What does it mean to be British or Irish in the 21st Century?Many people get hung up , if you’ll pardon the reference , with flags and their various representative designs and colours. They use them as identifying signifiers. Of course many of us would never dream of buying a flag, much less hanging the thing up on our house. Any kind of flag.Football supporters might support their team and wave a banner at a match but most will not decorate their homes with them for weeks after the game.It is a certain kind of person who does these kinds of things and not everyone wants that association. They might find it a crass thing to do , like those poor lost souls who declare Christmas immediately as Halloween dies and then attempt to crash the electricity grid by building a little Las Vegas of chaser – lights on the roof of their homes and illuminate the countryside and towns for two months every year. This is deemed unusual behaviour and sometimes gawpers will come from many miles to see it. Sometimes this display is then turned into a charitable event with donations being accepted for a special charity. In that respect it is seen as odd enough behaviour to deliver novelty. Some people feel that to trumpet their private thoughts and aspirations to the world is a foolish and tasteless thing to do …..Some people…
There are plenty who will take up the slack , though , given the sales of flags in Norneverland . An entire industry is surely finding and sustaining its economic support base in this part of the world.Being Irish or British is not the thing it used to be, though.Whatever that was.
Of course , you could equally ask what it means to be an American , a Chinaman. an Italian, an Indian , a Pole , a Russian. The shorthand would have the American as a Coca Cola , Big Mac, Budweiser , Coors Beer, Tequila consumer in his blue denim jeans. The Chinaman, of course would be supplying us with rice and noodles at a restaurant. The same for the Italian and the Indian fellow .It would be pizza, fish and chips, ice-cream and a variety of bhuna ,daal , chapatis and vindaloo. The Russian the Pole would be drinking vodka to beat the band .These are , of course , stereotypes but nonetheless, they have been assimilated into our own culture to a great extent. We now take all of that for granted in our daily lives .
We are not in the 1940s , the 1950s . the 1960s anymore…..It used to be so different and so simple. Everyone knew who they were and more importantly , everyone knew their place. There was a little confusion in the ranks .No matter what side of the community men came from , they all liked a pint of stout.Specifically Guinness. That was seen as symbolic pint of old Oirland but everyone across the board accepted their Irishness and downed that pint glass of the Dublin black brew.Of course, Guinness has long-since moved away from the flat-cap “Guinness is good for you” shtick and now markets itself as a sophisticated uber-knowledgeable lifestyle choice. The lager drinkers were a little more demarcated . The Nationalists favoured Harp Lager and the Unionists veered toward the slightly sweeter Tennents Lager. Carlings black Label fell somewhere in the middle .It must have been the most abysmal of tastes , because it smelt of bad cheese, old socks and possibly appealed to drinkers lacking in smell or tastebuds.
Food and drink were a much more prosaic affair a few years back . No too many had done much “foreign” travelling before the 1950s except possibly for reasons of conflicts in Europe such as the World Wars ,so to many their experience of food and drink from anywhere else in the world was limited.Being irish or British meant locally sourced meat and vegetables mostly; cooked in a plain way with little or none of the affectation of unusual flavours or spicing. .A few herbs were used in cooking but spices in food was unusual.Of course the British had brought their versions of curry back from their Indian adventures in the 19th century and kedgeree soon became a breakfast or dinner staple in many English and Irish homes. It was a good way to make a few smoked haddock stretch a long way in money -straightened households. .Curry powder , already blended in a little tin , was available ,but something like the Italian cookery staple olive oil was only available in small slim bottles in chemist shops and was used for medicinal purposes only .Most of this health-giving oil ended its days behind a wad of cotton wool inside the ear of some aching child. It was used almost entirely to soften ear-wax. The very idea of using this emollient as a cooking aid would have garnered some odd glances.Now Virgin Olive Oil is sold in supermarkets in large bottles and tins.It is used specifically for cooking.
Nowadays a night out in the city might involve getting lightly hammered on some new “Craft Ale” from the new Brew Dog brewery , like “Punk india Pale Ale ” or “Dead Pony Pale Ale” two pints of which or some similar 8% percent , richly flavoured witches’ brew may have your tongue lolling as you enter the Cafe Renoir restaurant for a nice bit of beef brisket.Being Irish or British in Norneverland is a much more varied and richer experience than it was a generation ago and in many respects it involves a complete shift in what we might think of as our “identity”. Are we even really British or Irish anymore?Are we really something very, very new?
When you consider that the Jose Cuervo Tequila company , founded in Mexico in 1795 by Don Jose Antonio de Cuervo, has just last week bought out Bushmills Distillery in Co Antrim . Does that mean that the product is really now a Mexican Whiskey that is simply being brewed by Irishmen in a tiny corner of Ireland…
Maybe only another wee part of a new all-world identity?
Harry,
What it means to be any particular nationality has within the media become a much vexed question across many nations. The fact that a particular society has become more diverse, doesn’t lessen that nations’ natural national identity e.g English people playing American Football doesn’t make them less English and Irish people playing or watching English soccer doesn’t make them less Irish.
I’ve heard English and other friends complain, their natural English identity has been subsumed into a now antiquated imperial ‘British’ political and economic Union title that’s long been superseded by an EU Union title. During the Scottish referendum, many Scots disavowed any sense of Britishness and you only have to follow @welshnotbritish on Twitter to gain a sense of the increasing numbers of Welsh who reject a British identity being imposed upon them.
You should read my first blog post published back in November 2013: A Lost Tribe – the “British” in a corner of Ireland http://belfast-child.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/ALostTribetheBritishinIreland.html
Ruaidri ..I’m not implying that it makes them less or more whatever they believe their identity to be but I’m pointing out that the national “differences” are less and less apparent as the years go by and as we are all exposed to the differing cultures and influences. I’m saying that as time peels away there are less and less differences and more similarities.Pop music , for example had a large part to play in opening the world up to a greater feeling of universality in this past sixty years ….Maybe creating greater social change throughout the world than any other thing .The same is happening with food and drink now. A generation ago there was little choice but now you can dip in and out of every kind of food on the planet and your neighbours are as likely to have their origins at the other side of the world. I’m sure there are interesting times in the classrooms now as a multi- cultured generation get to know each other.All of this is bound to make us all into something completely new.
Thought provoking article well done
Ta ,Neill…
It strikes one, Esteemed Blogmeister, that the take over by Tequila of Bushmills might provoke a song which could even turn out to be a musical blend of the two drinks.
Which bevy of beverages have elicited songs from the pens of such as the sublime Shel Silverstein:
‘I feel like Pancho Villa, Sheila
And I got the pesos to spend
So pour me another tequila, Sheila
And lay down and dah di dah di dah’.
And this one by the tunesmith for whom neither Time no Tom waits:
‘Old Bushmills I staggered
You buried the dagger in
The silhouette window light”
This second lyric is taken from ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’. Blue is right. The last time Perkie was poking around Bushmills he noticed that signposts for the Distillery in the village were as thin on the ground as Don Quixote himself. El Senor Q, while on the trail of Windmills, could have been nicknamed Flaco/Slim.
On enquiry one was informed that as the Distillery of the ‘Devil’s Buttermilk’ was located in the constituency of the Big Mon directions were discreetly given only by the nod and the wink. That was in the last year of the last Millennium so perhaps the thinking on local signage has changed direction since then.
The first line of the first song (first recorded by Bobba Bar, aka Bobby Bare) reminds one that this latest marrying of a Mexican and an Irish institution is not the first. (Oops, meant to write, a British-Irish institution as of course, Bushmills is situated in County Tantrum).
Take Sheila, an Irish name for a female, derived from Cecilia out of caecus in the Latin, meaning blind. Which could indicate said Sheila was a songbird not unknown to be blind d. on occasion.
And of course the link between Pancho Villa and The Big I is not as famoso as it deserves to be. During a sojourn in La Ciudad de Mexico some years ago, one of Senor Warbeck’s favourite cantinas was El Bar de l’Opera on Calle Cinco de Mayo. There he would indulge in a TAT while his favourite plate of paella was being prepared.
And while he would nibble at his Tapas and sip on his Tequila while seated in the old world ambience of carved wood, ornate windows and the rusty burgundy of the lush wallpaper his nosey eye would occasionally stray – yet again – to the magnetic holes in the ornate ceiling.
Left there in 1914 by the pistol of Pancho el Pistolero, the guerrillo giant with a causeway-sized moustache after he had ridden into El Bar on his trusty caballo and was, for some reason, being refused his f. tipple of tequila by the gringo-run cantina.
This most Homeric act on horseback in the history of hostleries was duplicated a couple of years later in the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street. When the legendary Bird Flanagan rode his horse up the steps and into the bar. Instead of shooting a shot in demand for a shot of his favourite Jameson’s El Pajaro barked. And besides, it wasn’t for himself he wanted the drink but his four-legged friend.
If one said that one horseman of this apocalyptic episode was related to the Cosgraves, padre y hijo, WT and Liam then one will realized his bark was sharper than any shot fired from el pistol of Pancho. The bar in the Gresham is, of course, now named in honour of The Bird.
One cannot over-emphasise the fact that the relative of Los Dos Cosgraves did NOT use a firearm. He was no gunman. The political tradition to which this family belong(ed) would have no truck with gunmen, such as might, say, invade the office of a newspaper editor and smash up the tools of his trade, his printing press. Just not on. Never was.
And one should not read too much into the f. that El Bar de l’Opera is situated on Calle de Cinco de Mayo. Just because Henry Kenny, el padre de Enda, played number 5 on the Mayo football team, is just that, a coincidence.
Just as the fact that Tequila takes its name from a village outside La Ciudad de Guadalajara in the same way that Bushmills derives its name from its native sraidbhaile (ask Gregsy Uasal) is a coincidence.
Guadalajara is renowned as the birthplace of three Mexican institutions – tequila, mariachi and – Numero Tres (to be dealt with in uno momento). Perkie spent a weekend down in Guadajalara once, and a fine peaceful one it was too, sipping mariachi and listening to the local tequila banda. Or, something like that. In fact it wasn’t till he returned to Mexico City that he discovered that a discovery had been made in G. el noche he left.
He read about it in the pages of his favourite red-top, El Graffico. And even then it didn’t appear till the Tuesday edition of the paper and then in an inside page. The discovery being, three spanking new SUV’s parked (illegally) under a bridge in el centro of Guadalajara. But it wasn’t that the illegal parking which made the news, sort of, but rather that each neatly contained nine bodies of young muchachos, each with the trademark of a local drug cartel, one bullet in the back of the head. Seemingly, the symmetry of body numbers in each SUV was significant.
One mentions this as an illustration of how things are conducted on an even grander scale in Mexico than in British Ireland. La violencia has not gone away from South of the Border; hopefully, it is the opposite North of the Border in Norneverland. Perhaps, the acquiring of a taste for tequila by the DUP might even loosen some obdurate tongues sufficiently to indulge in some hablar or even charlar itself.. Que paso, Pedro?
Now, that would indicate at least one of the benefits of cultural crossfertilization, Esteemed Blogmeister. Which brings Perkie’s inner pessimist to the third reason which made Guadalajara famoso: it is also the birthplace of Chicarito, aka Javier Hernandez who played with Man U (or whatever Los Diablos Rojos call themselves these days, Merchandise Utd or is it Mercenary Utd) for a less than spell binding spell.
Perkie who hasn’t consciously watched Man U since G. Best was let go, knows this because the dial of Chicharito was unavoidable in the l. and b. of Mexico as he grinned down from every camino bill board advertising everything from toothpaste to tweezers for eyebrows.
Mind you ‘The Little Pea’ has the phizog for same, in fairness (Premiership-speak). Which is whole lot of face more than you can say for his erstwhile teammate, Rooney, W. The always peripatetic and occasionally pathetic (in fairness) Perkie still wakes up with a brow on his sweat when he things back to his…….Rooney moment.
It happened at the rim of the Kintamani volcano on the island of Bali. PW had gone up there to view the crater and its contents. The day being overheated the crater, alas, was obscured by a blanket of haze. On looking around, however, the billboard overlooking the viewing stand and advertising after shave lotion was not obscured. There, in plain view was the face of…..Rooney, W.
Now, the idea of the face of Roons advertising after-shave lotion might well fit into the category of the Ruins of Athens being used to advertise ball and chain machines and the benefits of site clearance. The pure craytur, with a parboiled puss like that sure it’s a wonder he doesn’t don a permanent Balaclava to match say those temporary cute wooly mittens Man U dudes wear on cold to chilly days.
The point being, Esteemed Blogmeister, you don’t have to be in Bali to witness this truly scarifying slice of Hammer Filmania; any place from Ballyfermot to Ballyferriter to the Ballygawley roundabout itself will suffice.
In short, when it comes to the greatest dangers which humanity is facing, global warming is a distant second to…..this virulent strain of El Futbol, called the…..Premiership.
One last example of the havoc wrought by this global menace, in fairness: for years the name of Rooney was associated in the mind of an admittedly impressionable Perkie with the 1957 hurling/stickfighting final between Kilkenny and Waterford at which he was present, having been ‘chairlifted’ over the stiles. This was the only final on record in the Croke Park Paddock when 16 men marched beside the 15 men of the opposing team in the pre-match march around.
The 16th being the rotund figure of a splay footed English actor called John Gregson. He was some fat cat in his bulging black and amber gansey. Why, Gregson looked almost as rotund as Rooney, W does in his prime. All done as an insert for the fillum called ‘Rooney’. Rooney being the local Dublin term for a rubbish dump scavenger.
The occupation hasn’t changed, just the game.
And as he contemplates the downside of cultural globalization, a perturbed Perkie would like to order:
‘Una doble de tequila, plus a chaser of Bush, por favor’.
Salud agus slainte !
Ah …Mighty Perk …i’m a fan for life. Anyone who can slip a little Waitsian drollery as a result of one of my diatribes can have a free-lifetime subscription .Oh what the hell…make that two!!!
Diatribe.
Perkie’s born-again inner deconstructionist has always found this eight-letter word one of the great examples of the possibilities which await the splicing of the two camps together. Two camps, one of which is currently blowlamping at the other, in the nine-county province.
Oops, meant to say the six-county province.
Upside down, yet again.
Dia. Tribe.
Dia being the leprechaun for God.
Diatribe.
The Chosen People.
Lead on, Paddykool, to the Promised Landfill.
For God and Harry, Perk, as Larry Olivier might emote……