Summer is a time for getting outdoors and making with the barbeque food. But what to imbibe with it? Dermot Stokes on the wines and beers that are made for those long evenings
Is Ireland really drowning in gargle? Is there no hope for the youth? and is ever more draconian legislation all we can do? Dermot Stokes sidesteps the hysteria to offer some sober reflection on the use and misuse of alcohol
The north did not witness such seismic changes in Y2K as it had in preceding years. But there was still plenty going on, as a society in which war had become the norm stumbled towards peace.
In domestic politics, there was a curious sense throughout the year of everything and nothing staying the same. The tribunals progress continued apace, but the effect on Fianna Fail was not easily quantifiable.
It s gas. Some idiot in a world observatory of finance or somesuch has dropped Ireland down the least corrupt league. S/he thinks we are more corrupt than, say, five years ago. And why is this? Because we have these tribunals, that s why. Logic? Don t talk to me about logic. It s no wonder the financial order goes pear-shaped from time to time if that s their logic. Because, of course, the tribunals are a sign that we were once corrupt, that we know it and are getting better, not the other way around.
The most hyped show on earth may not have lived up to expectations but the year 2000 did provide the usual mix of giddy highs, horrible lows and the odd blast of flat out weirdness. THE WHOLE HOG reflects on 12 months in the history of our world, while our regular columnists have their last word on the first year of the new century
Let's start with a crescendo and build to a climax.
Being Irish, we talked a lot about the weather. Right from the start. Tornadoes in America and cyclones in east Africa. Doomsday. Biblical torrents raged down the Limpopo and Save rivers. The lucky ones clung to the tops of trees - there was even a baby born in one. But thousands perished. Villages too. A million or more were homeless. Family and tribal networks were destroyed. Roads and rails were in ruins. Thousands of landmines were washed away from their known zones to who knows where.
I don t believe in horoscopes. At all. They just don t make sense. How could the stars influence our lives? It seems so utterly improbable. But there s a lot of credulous people out there. First page they ll turn to in a magazine. They must answer some fundamental need, some vacant space in people s lives.
Progress doesn t always follow a straight line. Far from it. Sometimes you take two steps sideways for every one step forwards. There s another image that holds progress to be a kind of tumbleweed effect. We roll forward, but sometimes we re going backwards, and mostly we re just marking time. Frustrating? Yes, but it has the ring of truth.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Northern Ireland.
Consistency and continuity. Hmmm. These are things we value. Like when Ireland used to be hard to beat at football. That was good, wasn t it? You ll never beat the Irish. Not at football. Not then, anyway.
It would be different if we were talking about rugby. But that, sadly and predictably, is another story. A very other story. About which nobody can do nothing. As it were.
It’s August. Dog days. Holiday time. Offices of state close down and decisionmakers cut and run. It’s a time when a good family man ought to be taking to the countryside, or the sun and sand. Buckets and spades.
Well, it all goes to show that you can’t predict anything. There I was, like all distant observers, predicting an apocalypse in Mid-Africa, and what happens?
The year is barely up and running and it seems just like the old one. Murder and mayhem, wind and water/water everywhere. Bastards bashing the knees off victims in Northern suburbs. And a Budget that neither pleased nor offended anybody too much. So what’s new?
Great weather for ducks, they say. This island has been deluged. Inundated. East to west, south to north. And it is, if anything, worse to the east. The Rhine is already many metres above normal as far inland as Köln. By the time it subsides, billions of marks worth of damage will have been done.
Well, ya can’t say I didn’t warn ya. I’ve been writing about a forthcoming earthquake in Japan for months. And now it’s struck with a vengeance. Hundreds of thousands are dislocated, their homes either destroyed or threatened.
The new year, according to some astrologer or other, was a very good time for making resolutions, as long as you got on with them from the start. If you’ve left it ’til now, forget it. Depending on your particular weakness, you might be just as well off.
And so, unbelievably another year has bitten the dust. Here, continuing a tradition as Christmassy as the eating of turkey and the consumption of way too much alcohol, The Hog reflects on a turbulent year, when we all grew older and much, much wiser.
That a week is a long time in politics is a truism. So what does that make of a fortnight? Truly, the landscape has changed utterly. The end of an era has sprung upon us. Ye know not the day nor the hour.
An old friend of mine used to regularly take out a word and fondle it like a friendly animal. A very Irish amusement, I think. One particular favourite was the word “worrying”, as in dogs “worrying sheep”.
I’ve been driving in the west. Out there beyond the water margins of Yang Shang-Po, aka Oughterard, after which the landscape shifts into something quite different from that which has gone before.
There is nothing more odious, to paraphrase a famous quip, than the British press in one of its fits of moral outrage. And it’s true. Nothing can compare. And I’m not just referring to the tabloids . . .
There is no doubting that politics is a dirty game. Everywhere. People here may sniff their superiority over the sleazebags in England and America, and how we don’t dump on a cabinet minister for bonking five secretaries and getting caught. But in truth it’s just as dirty on this island as anywhere else.
It is both a strength and a weakness that print journalism is so governed by the deadline. There is no ambiguity, as the courier sweeps away with the final proofs, or film or discs. Anything else is for the next issue, for tomorrow, for next year.
The year began with contrasting and contradictory alignments. On the one hand, the United States were about to invest a new president, a young, rock’n’roll-loving sax-playing boyo from the south called Bill Clinton, offering the possibility of America as the last great hope again.
In the middle of the present rather straitened times, it may seem a bit previous, as they say in Cavan, to be talking about the recession bottoming out. well, actually, in its own rather weary wary piddly way, it is.
Madness, madness, war. Spin that globe and wonder. We live in murderous and turbulent times. The most awful century known to history is drawing to a close in much the same way as it dawned.
And a nation weeps! The three Spanish goals that went in one after the other drooped the heart and mind. The ISEQ Index probably lowered by five points. Travel agents have ulcers where they once had digestive tracts!
And suddenly yet newer horizons opened up. The Arab and the Israeli shook hands. The walls came tumbling down. The lion and the lamb lay down together. The strangest things have come to pass.
The recent burst of good weather may have misled us all as to where we are on the great wheel of life. We're in September. Schools are back. Apples are ripening. Night comes earlier. Often the most settled time of year, and certainly very pleasant now.
We are a drinking people. For all the best efforts of the temperance movement and the prohibitionists, the culture of the drinker has remained at the heart of the Irish personality.
What was I thinking of when I wrote my last column about water? What strange movements were in the skies? Damned if I know, but its references to possible wars over water supplies, and the specific instancing of Israel seems uncannily prescient in the light of that country's latest brutish incursion into the south of Lebanon.
The recent incredible scenes from the United States, where the Mississippi river and its tributaries ran amok, may have seemed a peculiar but just recompense to a vast area which only a couple of years ago suffered a disastrous drought. Water was all they asked for then. Now they have it, but in quantities so enormous that it all seems like some huge global joke.
Don't tread on us, said Buffalo Bill Clinton, and the Cruise missiles shot off at Baghdad. Hitting this and missing that, amassing what the Americans presumably see as acceptable "collateral damage", including six civilians.
Japanese tin whistlers, Harlem Gospel singers, Indian mandolin players . . . De Dannan have traded scales and tales with them all. Dermot Stokes catches up with Frankie Gavin and Alec Finn and is entranced as the Michael Palins of pan-cultural playing share excerpts from their ongoing odyssey.
While the entity that is U2 continues to be the dominant focus in the creative lives of its four members, away from the band, Bono, The Edge, Adam and Larry have all indulged in extra-curricular activities, bringing them – and their music - into contact with such legends as Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, Keith Richards, and Roy Orbison, By Dermot Stokes
One might have thought that such a wild and woolly year would have produced a more extraordinary selection of records to mull over in these last weeks.
Casting a cold eye on 1986, one must be frank that, although it was a good year, the absolute pinnacles that have marked previous years were absent. Perhaps ‘The Unforgettable Fire’ and ‘Born In The USA’, and their respective tours in 1985, not to mention Live Aid, drained a lot of emotion.
1985 has got to remember as the year when one of the most spoiled, wasteful, self-indulgent and ephemeral industries on earth suddenly woke up, not only to the urgent insistence of its conscience within the person of Bob Geldof, but to its power to actually achieve something, (to raise money and thereby save lives), given the right motivation and mechanism.
*Well, it's 9th and Hannepin/And all the donuts have/names that sound like prostitutes/And the moon's teethmarks are/on the sky like a tarp thrown over this...*
The opening paragraph is always the most difficult. That first couple of sentences where you try to ensnare the reader's attention and make some kind of substantive statement that sums up the artist's work to date and his/her relationship to the public, god and mammon in no particular order. But how do you do it with Kate Bush?
And you can dance to them too, they said way back, and it was the truth. Talking Heads are one of the perfect marriages of modern rock'n'roll. They don't just sound of angles, perspectives and prisms of thought, they actually mean something! And dey got riddim too!! Ah yes, David Byrne is a fellow who knows what it is to be ridden by an angst, and to make it jumpy and funky and fun!
Ry Cooder's last album was released way back in 1983, the fairly successful but musically undistinguished 'Slide Area'. Since then! Well, he's done the music for 'Southern Comfort' and 'Paris Texas' but hasn't as yet produced a follow-up LP. In the absence of the latter, this soundtrack album will have to keep the fans happy.
The alarm only went off half-an-hour ago, and yet here we are, looking back in anguish at a year that threatened so much and largely failed to deliver.
"Hey Jimmy, I want to go home! Hey Jimmy, I been away too long…" And you feel like shouting yeah to the way he sings it, to the way the voice reaches into your soul like only the most expressive instrument can, like Muddy Waters' slide, or Charlie Parker's sax, or Mavis Staples' voice… but you know what he's talking about as well.
In 1980, with the various Irish bands who have taken the easy road in terms of rock'n'roll fashion, it is easy to overlook the emergence and development of other groups. Scullion are a good example, every bit as committed and interesting as others, yet adopting a form that is at divergence with much of what's going down in pop music at the moment.
De Danann, outmoded by the Celts. Supplanted by the Iron Age. So they retreated into the hills and mastered their magical powers. The true traditionalists who still had the suss on the newcomers, and for all their old-fashioned ways were able to out-manoeuvre the modernistic and industrialised Celts. More traditional and yet more advanced.
A misbegotten, footsore bone-crushing trek through the industrial badlands of Northern Germany finally left me in a single hotel room in Frankfurt uncorking a dutyfree bottle of Old Bushmills.
