

  ‘Stop acting the mickey and get up off the ground.’

  ‘Things are looking good – they have the breeze behind them now.’

  ‘Drive the ball up the field, ya hoor.’

  ‘I’d say that’s a line ball. That’s a line ball, ye feckin’ blind bat.’

  ‘Free out. FREE OUT, ya blind bastard.’

  ‘He’s up. He’s down. He’s up again.’

  ‘Over the bar is the place for that ball.’

  ‘Take him on. TAKE HIM ON!’

  The second part of your assessment for fandom takes place that evening in the pub, where you should briefly discuss the match you saw that day, before moving on to the more important topic of discussing every club, county or inter-county game that a) you attended or some member of your family attended on your behalf in the last month, and b) that took place during the last seventy-five years. Novice fans are allowed to discuss games within a t
en-year period.

  Not everyone can be a supporter. In order to be a true supporter, you need to have an infallible memory for all the teams and actual individual games since the GAA was founded. Well, actually that isn’t true. Just pretend that you remember everything. As no one else remembers anything either, they won’t have the confidence to actually contradict you. If they say, ‘You haven’t a feckin’ clue what you are talking about,’ they are not challenging your memory or knowledge, they are just making conversation. You should keep going with your memories regardless. Most supporters don’t remember their own names the morning after a big win. However, beware the supporters of teams that never win. Their memories of games are probably still intact.

  Starting with an uneven year, begin thus:

  ‘Do you remember the Munster final in Thurles in 1937.’ Pause and look around. If anyone nods and looks wistfully out the window in a reverie of recall, quickly interrupt yourself and say, ‘Thirty-five, it was thirty-five. Jaysus, that was a great game. They don’t make players like that anymore.’ All nod in agreement. Allow someone else to develop the plot.

  ‘Is that the game where Billy Barry played on for twenty minutes after his leg broke?’

  ‘Broke! It was cut clean off just below the knee and he played on. Scored two points.’ And on you go. It’s improv really.

  If your team actually wins a game, you need to be ready to react to that appropriately. You can start your analysis of the winning performance by referencing last year’s failed efforts. It is unusual for a team to win in consecutive years, given the burden of mandatory celebrations that last well into the season following a victory. To join in the conversation amongst fans, you can say, ‘We got bate last year but we came back this year and won it. Our lads looked after themselves all through the terrible winter. They came out for the training on a night when you wouldn’t have shoved your cat outside for a shite. Our players didn’t care what they went through to get this win. But they didn’t do it for themselves. They did it for us, the people of this county. They played some fierce football. They played their hearts out.’ At this point you should start crying.

 

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