Crimble ...

There’s a cruel myth making the rounds that Christmas is a time of cheer, hope and quiet contemplation of the year we’ve had. No Christmas is likely to be as unrecognisable compared to this description than the miserable holiday season we’re facing in Irlande sur mer for 2009. Santy doesn’t own a pair of waders, Rudolf can’t swim and parking a sleigh will be a pain in his sack if the jolly old man hasn’t got the right change for the pay and display system.

I’m not enamoured with Irish Christmases and yes, I’m going to be Grinch-like about it. The holly and ivy drinkers in their awful sweaters drinking Smithwicks Shandies in my local, roaring on about golf and how much their wives cost to renovate; The inevitable futility of avoiding family for 364 days of the year, only to be trapped in the same place for a day of overindulging on cold turkey, colder ham and positively Baltic Merlot, with side helpings of a vegetable which resembles decomposing rabbits tails and tastes as much. The inevitable Christmas row is all that keeps me going. In our house it’s a two day, bilingual extravaganza, and sure the craic is mighty.

It’s the one aspect of the Christmas on this island which is true to the real character of the Irish. We don’t get on with each other. If we did, we’d be as interesting a Mormon stag night in Brussels. We’re noisy, we’re cranky, and without the safety valve of Christmas, there’d be civil war, I’m telling you.
The thing is, that the Christmas sold in Ireland , snow, red Coke trucks, Gemütlichkeit, are only likely to be part of our actual Christmas experience, if Ireland were taken piece by piece to Bavaria to be a ride in a negative equity horror theme park. Christmas, in other words, is consumer fraud with a Bing Crosby soundtrack. It’s the chance for RTE to run The Wizard of Oz during the Six-One slot, when Brian Dobson has to be taken to hospital due to a mince pie overdose. Will anyone notice the difference between footage from Co. Godknowswhere and Kansas? I have my doubts. There are plenty of people out there with green faces and stripy stockings who’d pop up in your average vox pop, anyway, normally on Nationwide selling organic marmalade.

To make things worse, this year we’re likely to get the full wrath of Aidan Nulty – cloudy with a chance of everything falling out of the sky – accompanied by a winds not seen since Ian paisley’s unplugged gigs in Belfast some decades ago. It’s hard to get into the festive spirit when walking upright is hard enough anyway with a vat of mulled wine in your veins and shopping bags ready to burst. By the end of your foolhardy trip to town, you’re standing in the pissing rain, your assorted presents at your feet as your bags finally give up: a sodden Santa watching the cardboard box of a Fisher-Price trike serve as a rescue raft for your town’s rodent population.



Some things though, are definitely true. People have been complaining for years that Christmas comes earlier every year. In November, the decorations went up. Two weeks later, they came down, thanks to some force 30 gusts. Methinks it’s time to batten down the hatches. It’s beginning to look a lot like carnage out there.

Age and Reason

"What people don't realise is that for our generation, nothing was normal." Rudolf Garmatz, my grandfather, is of the generation born at the same time as the ill-fated Weimar Republic. He knows all about the simple strangeness of life. His life began in what's now Poland, formerly the province of Pommern,from which he left, as one friend pointed out, as if predestined. His life was not bound to the earth of the east. Berlin, the front, north Africa and all the awfulness of the Ardennes, to Hamburg, where his first home was as simple as it was strange. An old map room in a school, he received a letter from my grandmother that they had been allocated it by a school comptroller who took pity on them. No electricity, he wired it with with old power lines he gathered up from the rubble of early 1950's Hamburg.

Nothing was normal. This thought came to mind again when I went to see Robert Fisk in the National Concert Hall, thanks to my wife who thought I'd like it. She was spellbound. I was distracted by the inordinate number of know alls using the opportunity to ask Fisk questions in order to make inane, crass and stupid statements in the deluded belief that he, the great Fisk, would reveal them as a true prophet. Any hope for intelligent discourse was hardly going to come from this audience, surely.

Towards the front, an elderly lady sat with her hand up, the only woman who asked question. When she was finally brought a microphone, she asked question which was staggering in its simplicity, honesty and genuine curiousity.

"I'm 78 years old" - she can talk as long as she wishes to, whispered my wife - "and you may find my questions silly."
"They are not!" Fisk assured her, as if he'd been impugned himself. It was charming. "Well, I was wondering, where do the israeli's get their oil from? And, How's Mordechai Vanunu? Is he dead?"

Fisk seemed startled and took a brief moment to bring himself back to her question. He answered her questions with as much detail and clarity as he could. She seemed satisfied. Older people can sometimes see through the world, that we younger people can't. If we're to have any hope of progress as a society, then our discourse needs to be both simple and inspired. No joy yet, though some hope exists.