1) The correct term of address for Camilla Parker-Bowles, King Charles III’s consort, is “Your Royal Consortship,” and thereafter, “Chooks,” not “Ducky.”
2) The midnight assault on Buckingham Palace by the Coldstream Guards was led by Captain Sir Reginald Hogg-Blother, CMG, VC, KCMP, VSOP, not Col. Alistair Pimpington-Rumpworth, GCMG, ASAP.
3) Under the terms of the abdication agreement, Queen Elizabeth may appear in public, but will not be allowed a handbag.
An article in the November issue, “Polar Bear Attacks in Downtown Omaha Up 35 Percent,” contained an error. According to the National Polar Bear Attack Center, there have been no polar bear attacks in downtown Omaha since the late Eocene era.
An article in the June issue, “Berkshire Hathaway Off 38,000 in One Day as Investors Flee,” mistakenly gave the impression that Berkshire Hathaway stockholders engaged in panic selling following a report that CEO Warren Buffett had been eaten by a great white shark while wading in Lake Michigan off Chicago’s Grant Park. Mr. Buffett was eaten by a polar bear when he stopped to fill his tank at a gas station outside Omaha.
A correction in the current issue incorrectly identified President Harry Truman’s middle name as “R.” His correct middle name was “Delano.” We regret the error.
—Forbes FYI, November 2001
YOUR HOROSCOPE
VIRGO
(Aug. 23–Sept. 22)
Jupiter just passed through your fifth house and left it a mess. However, there are several good cleaning services that specialize in mopping up after large planets. If your business partner is an Aries, he’s probably cheating you, but don’t worry: An asteroid shower is passing through his house. However, now is not the time to run for Congress or regravel the driveway.
LIBRA
(Sept. 23–Oct. 23)
Take that shotgun barrel out of your mouth and do something positive for a change! Wash the car, tip the pizza man an extra dollar, propose to the airport security person who’s just asked you to turn your belt buckle inside out. Do not appoint Pisces as your executor. He’s sleeping with your girlfriend.
SCORPIO
(Oct. 24.–Nov. 21)
Scorpios love a threesome, but with Taurus in Virgo and Capricorn in Aquarius, this is no time for sex with Gemini. Instead concentrate on ridding the basement of radon and learning classical Portuguese so that you finally make good on your vow to enjoy the Lusiads of Camões in the original. Sell your remaining AOL when it hits 73 cents a share.
SAGITTARIUS
(Nov. 22–Dec. 21)
If you drive a Swedish or Japanese car, avoid oncoming sixteen-wheelers driven by amphetamine-crazed Libras. With your parents redoing their wills, this is an opportune time to tell them that it was your brother’s idea, not yours, to put them in that assisted-living home that’s just been cited by the state attorney general for health code violations.
CAPRICORN
(Dec. 22–Jan. 19)
Concentrate on financial matters. Now’s an ideal time to “come clean” with the SEC about that $1.4 billion “loss” you reported in the second quarter, but make sure your commissioner is a Leo or Cancer, or you could find yourself sharing a cell with Michael Skakel for the next ten years. By all means treat yourself to that new yacht, but with Neptune on the rise, be on the lookout for giant sea serpents, oil spills, and rogue North Korean submarines looking to provoke an international incident.
AQUARIUS
(Jan. 20–Feb. 18)
Do not engage in any “air” element activities, such as bungee jumping, skydiving, or playing professional basketball. Instead, concentrate on indoor activities, such as baking cakes, vascular surgery, and insider trading. It’s also a good time to recharge your intellectual batteries. Recite Proust out loud in pig Latin. Emembrance-ray of Hings-tay Ast-pay . . . But be wary of voices you hear that aren’t really “there.”
PISCES
(Feb. 19–March 20)
Your friends are sick and tired of hearing you complain and are plotting to kill you. Don’t go to the police—they hate you, too, and are in league with your friends. Move to the Cape Verde Islands and take up whaling until they’ve forgotten you ever existed, then move back and act like it never happened. But no more whining about your problems!
ARIES
(March 21–April 19)
Avoid kitchen appliances and people named Jim, Nancy, or Blethersthwaite-Jones. Be wary of letters from shareholders whom you have bankrupted. If you encounter anyone with freckles, throw white wine on them and shout, “Fiend—you have no power here!” Tell the waiter the fish has “too much mercury” and send it back. Menace the people at the next table with the pepper grinder.
TAURUS
(April 20–May 20)
Postpone that trip to Spain, Mexico, or other Latin countries. Write Merrill Lynch and propose that they make you their new corporate logo. Do not have sex with cows until the bovine spongiform encephalitis epidemic is erased from the planet. If you find yourself in a china shop, violently smash everything in it. People expect that, and with Pisces rising, you don’t want to disappoint.
GEMINI
(May 21–June 21)
We told you—didn’t we?—not to tightrope-walk across Victoria Falls in Manolo Blahniks when Capricorn and Libra were in your eleventh house. But listening has never been a Gemini strong point. All you can do at this point is try to swim faster than those crocodiles and postpone making any long-term romantic commitments. If you make it to the mudbank, avoid Leos and Scorpios.
CANCER
(June 22–July 22)
Go easy on the hollandaise—your cardiologist has four kids in college and is just looking for an excuse to do a triple bypass. When taxiing for takeoff, do not stand up and shout, “Allahu akbar!” but do leave yourself open to the possibility of romance, especially with wildly attractive, scantily clad members of the opposite sex. An old friend posing as a telemarketer for a long-distance phone company is searching desperately for you with amazing news. Take the call.
LEO
(July 23–Aug. 22)
Watch out for radioactive bags of potato chips, rivers of molten lava, and people who introduce themselves only as “Turk.” Keep your left arm straight and your chin down. Listen to Aries, but say you’ll have to get back to him. Avoid asparagus and manatees.
—Forbes FYI, September 2002
Out and About
* * *
Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
—ALFONSO THE LEARNED
RAMBLES WITH MAGGIE
“Oh, the poobs are hortin’ something terrible,” said the porter at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin.
There was a sly, diversionary agenda to his banter about the calamitous economic impact of the recent smoking ban on the pubs. My friend Maggie O’Moyne and I had been waiting for the rental car to arrive. This being Ireland, it was now going on two hours late. But this being Ireland, neither of us could muster more than bemused curiosity over the delay. By this point back home, we’d have been in a cold, litigious rage. Yet despite having imbibed nearly toxic amounts of caffeine in the Merrion’s cozy lobby, richly hung with gleaming, important paintings, we were all at peace.
“Don’t you adore Ireland?” Maggie mused rhetorically for the fifteenth time.
She has adored Ireland since she came here a quarter century ago after her disgrace with the Brazilian ambassador at the Knickerbocker Gold Cotillion. Ireland being Ireland, it took her in, no questions asked, and here for two years in her ancestral land she thrived, befriending everyone—poets, painters, players, pipers, politicians. Her memoir of that sojourn, Rambles in Ireland, is considered a classic.
In the fullness of time—the Good Lord be thanked—the car arrived and we could begin our sentimental journey. We would visit three notable haunts of Maggie’s youth: Luggala, Glin Castle, and St. Clerans. The first is home to Ireland’s last great dandy; the second, to the twenty-
ninth and last Knight of Glin; the third was once the home of John Huston, the famous director. All three are open to the public, for sums ranging from impressive to quite manageable.
Though we were already running late, we had to stop at Joyce’s Martello tower in Sandycove, where the opening lines of Ulysses are set (“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . .”). Brave, pink-skinned swimmers plunged into the surging, snot-green, frigid waves of the Forty Foot Pool. Emerging from the tower thinking Joycean thoughts, we were drenched by the day’s tenth or eleventh rainfall. Otherwise, it was a glorious day in May. Moistly, we drove to nearby Dalkey and warmed ourselves inside and out at Finnegan’s over pints of Guinness and baked Dalkey crab.
On the way to Roundwood in County Wicklow, Maggie told a convoluted story about one of her Irish friends, someone named Roderick.
“My God,” she said as we hove into Roundwood toward late afternoon, “there he is. Exactly where I left him two years ago.”
Roderick was standing unsteadily on the pavement outside a pub, smoking a cigarette. The recent smoking ban has driven half the country’s population onto the sidewalks. He grinned at Maggie’s approach, not in the least surprised at her sudden appearance after all these years. In a country where highway projects are rerouted by town planners because they might displace notable fairy homes such as the Tree of Latoon, serendipity is taken for granted here.
He was on his fourth Irish coffee, following we guessed about as many pints, and was all congeniality. At his stage of inebriation, bar patrons in most other countries start throwing punches or shouting obscenities at the widescreen TV.
“I’m inside with a very disreputable local personage,” Roderick informed us. “I warn you, he’s a serious alcoholic.”
We went inside and met his friend, who greeted us warmly, if wobbily. He turned out to be a distinguished musician who records with Van Morrison and the Chieftains and is brother to Ireland’s most famous woman singer.
“You know what she’s worth?” Roderick murmured as his friend staggered off toward the Gents. “A hundred and ten million euros. How much is that in pence?”
“Don’t you adore Ireland?” Maggie said in the car. We were now seriously late. A spectacular vista opened to our left. It seemed familiar, though I had not been to this part of Ireland. Then the next day we passed a sign indicating that Mel Gibson filmed part of Braveheart here.
As Maggie drove, she told me about our host tonight, her old friend the Honorable Garech a Brún. Garech is the son of Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne, one of three legendarily beautiful Guinness sisters. His brother Tara Browne was killed at age twenty-one in 1966 when he drove his Lotus Elan at lethal speed into the back of a parked van in London. Tara’s friend John Lennon memorialized the event in the song “A Day in the Life” (“I heard the news today, oh boy . . .”).
Garech founded Claddagh Records, which started the Irish music revival and preserved much of Ireland’s musical patrimony from oblivion. He’s lived at Luggala for many years and is married to an Indian princess. Really, there is nothing about him that is not exotic. At one point in our visit, Maggie came into accidental possession of a piece of paper containing Garech’s most frequently dialed phone numbers. Among them were Bono’s cell phone, a dozen maharajahs and maharanis, Chez L’Ami Louis restaurant in Paris, and the Taj Mahal.
“You’ve never met anyone like him,” Maggie said.
We drove through a gate and descended into a long, misty valley with a river-fed lake. The road leveled as we went through a mossy glade. It felt like going through a time warp. As we emerged, I saw what looked like a small Greek temple by the shore of the lake.
“That’s where the brother’s buried. Look, deer.”
We were in an open field planted with immense four-hundred-year-old specimen trees. And yes, there were deer.
The house loomed ahead, a low white Egyptian Gothic confection with crenellations. Luggala. It was built as a hunting lodge in the 1780s and has twice been given by a father to a daughter as a wedding present. It appears in the 2004 movie King Arthur. Everything here seems to have been a movie set.
Garech emerged blinking and watery-eyed from a nap to greet us. And now the illusion of being in Middle Earth was complete. Luggala’s master is diminutive but dominates a room by stepping into it. I couldn’t decide—man, leprechaun, hobbit . . . wizard? He carried a walking stick and had a bald pate, long gray wispy beard, hair tied in an unkempt ponytail, and was impeccably dressed in a baby-blue tweed three-piece suit. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d reached into his pocket and produced either a flintlock pistol or a mandrake root. His eyes gleamed with intelligence and hospitality and a trace of sadness. Later he said to me, “I’m actually a very shy person.” Garech looks at you with a half smile, as though daring you to blurt out whatever thought you’re withholding. In my experience, aristocrats are usually cool to the touch. This one glowed like a peat fire.
His friend and Luggala’s curator, a natty, polymath architectural historian with the unimprovable name of Count Randal MacDonnell of the Glens, poured champagne. Garech plunked himself down on an important-looking sofa and held court until suppertime.
Count Randal gave us a tour of the house, which has been undergoing renovation for the last five years. He showed us a 270-year-old clock that once kept time in the Irish Parliament and which plays “God Save the Queen” on the quarter hour; a horizontal harpsichord (“very rare”); a French Revolutionary cap in a Lucite case in a bathroom (“You don’t see many of those, do you?”); a chair on a landing that had belonged to Napoleon; paintings by, among others, Jack Yeats, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud, who was a sort of godfather to Garech; and the new library, which will hold 28,000 volumes.
At dinner, as the clock repeatedly chimed “God Save the Queen,” Garech read from a memoir by a member of the Bloomsbury circle, about a dinner party in this same room in the 1930s. When I got home, I found another anecdote of a dinner at Luggala in a book about the director John Huston. This one took place in the 1950s, and featured a well-and-truly-drunk Brendan Behan. Behan kept interrupting the convivial conversation, shouting, “Up the rebels!” Then, “after dessert was served, he rose unsteadily to his feet and, swaying slightly, raised his glass in the direction of our hostess. ‘To her ladyship!’ he roared. ‘God bless her!’ and fell forward onto the table, which gave way under his weight with a tinkling of breaking glass and a jingle of antique sterling silver.
“Oona [sic] said, ‘Oh, dear,’ as if someone had spilled a teaspoonful of salt, rose from the debris in front of her, and suggested that it was ‘time for us to move back into the drawing room.’ Two of the sturdier gentlemen guests lifted the eminent playwright from where he had fallen and carried him into the adjoining chamber, where they deposited him, breathing heavily, on an ancient sofa.”
After dinner, sitting on that same ancient sofa with Garech, I noticed a pair of bronzed hands in front of the fire screen.
“I thought you’d notice those,” he said. “They’re the death hands of a very great piper named Seamus Ennis. He would stay up all night, and then after you’d finally got to sleep, wake you at five o’clock in the morning to tell you that the story he had told you at four a.m. had a detail wrong, and would tell the entire story again, which you really didn’t want to hear.”
The next morning, I walked to the Greek temple to pay my respects to Tara. We ate a good Irish breakfast of eggs, bacon, and sausage and prepared to depart.
“You must sign the book,” Garech said. Luggala’s guest book starts in 1964, the year Garech’s mother gave him Luggala. It weighs as much as a Gutenberg bible and is full of drawings and photographs. Garech gave me a guided tour through it. It took almost two hours. I was in no hurry, but Maggie, who had signed the book many times over the years, was getting frantic about being late to Glin.
One early page had a photograph of a striking woman named Tessa Welborn, who designed Ursula Andress’s bikini in Dr. No. Here,
too, was John Hurt, the actor. Ronnie Fraser, the actor, who got very drunk at the races and fell down face forward on the course. John Boorman, the director (Deliverance, Hope and Glory), a near neighbor. Also Mick Jagger, a regular at Luggala. Charlotte Rampling, the actress. (“One of the Chieftains became so infatuated with her that he had to be pried off.”) Tara Browne, Garech’s brother, and a yellowed newspaper clipping about his fatal wreck suggesting that he’d swerved at the last second to save his passenger. He was very handsome, Tara. Ronnie Wood of the Stones. Robert Graves the poet, whose eightieth birthday party was held here. John Berryman, the poet. Marianne Faithfull. A woman with a famous German surname, an old flame of Garech, looking fiercely at the camera like combination vampire and dominatrix. (“She was really crazy.”) Brendan Behan. Garech’s wife, Purna, beautiful in her royal Indian finery. And an Irish poet whose last name I missed but who effectively ended his career by broadcasting from Berlin during the war. “His defense,” Garech said, “was that an artist ought always to be on the wrong side of any issue.” He continued leafing. What times this place has seen.
We said our good-byes and drove off toward the lake, past deer and stately trees on our way to Glin.
“We’re going to be seriously late,” Maggie said. “On the other hand, no one cares. It’s Ireland.”
Glin Castle sits on the Shannon River thirty-two miles west of Limerick. It was built in 1785 and is the seat of the Knight of Glin, a title that goes back seven hundred years. The current knight, Desmond FitzGerald, is the twenty-ninth and last as he and his wife produced no son, albeit three beautiful daughters.
When your family goes back seven hundred years, there are bound to be some interesting moments. Such as this, from the family history:
. . . Thomas FitzGerald, heir of the then Knight, was hanged, drawn and quartered by the English forces in Limerick in 1567. His mother, legend has it, seized his severed head, drank his blood, and walked, surrounded by a vast keening concourse, carrying his dismembered body to be buried at Lislaughtin Abbey.
But Enough About You: Essays Page 9