Backstop.
Meaning the baseball term to do with the camouflagic 310 mile long British border on the facebook of Irish soil magicked up back in the day by an oily Welsh Wizard. So chosen to doff the hat deferential in the direction of the DUP and its (gulp) baseball bat-wielding base of the bureaucrat.
The Welsh Wizard, one whose surname was a first name, not inappropriately, when he (Harrizonally) drew his bloody red lion in the land while uttering the morally persuasive incantation in 1920:
-Listen here, me boy-o’s, you do as I order you to do with this border-o, which is the first known example of boyo-diversity in the inaugural shape of Éirexit or it’s another dose of the wooden spoon-o on your Irish backstops with an immediate and terrible war for the Triple Crown-o.
(Actually, there was an extra-time p.s. which had been lost to history. Till WikiWelsh Leeks uncovered it while contemporary wannabe-hack historians were busy getting all miked up:
-I can tell you this much, me boy-o’s: the Cardiff Arms Park is not so called for nothing-o ! So, drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of death if I don’t get the drop on these hip-flask towel-flickers and their pneumatic no-knickers in Lansdowne Road-o ! NÍ small ask go dtí é.).
The hissing from the pits of the Éirexit even as the Tormented Green Corner of the Wee Six retired was soon desisted from, with the aid of a Union jack (small j) in the shape of a D-word (big) with transport implications to predate the Backstop:
-Dunlop.
It wasn’t the first time David Lloyd, by George. And through his war-weary sheath too. Or the last time the Free Southern Stateeners bought his blatant patented whopper which, of course, rhymes with backstopper. It lodged the start of the political dodge known as Confidence Trick and Fall Guy.
Neither was, as WikiWelsh Leeks have also revealed, the ‘immediate and terrible war’ his first choice of intimidatory incantation-o. That honour fell to:
– Abracadabra ! it rhymes with the Castle at Cabra.
When that slice of prime bully-beef by the beefeater of a Prime Minister for Understandable War Crimes in WW1, failed to include the other three counties of Ulster into the Big 9 it was incantation once again, as the Wee 6 was shunted into existence, stunted.
Shunted, being the operative term. For the 310 mile partition spawned not one but two movies and in the same year: 1957. One of which was a train fillum. Albeit, prompted by a different mode of transport.
Indeed, twas on a dreary New Year’s Eve when a lorryload of volunteers, from the 4 Provinces and 2 sides of the Border, North and South, all affronted by the fear-drenched frontier, began to rumble in the direction of Fermanagh.
This was a time when an up-and-under was still known as a Garryowen and before a Province was called a club. When a South called Seán was killed and before a North called George from the land of the Welsh Wizard was born.
-3.10 to Yuma.
This was the name of the first of the two movies made on the 310 mile border, specifically that part of the partition betwixt Fermanagh and Donegal. Predictably, it was an iron horse opera in which gunslingers slung.
The first movie, shot on location in the hinterland of Pettigo, was based on a prescient short story by Elmore Leonard, sometimes spelled L. Mór Leonard. The essence of prescience, gan dabht, is that it paradoxically looks at the future through the cross-hairs of a soothing soothsayer of a sniper. Consider, a léitheoir dhil, the following riper elements of:
-3.10 to Yuma.
The names of most characters in the movies (there was a remake of the movie in 2007 to mark the tenth birthday of the Black Friday Agreement re the Black Sow’s Dyke) differ from those in the story, save that of Charlie Prince, a character in each version.
Hmmmmm.
On the very same day that the buck stopped with the Backstop, Charlie Prince, with the big irons on his hips and the big wing tips on his ironic head, celebrated his Big Seven O. Meaning? Éasca sin a mhíniú. The 26 counties have morphed into the Seventh County-O to act as guarantor of The Wee Six.
The original short story also contains a town called (gasp) Contention on whose main street stands (gulp) The Republic Hotel. The shackled gunslinger, Jim Kidd, due to be ferried to Yuma on the 3.10 is more or less universally acknowledged by cinéastes (i.e. fillum buffs who don’t eat popcorn) including The Perkin, if one may be so modest, to be based on …………………Buachaill Ón Éirne.
1957, of course, was also the fateful year when the railway loin through Pettigo was (gulp) shut down, for good, bad and indifference.
Oh, and the director of 3.10 to Yuma was one, Delmer Daves. Close, but no railcar. Still, a dogwhistle in the future direction of David Davis, he who is always in the best of good, erm, Huma. The true sign of the congenitally inane.
Contention is, of course, Pettigo by any other name. Until the late 1700s, the area was known as ‘An Tearmann’, meaning in the aboriginal Leprechaun, ‘a place of sanctuary’. The modern Irish (Paiteagó) and English (Pettigo) names derive from the Latin protectio (protection), a translation of the Irish ‘An Tearmann’.
Lug Ainm agus an Leipreachán
There is something about Tearmann
Which is a g. deal less than charmin’
To an A-English ear;
Never fails to endear
To those T.’s who’re into fairy farmin’.
Now, who’d have thunk that Latin (!) is preferable to Leprechaun ? Apart, of course, from a wee tee-totally power-drunk Ulster-Scot looking at a thistle while simultaneously dogwhistling and declaiming in this Gregorian incantantion beloved of the Clann Campbell even while listening to the last wee trainwhistle ooot o’ Pettigooo:
I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired – deid dune.
It’s gey and hard wark coupin’ gless for gless
Wi’ Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like,
And I’m no’ juist as bauld as aince I wes.
With all those Wee Six-guns left lying around after the shooting of 3.10 to Yuma it was a no-brainer to re-open up the doggy bag and shoot a second head-strainer of a fillum in this soggy bog in 1957. As happenstance had it the second fillum featured a WW2 war-hero wizard / actor whose Irish name was hitched to a wee transport trope (a daarlin’ anti-dope word beloved of us , erm, cinéastes) in the lead role:
-Audi Murphy in The Guns of Fort Pettigo. (see below)
Let us now continue on a-moving down the track, a clickety-clack, in a south-easterly direction through West Britain till we reach Kingsbridge Station in the Backstsop of B.Á.C. on the banks of Anna Livia Plurabella.
Where on the platform awaits, tongue a-loll loyally, The Linguistic Lapdog with a Laptop up upon his behindlegs, with both paws held warmly aloft in welcome.
Pause now for THE ONE LINER OF THE WEEK:
It is a toss up of the coin of the realm between two short-listed lines in this fraught and Wilhelming week, with FOTUS ( for it is also he ! – Fintan O Toole, Uber Shoneen) tut-tut-tuting like Billy-o in The Unionist Times. And through the frayed yet fashionable holes in the knees of his true-blue jeans, got from McKneeling in the diamond and dynamite draped direction of Hausfrau Lizardbeth, and in which pose he can be found forever:
–Historians will not believe the sheer ignorance of Brexit supporters.
Eh?
(The trained lapdog is as attuned to the trainwhistle as the dogwhistle. Hark back then to the Ulster -Scot (US) barking from the Foster Home of Fermanagh, which has given sanctuary to a poetic phenom known, frankly, as (gulp) The Gormlessby.
–Níl fuckáil focal Béarla againn !)
Sadly as the above bracketed piece emanated once again from a foreign country (and besides, the stench of the language signifies it’s dead), i.e., the Tormented Green Corner, it cannot be considered, unlike the second of the short-listed five-a-side British and Irish one-loiners below:
Gort na nGooley : Shoulder’s Field
Scread siad i dtóin Amhrán na bhFiann
Scread siadsan i dtóin G. S. The Queen
Náid-Náid
OM Gawd
O’Neill is O’Kneel: is mian linn pian.
So now, back to the backstad in B.Á.C.
3.10 to Yuma is not in any way to be confused wth a movie which is currently wowing the fillum buffs of the Free Southern Stateen. Though the confusion is understandable as Boot Hill also fills a large backscape in this black and white fillum noir, as we cinéastes like to call it, on seeing it.
-3.10 to Tuam.
This movie has really hit the groovy grave culture which is now all the rave in Step-Mother Ireland, south of the Black Sow’s Dyke, going backwards. It is currently cramming the motion picture houses on Liffeyside, where Popcorn has been renamed Momcorn.
It was produced, directed, scriptwritten, funded, soundtracked, voice-overed, ballyhooed, subtitled and ushered in by the justifiably pushy, Zapper Zappone. She is, ar ndóigh, the Madame Mogul of the Kiddies Kartoon Korporation, whose much-ogled and animated classic ‘Old Sods boldly Retold’, shudda won the Oscar hands down and limp-wristed. But didn’t, straight down due to Old Boyz Bias.
To lose one Oscar may be considered a misfortune; but for ‘3.10 to Tuam’ to be overlooked for a second Oscar will, aparently, be considered a careless walk on the wild side.
It has already taken another one liner of the ocean-going variety, the Queen Katherine, across the Atlantic for a toe-in-the-water try out and been greeted rapturously at the Bosthoon Fillum Festival in Boston, where much, erm, meas was shown. This was organised by the Friendly Daughters of Saint Patricia in Hysteria, Mass. and sponsored by the Cordless Phoney Company.
Beseeched Madame Mogul on knobbly knees with this peach of a screech:
–We must come to terms with the shame of our past. It’s up to us to right this long-gone wrong !
Eh?
We? Our? Us?
Settle, petal: don’t forget you’re from Seattle, home of Boeing, Boeing, Bong, as J. Arfur Rank might have put it.
Go again.
-It’s up to U.S. to right the long-gone wrong.
Well, tis a start entirely, Shirley
Meanwhile, back in the Stemerald Isle could be heard the slimmed-down Spice Girls voice-signalling.
R to L: Yuma-Yuma, Peep-Bo and Pitti-Sing-Sing:
Three little maids from media school are we
Pert-isan as a Miaow 2 school girl we can be
Filled to the brim with girlish glee
Three little maids from media school are we.
Everything is a source of Femi fun
No Man’s safe for we care for none
Life is a joke that hasn’t just begun
Three little maids from media school are we.
In the fillumic world of the Femis it is fashionably fascistic to morph a successful filum into a killer serial for the TV. Thus, The Guns of Fort Pettigo (see above) starring Audi Murphy (1957) has been, erm, morphed into the pettifogging anti-man bi-weekly.
-Petticoat Junction.
Its launch in Leinster House has been justifiably reviewed with extreme unction by The Linguistic Lapdog with a Laptop :
– Smashing times, oops, Times are here again !
He then went on – and here The Perkin must perforce paraphrase the tasselled, cold-nose prose of the incomparable Maestro – to describe how the GAS Ceiling in Leinster House, where the neo-vassals and internet-surfing serfs of its marble halls are now but not for long, all male, is in the process of being well and truly Smashed and Hashtagged. By the Tash Hagitariat !
(Not, needless to say / ní gá a rá, the Lapdog’s precise choice of woof-words).
The Dáil Carty Light Opera Company has long been a world leader / taoiseach domhanda in Men Only Humour. Gilbert and Sullivan: a GASometer of gut-wobbling humour of the male variety.
Savoy boys will be Savoy boys ? No more, no never no more.
This is the GASometer which now houses the Dáil Henparty Light Opera Company of Occidental England. Ironically, its, erm, maiden production was a horse-faced d’ouevre (as we cinéastes cheek to cheekily call it ) sé sin, the Oriental Noh-means-Noh costume drama entilted:
– ‘Noh more Ado about The Mik’.
In which the trio of lead roles were , erm, rolled out with brio by the fact-checking actresses, oops, actors played by Mary Mitchell O Connor (in the role of Yuma-Yuma which is long for Yum-Yum); Kate O Connell (in the role for Peep-Bo which is short from Peep-Bohemian Girl) and the little bitty Pitti Sing-Sing, playing, some contend, sheself.
First into the Chamber was Mary Mitchell O Connor, Minishter of Shtate for the Shtate of She-level Education, to announce she was initiating Wimmin Only Professorships in Irish Unisexities. To the enchanted chant from the placard-stacked and jam-packed gal-only gallery of:
-Parity for Vulgarity ! Parity for Vulgarity ! Parity for Vulgarity !
Thus, prompting the Minishter of Shtate to announce that her firsht appointment would be:
-A Professorship in the Feckulty of Vulgarity !
This was the cue for Kate O’Connell, née (gasp) Newman, Fine Gal TD for Dublin Bay South, to enter the Chamber with a pot in one hand and a bay in her south Dublin throat. With Sunday Morning Coming Down, the baying Kate bellowdramatically went into Kris Takeofferson mode, while dissing mere males for daring to even dream of discussing child-birth not, by wind-breaking into a strident version of :
–My cleanest dirty bed-sheets !
Not for nawt is naughty, self-worshipful Kate known by her Legion of M. admirers, as :
– The Stridentine Miss.
This prompted a large shower of female smalls to be tossed down into the commodious Chamber from the direction of the gal-only gallery. Prompting the Pooh-Bah of a Ceann Comhairle / Speaker to whack his teak gavel (this mere man being a de rigeur auctioneer in real life) on the feckin’ lectern.
-Decorum in the Dáil ! Decorum in the Dáil ! Ladies, pul-eeeeeeze ! There are gentlemen present !
Sadly, his ruling was over-ruled by his receiving a smack in the gob by an X-rated, X-large unidentified, inflatable rubber object thrown once again, for badness, madly, from the on-high direction of the gal-only pubic (with an l) gallery.
(The Perkin, a keen student of the low-down re. the hi-jinks of McHenpartyism recognised said-object in the wink of an eye, but in this feckin’ decorous family-friendly blog is obliged to keep his Trappist-like trap zipped, buíochas le Bandia).
-Parity for Vulgarity ! Parity for Vulgarity ! Parity for Vulgarity !
Which (sob) smack in the gob was the cue for a hoppin’ mad Ruth Coppinger, TD for Prophetess before People, aka The Truthie Cutie (for it is she ! in the pithy role of the itty-bitty Pitti Sing-Sing) to swan into the porcelain Chamber on song.
And she to be holding aloft an intimate item of female under-apparel, much to the early girly shrieks of sheer, unandulterated Missy Bliss. While uttering an anti-mantra which somehow seemed to owe more to one Davis rather than an other, Bette rather than Thomas.
–Tír gan Thong ! Tír gan Pong !
(Surprisingly, The Unionist Times, taking its cue from the discreet, ladylike decision of The Truthie Cutie, somehow saw fit to omit a fact-checked report that the same intimate apparel had been first held aloft by an, erm, unembarrassed female defence barrister in a Cork court during a rape trial in which the mere male defendant was acquitted, that kinda thingy).
–Tír gan Thong ! Tír gan Pong !
Is it any wonder that there is small, imperfectly shaped laneway in Dublin 2 not unadjacent to the Dáil Office named in her cantcestral honour ?
-Coppinger Row.
So now. By swerve of border to bend of bay brings us back by a commodious vicus of recirculation to:
B.Á.C. stad.
Tuilleadh le Teacht: To be Continued.
Comments are closed.