Today, my best friend and allotment buddy, Brian Moorehouse, and his wife, V’ron, celebrate their 48th wedding anniversary. Enjoy your special day, you two lovebirds. Thank you, Brian, for all the help you have given me and Sheila up at our allotment during the years we have been close friends, and thank you, V’ron for your constant support and words of encouragement during my illness. Bill and Sheila xx
Our five birthday celebrants today are Tricia Fraher who lives in Waterford, Ireland. The other four birthday celebrants all live in the same village of Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland. We wish a happy birthday to Paul Mullins, and Carrick Davins, and Denise O Callaghan, and Margaret Walsh. We hope that all our birthday celebrants enjoy their special day, and I thank them for being my Facebook friend.
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Today will sadly be the last song that I am able to physically sing as the RHS of my jaw has finally seized up with aggressive cancer that has spread around my forehead, face, neck, and throat. I now find it hard to pronounce my words clearly, difficult to ingest food, and uncomfortable to chew and swallow. It physically pained me considerably to record the song I sing today for you, ‘Galway Town’, and I can only hope that I did it justice.
I commence my cancer drug trial on March 29th, 2021 at St. James’ Hospital in Leeds, and hopefully, while it cannot cure my cancer, it may extend my life a while longer. The pain has increased more daily in my face and mouth area over the past month, to the extent that it often produces an involuntary moan from me. It has also started to impinge upon my traditional good sleeping practice and finding it more difficult to eat solids is affecting my appetite. More than all that though, as I can no longer open my mouth enough and move my jaw normally, it has brought my three-year daily singing practise to an abrupt end.
Fortunately, I am way ahead in my stockpile of songs. I have another 300 plus recorded songs that I have not yet posted on my daily Facebook page, so you may even hear my voice from the other side of the green sod before you have heard all my earthly vocal repertoire. Please note that all 1300 songs were sung and recorded before today. It is also fitting that the last song I will probably record is an Irish song for my best friend and allotment buddies, Brian and V’ron, and the other five Irish birthday celebrants today.
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The Irish are a most unusual race, and I can say that without the slightest prejudice or malice because I am a born and bred Irish man. I remember attending an Irish funeral when I was a young boy. As the coffin was being lowered into the ground, the parish priest conducting the burial described the deceased as being “one of life’s scholars, a living saint to his family, friends, and community, and a gentleman with a heart of gold”. Hearing such plaudits, I regretted never having known this great man. By my early twenties, I had attended a great many Irish funerals, and had long established that every Irish man that has ever been buried has been described by the parish priest officiating the burial as being “one of life’s scholars, a living saint to his family, friends, and community, and a gentleman with a heart of gold”. My mother later told me that any bereaved Roman Catholic family could always get the priest to pronounce the deceased as being such a person, simply by adding an extra ten shillings to the customary priestly functions on the day!
My development from childhood into manhood witnessed me growing up an Irish immigrant in the foreign country of England, across the Irish Sea. Our family would often experience racial discrimination as my nationality was constantly run down and denigrated. Far too often I heard the Irish man being held up as the proverbial butt of an English man’s humour. The most common jokes in the world of children and adults at the time were jokes about four men of different nationalities, the English man, the Irishman, the Scottish man, and the Welshman. The location of where the joke was being told, and the nationality of the teller, would always indicate which nationality of the four came out best and which one turned out to be the butt of the joke. From the traditional English person’s point of view, the Irish man was always the one who was left looking a fool because of his tendency to forever grab hold of the wrong end of the red-hot poker. For instance; because the Irish midwife was usually described as being as ‘thick as a plank’, and who always saw the world arse end up, she would slap a newly born infant across the face to test if there was any life present!... or so the joke went.
I would like to use my post today to correct a few misapprehensions about the Irish person, and, especially, the Irish man. First, I adamantly refute the downright lie that all Irish men are big babies who never learn to let go of their mother’s apron string while their Mammy lives. The Irish man deeply respects the women in his life from the Virgin Mary down, and it is only natural that he will always prefer the taste of his mother’s milk, than that creamed product milked from Farmer Haggerty’s cow. I have often heard the English man issue the false charge that the Irishman can never fully loves the woman he married until the woman who brought him into this world no longer lives in it. To the Irishman the lines of affection are clearly defined; Mammy is mammy and wife is a wife! The secret of every Irish marriage is the woman of that marriage knows how to behave in it to best keep the peace. Few Irish men stray from their marriage vows because their wives and mothers of their children learn early on in their marriages how to be a saint in the community, the best cook ever in the kitchen, and both whore and innocent lover in the bedroom. Motherhood is a given in every Irish woman.
I would also like to dispel the false rumour that all Irishmen are born drunks; and if you ever see an Irishman drinking ten pints of cool Guinness in a pub on a hot summer’s afternoon, know that it is not an addiction for the hard stuff that is being displayed, but merely a large thirst after having done a good morning’s hard work. If you really had any understanding about the Irish fella at the bar, you would know that drinking ten pints of Guinness in an afternoon represents ‘taking things easy'. Had he wanted to, the Irishman could have drunk twenty pints without belching or breaking wind once.
When it comes to wisdom, I will have you know that Irish men are not endowed with the brains of a Welsh sheep who cannot distinguish between ram or shepherd on a cold night in the Brecon Beacons. The Irishman is too clever for any of their three closest nationalities. Whereas much of English folk’s learning comes from stuffy old books off a dusty shelf, the learning of a true Irishman comes straight from his head, and the hard lessons of life. If a seven-year-old son asks his Irish father “How do babies get of Mammy’s tummy”, the Irish father will simply tell it as it is, “The same way it got in, son!” Once an Irishman experiences any action, it does not have to be repeated to sink in.
Although natural-born winners in all that they undertake in life, the Irishman never has to be a poor loser. Indeed, were the Irishman ever to come second, it would be because he wanted to. In the unlikely event that the Irish man actually lost, he would be a ‘good loser’ because he is a gentleman and a true gamesman through and through. He does not need to depend on playing dirty tricks to win a pub dart match Irish like spiking an Irishman’s straight whiskey with water. Irish dart throwers have learned their skill from studying their bible and the scriptures. They possess the wisdom of Solomon and the dexterity of his father David when it comes to slinging a dart towards the bull’s eye in the taproom. The Irish man knows only too well how some nationalities are poor losers when the chips are down, so when an Irishman enters any sporting match, he makes a point of not beating his opponent too badly. In fact, he has often been known to throw a match to allow his opponent to save face with their mates.
And while we’re at it, let us also dispel this notion about all Irishmen having originally come from the same family of travelling tinkers. While it is true that the Romans built the first roads in Great Britain, it was the Irish who built the best roads! Without the skill and toil of the Irish navvy, there would be no roads to ride throughout the length and breadth of England, Scotland, and Wales. So, as far as these ‘tinker‘ and ‘traveller’ jibes which are often levelled at us Irish, I have to remind you of the following. It was the Irish men who built the roads and were the ‘constructors’ of them, but it is the English who are 'the travellers'. And while I am on the subject, we also built most of your motorways, your bridges, your underground tunnels, sewers, canals, railways, and even the houses that the English live in or rent!
I know that a few English men will often remark about the shoddy workmanship of tarmac driveways done in an afternoon by two men with Irish accents that are thicker than the layer of hardcore they put down beneath a skimmed surface of tarmac that starts to break up after the first person has walked to cross it the day after. I ask you now, even if we assumed that the workers were not pretending to be of Irish descent, even were we to agree that the cowboy workers were of low-grade Irish stock, which two couples exercised the most intelligence do you think? Was it the two workers called ‘Murphy’ driving an old tarmac lorry carrying the black stuff, with no registration plates to front or rear of the vehicle with which to track and report it, and who charged two grand for an afternoon’s work, or was it the couple of English eejits who were prepared to pay £2000 cash in hand for a job badly done?
‘What about the large families they breed?’ I hear. This is a common charge levelled against the Irish migrant. I acknowledge that the average Irish Catholic married couple will invariably parent more children than will English couples within their often-trialled relationships. This practice of parenting larger families, however, has less to do with perceived fecklessness or papal indoctrination and has more to do with having no more children than is ‘absolutely necessary'. One of the reasons why Irish Catholic couples have larger families is that their children are usually confined to just one relationship. The most important reason though is that they simply keep on having one child after another child until they have a ‘good one’; then they stop!
As to people charging the Irish with being big drinkers and big eaters, let me put you straight on this point regarding Irish consumption. We may eat more on our plate than the English diner, but that is because we chew all our food and can store it easily after digestion until we evacuate it as a solid, instead of converting it to a gaseous fart composed of tiny amounts of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen sulphide, and expelled in the politest of social circles with nothing but the word of ‘sorry’. Also, given the fact that the Irish nation has had centuries experiencing starvation rations and failed crops, nobody should not be surprised if we always finish off what is on our plate.
Irish people, contrary to the popular belief of some bigots are economic all they undertake. They are brought up knowing that life is hard enough without them trying to make it any harder for themselves. Today’s song is a good example. When I listened to the song that I sing today for the first time, it was St. Patrick’s Day of 2021. After about one hour of listening to many Irish songs that day, I was amazed to discover around a dozen different songs with the same tune, and similar lyrics.
After giving this melodic enigma some thought, I immediately concluded that the Irish are simply being ‘economical’ with the use of their own bodily energy and brainpower in the mere composition and writing of a good old Irish song. Why row furiously along the river like one is trying to win a boat race, when one can sail with the relaxing wind? When I thought about it long enough, I knew deep down that it is the same old melodic structure that the old squeeze box (concertina) plays to accompany every Irish song that has ever been sung or every Irish tune that has ever been danced.
Think about it one minute? What greater way is there to save energy and to preserve one’s brainpower than to borrow an old song from the past and put a few new words to it to make a new song? That is why I was able to discover so many songs about Galway Town, all of which varied enough from each other to be accurately described as being ‘different’ from each other. I also found songs about almost every other town that is found in Ireland where this pick-and-mix musical and lyrical construction has been liberally applied to the finished masterpiece of a local folk song.
So, the next time you hear any man (English, Scottish, Welsh, or otherwise) glibly knock my nationality and race, please correct their false impression immediately. Tell the maligner that every true Irish man is ‘one of life’s scholars, a living saint to his family, friends, and community, and a gentleman with a heart of gold’. And as you kindly inform them of these facts, speak in the certain knowledge that ‘this is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!’
Love and peace
Bill xxx