In June 1996 the IRA did most people in Manchester a bit of a favour.  They detonated a bomb, the biggest in peace time history, on Corporation Street, near to the junction with Market Street.  The bomb caused that much damage, it advanced the development of Manchester city centre by about 30 years, leaving us with a city centre today that anybody would be proud of.

The damage was so great in relation to the infrastructure that most buildings within a few hundred yards had either to be demolished or had to have fundamental demolition to large parts of its structure.  This led the movers and shakers to think that while we are doing this we might as well do that as well.  Insurance and investment money came pouring in from all angles and kept the construction industry in business for many a year.  No wonder that although the authorities knew who the culprits were they did not have them arrested.  Had they not done Manchester and the North of England a great service?

The only building within the bomb’s vicinity that did not get demolished was the Royal Exchange, a massive Victorian monolith which had experienced Hitler’s bombs in 1940 and stood to tell the tale.  It was formerly the heartbeat of the textile industry which conducted world wide trade within its porticos, but was now offices, shopping centre and avant-garde theatre.  We, as demolition contractors, were lucky enough to win the contract for the complete internal demolition and clean up of this building and so we embarked on two years of hard, busy and lucrative work.

Back at home my fifth child, Paddy Jo or on formal occasions Patricia Josephine, with one eye on her fast approaching second level education, was expressing a wish to learn to play the piano.  She was just over eight years old when the bomb inadvertently did her a favour and well into her tenth year by the time the favour was realised.

The Royal Exchange, as I have explained, was high, deep and massive.  Nine floors above the ground, four floors below and all sat on a footprint of 60,000sq. ft.  As each floor was handed over by loss adjustors and insurance men, we moved in and cleared everything back to structure.  Hard and difficult work in the confined spaces in which we were asked to work.  We literally shifted several thousand tonnes of debris in our time there.

Some time in late 1997 we were given the undercroft to clear.  The undercroft was the lowest floor of four basement floors, accessed by street traffic from a vehicle lift situated on its southern elevation, opposite Half Moon Street.  It was a warren of storerooms and service equipment rooms housing heating and ventilating and electrical equipment.  The tenants of these storerooms and there was several dozen of them had been permitted entry and had taken out what was considered valuable.  Any item they could not remove because of its size had to be bubble-wrapped and it was part of our responsibility to recover the said bubble-wrapped items and place same onto the tenants’ transport.  Everything not bubble-wrapped had to be removed to tip.

One day in the first week of this operation, we were given the keys to a long tunnel-like room, full of point of sale advertising boards for a shop upstairs that had once sold cosmetics and beauty products.  Struggling through this dusty and out of date paraphenalia and right at the end of the tunnel was a piano with no bubble-wrap around it.  I called the Project Manager on the radio, pointed out the instument to him and asked him the obvious question.  He turned to our job description and said “if it is not double-wrapped, tip it”  Although Paddy Jo did not know it then, her constant pleadings had been answered.

Within an hour of our meeting, the not bubble-wrapped piano was on the back of one of our pick-ups and making its way to our house in Heaton Moor.  With a little effort, four of us lifted it off the pick-up and safely installed it in our front room.  Helen set to work with damp cloths and polish and when I returned that evening there was this wonderfully manufactured upright piano dressed in the most beautifully coloured walnut cladding, a most desirable object.

A piano tuner was called and enquiries made for a piano teacher.  Within 24 hours we had both.  The piano tuner said it was a great example of a horizontally strung piano dating to about the 1870-1880 period.  The piano teacher said Paddy was approaching her lessons with great enthusiasm.  All our hopes and dreams were answered.

A couple of weeks later I received a message from the Project Manager asking me to come up to his office.  I entered and there sat a very irate looking matronly figure, who turned out to be the one-time manageress of the previously mentioned beauty parlour.  “Where is my piano, I did not think I had to bubble-wrap it” she squawked.  It seems, to ease the tensions of the day that rapidly build up in beauty emporia, madame used to visit her dungeoned piano and knock hell out of the ivories until her stress levels decreased.  The Project Manager winked at me and enquired as to where we had stored it.  I was nonplussed for a second but thought for the sake of everybody, I had better be straight.  I explained to the rapidly quietening lady that we had to remove it from its position  in order to keep the work moving but we realised that it had value to someone and that we had it in safe storage at our depot.  I received a delivery address but no thanks and the following day Paddy Jo was heart broken, the lady was happy and the piano teacher was out of work.  However the Project Manager was very pleased at the way he had been extricated from a very tricky situation.  But I had a problem how to placate my darling Paddy Jo and how to keep the piano teacher in business.

Longsight, in Manchester, where I spent my formative first 20 years, is a market for anything.  If you want it, Longsight has got it.  Within hours of me sending out distress signals I was informed of this piano showroom situated in an old mill in Hamilton Road, where I used to play as a kid, climbing its sheer vertical sides and generally doing anything that was just one step from death.  This showroom specialised in refurbished pianos and it was from there, having handed over a pocketful of spondulicks, Paddy’s refurbished Walberg piano was delivered next day.  Paddy and the piano teacher happy, me teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Paddy grateful to her splendid father, attacked the piano with all the vim, vigour and verve she could muster and 18 months later won the Music Scholarship to St. Bede’s College, in Whalley Range, my old alma mater. This Scholarship payed 50% of the fees during her stay at College.  With about £3,000 of a saving a year over her seven years at school that piano owed me nothing.  Paddy continued learning and finished up passing her Grade 8 examination which is as good as the normal piano player wants.  Mrs Rosamund Meehan, Deputy head of the school and Head of Music considered Paddy to be an excellent musician  That piano, the mahogany one, mentioned in my blog posting of 13 January 2012 entitled A Man With A Van, after crossing the Irish Sea the other day is hopefully going to earn some other deserving kid’s parents a few quid as well but it is all down to that beautifully clad walnut piano that we borrowed from that lovely lady.

Hello and it is so good to return to the land of the living to meet you all again after three and a half months of researching the life of a 62 year old dead man who passed from this world 42 years ago and who caused great grief to many young boys in Manchester, that he pastored for 16 long years all that time ago. Readers of this column will know of whom I speak and I just wonder whether it was the manner of his humble birth which made young, intelligent and gifted boys such an anathema to him.

Anyway, I am back amongst you, but not in a joyful or carefree mood, although I should be with that pair of burgeoning boys, born to my daughter in June this summer and winking at me from the wallpaper put on my computer screen and also another birth in August, in Bradford, of my sixth grand child, Hamzah, which means I think, Lion. Slightly built but with long fingers, he has time to grow tall and I expect him to play for Yorkshire one day and hopefully for Bangladesh or England, he has the choice and anybody with choice is half way there. I should be joyful after seeing the twins suck Northern France dry on our holidays there last month and I am not carefree because only just over a week ago, a man I held in the highest regard, a man who, more than anyone I know, kept his hometown of Boyle, in North Roscommon, in the artistic and intellectual spotlights of Ireland, died suddenly. It was his management and organization of the Boyle Arts Festival, an annual event of some magnitude, that kept the modern day artists of Ireland on their toes and it was him, alone, who captured the imagination of the Arts media. Except for him, Boyle would have been some little backwater bypassed on the road to Sligo and dreaming of its military and musical past.

I watched the blaze and pageantry of his funeral service, the blaze and pageantry that only the Catholic Church with the help of the local community can throw on occasions such as these and accepted that that is what they do well to bigfish in small ponds. I started thinking would he have liked all this hype, he went so quickly, he might not have left a protocol to be followed but knowing the man, I would suggest his favourite modus mortatis would have been in a blaze of glory, so he would not have been upset by his requiem.

Continuing along with that train of thought I realised that that kind of celebration would not be for me, not the pageantry or a blaze of anything other than the gas fired jets of a burner in some damp crematorium. I am no big fish in any kind of pond, I am not even plankton, possibly a minor diatom drifting around in a puddle caused by an imprint in the soil of some well worn wellington boot . When I go I want to be treated as such, first of all pinched for reaction, to ensure my mortality and when satisfied that life no longer exists, shovelled into some form of container, a body bag or even a shopping bag and taken to the firing chamber as soon as possible once all legal niceties are resolved, and there turned into clinker or ashes and when cooled, placed in some humble container. A cardboard box will do.

It is at this moment my family, if any still hold me in regard and a friend or friends can gather and drink my supernatural health and think of days when I did my best and there were not many of those. It would be a pleasure at this time if some kind burgher would dribble a few drops of life giving nectar over my cardboard contained dust. Just on the off chance so to speak. My mate, Charly’s, hooch would be just the thing. When satisfied that this elixir is only snake oil then take me off to South Sligo.

I want what is left of me to be bisected, roughly will do, if no scales are to be had, and the first half taken to the top of the Bricklieves, the Speckled Mountains, a place my ancestors of 5500 years ago held in high regard and it is there that my acolytes will await a gentle westerly breeze and allow this moiety of my roasted powder to slip away and be carried by this zephyr, over Dunaveragh, that ancient resting place of pilgrims and on over the latter day N4, to rest on the calm waters of Loch Arbhach with the lightest haze finally stopping on the walls of Ballindoon Abbey, where the Dominicans held sway 500 years ago.

Back in the car again with care being taken of my final remnants, a zephyr up there can soon turn into a tempest and this final grit has another place to go. To the historic Plains of Boyle we will be destined. Here on this vibrant pasture land, Irish cattle have been fattened up for thousands of years. In this much prized upland plateau is the townland of Eastersnow. It is here John Mcgahern, my most favourite wordsmith, in his much praised book “Amongst Women” buries the first fictional mother of the family. I can only say that he did this for the beauty of its name, certainly to me a better sound than, Aghawillin in Leitrim where his own mother lies and it has the added advantage of being within walking distance of Cootehall where he lived as a boy.

The graveyard at Eastersnow is a pleasant site, quadrangular in shape with the four walls of an old chapel standing in its centre. It has been the home of rich man and poor man for a long time and I would like my remaining bits scattered within these four walls. If John McGahern had high regard, so do I and it has the added advantage of being close to Byrne’s Public House. If any mourner ravished with the drouth, after so long a pilgrimage, would just knock on the door, I am sure Mrs. Byrne would offer them a drink.

So my time will be over and I hope there is great merry making in the community as one more thorn is picked out of people’s lives and the lovely Helen can settle down to an old age with little to worry about except for the untidiness of the kitchen. I, unfortunately will not be there to keep everything shipshape and Bristol fashion.

But before I go for today, I want to reiterate the thoughts in my first paragraph and thank you all once again for your support throughout the Summer. There was a steady flow of people logging on every day for, even though I say it myself, a better read than the newspapers.

The various events of June have dried my mind out, it is now a sere mass of grey matter and I have come to a full stop. Every morning for the last two weeks, i have come down the stairs at the crack of sparrow fart, dawn to the unpoetic, sat at the keyboard and nothing, not even a sentence.

It normally takes me about four hours to write a 1000 words, think, edit, rewrite, edit and type out, but these last two weeks nothing, in fact for the most of June, nothing. I might have been bothered about two major areas of research I have set myself, but nothing there either, only indolence, torpor and langour. I cannot set my mind to churn the way it has for the past seven months. So I have decided to rest up until the 1st October, concentrate on the research subjects and hope that I can get them out of the way for the Autumn.

It was not just that the words would not come although that was my Becher’s Brook, but there are so many other fences to jump. The glorious weather, a fascinating series of one day cricket against the Australians, a lake more or less outside the front door which had a 24 hour shimmer in that glorious June, the planning of a continental trip later in the year, the garden and vegetable plot that seems to want care evey five minutes with its burgeoning crop brought to fruition by the finest June on record, the thoughts of the twins thriving in Manchester and thinking of the life in front of them, I am sure and I hope that it will not be as hard as the past 60 years.

So there it is and apologies to all my readers who have been waiting patiently for most of June to pick up the glowing pearls that emanate from my keyboard every morning. A full stop will clear my mind, let me enjoy my enjoyment and stop making me feel guilty about taking time off. All my working life I have felt guilty at taking time off, even when working seven days a week. A weeks holiday, a round of golf made me a nervous wreck, it really was not worth it, but now I am retired, I am master of all I survey. So full stop until October and thank you for having me.

Please excuse me if I am inaccurate but I am speaking about an unusual subject for me at least, but I do understand logic and after nearly 40 years of marriage I am beginning to understand the courage and emotion that make up the female psyche and I know one thing for certain, women know their own bodies and as vacant as some of them might well be, they understand what is right and wrong for them.  There is another thing that I am certain of, men have not got a clue about the inner workings of a woman’s mind and body.  After years of study and examinations, the murky males who populate the maternity departments of hospitals and call themselves doctors and even worse, gynaecologists and look at women from a different perspective than most of us, have no idea about their patients’ innards and minds than we who admire them on a Saturday night out.

To them a maternity department is a well oiled conveyor belt with all operatives ticking along in unison like those in a car production plant, producing fully formed units every 20 minutes or so.  But this in reality is not the case and drugs and other additives are added to fine tune the system.  But this should not be the case.  Each woman is a unique machine, a Rolls Royce and is hand built to perfection depending on their environmental circumstances.  Each woman is different in a million little nuances; each woman needs empathy, not sympathy and certainly does not need to be patronised.

Most women nowadays understand drugs and their misuse and overuse and consultation and agreement is required, not dismissal and overbearance.  A psychotherapist with no maternity training would make a better maternity doctor than those who have trained for years in obstetrics.  Without a doubt when it comes to producing babies, mind is more important than matter.  Pumping them full of antibiotics and birth inducing drugs, like a cow in the field, is not what the normal woman wants.  Environment and nature is the thing to instil into these maternity mechanics.

On conveyor belts hundreds of things can go wrong.  Take the case of the North Dublin woman, Melissa Redmond, who went for an initial scan on her expectant third child, after a few miscarriages and was told the foetus was dead and the hospital set in motion the machinery to remove the embryo by D&C procedure two days later and gave her an abortion tool and some drugs that would help the operation.  The lady agreed to all this but knew in her own mind that something was wrong.  Her body was telling her different, she knew her own body and everything felt good.  Wisely she went for a second opinion to her G.P. who confirmed to her that her baby was live and well and in fact the bouncing boy was born in March this year.  If she had used the abortion tool or taken the drugs given, prior to presenting herself at hospital that new life would not be..

You might recogniSe the hospital, that conveyor belt to hell, Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, famed for Dr Michael Neary’s antics of removing the wombs and ovaries of women as they got out of their cars in the carpark.  To him, no woman was a vital unit until these parasitic organs were cut out.  To read more of this lady’s experiences which was well reported in depth by Fiach Kelly and Breda Heffernan in today’s Independent click here.

I, as a father of six, am well experienced in natural births, long labours (four hours) and short labours (ten minutes), hospital births and home births and I know the most important thing for my wife was environment, nature and absence,  My absence that is, whilst she underwent the joyous and personal effort of birth.  I was obviously welcomed back into the family as soon as the messy bits were cleaned up.

So my daughter, who became pregnant last autumn and was later told she had twins, swore she was going to have her multiple birth at home, like her last child, in peace and harmony and without drugs and insistence and clockwork routine.  She had suffered trauma with her first two births in that den of filth and grime, they called Wythenshawe Hospital, a few years ago.  Let us hope that they have now got their act together.

This time she had independent midwives on call and every thing was progressing well until time stepped in.  Even independent midwives have to send their charges to hospital if they are more than three weeks premature and Katy was 35 weeks gone when she started to have regular contractions yesterday and she reluctantly had to go to Stepping Hill Hospital, where if she had let them, she would have been hooked up to the conveyor belt and pumped with antibiotics.  An institutionalised midwife explained the system and a foreign doctor, who did not have a proper grasp of the language, never mind the mind of the mother, told her she would be endangering the lives of the unborn if she did not enter into the spirit of his system and have steroids administered to the foetuses.

Her husband could see the trauma his wife was in and with the obstinacy only those born in Northampton have, told the doctor to fuck off, which released the tension momentarily.  Katy suffered an adrenalin rush which halted her labour and they came home, exhausted and annoyed.  Her contractions started again this morning and she waited until they were coming thick and fast before submitting herself to an understandable husband’s six mile hair-raising drive to hospital.  An hour later, Tom, her first child was born at 10.05am and as I write between tears, he has already settled on her right breast and we are waiting for the second.  It is important to know that in this case the hospital staff did not have chance to start up the conveyor belt, at least nature if not environment took its course.  My wife telephones me from the ringside and tells me that a doctor in a book she is reading tells that the safest place to have a baby is in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital, to sever the umbilical and tell the driver “home James”.  The phone rings once more with the news that George was born at 10.30am and is settling down well on the left one.   Alleluia! Alleluia!

Mother, father and fourth and fifth born swear to be out of hospital this afternoon.  I wish I was there instead of tapping the keys of this ever devouring machine of mine.  I can hardly see the keys for these last few lines so emotional as this morning become.  Alleluia!

As a post scriptum to this happy occasion the first pictures, as if by miracle have come onto my computer screen.  The two young bucks look like their father and mark my words, they look obstinate buggers.

First of all I would like to apologize to anybody who reads this blog on a regular basis.  I have been very busy and have only managed to squeeze in one blog in the last week.  A cousin of mine died  a week ago, trgically young at 54 years of age and I went over to England last Thursday to a very emotional but lovely funeral.  A funeral is a very necessary and cathartic experience for all that have been  touched by the deceased’s life.  The tentacles of humanity, stretching out and gathering in all those people, who have at some stage  had their spirit lifted by the finished life-force, for one final celebration.  It is happy and sad and necessary and this particular celebration was made all the greater by the beautiful panegyric of the priest, Father Bernard Sparks, a great and longtime friend of the family.

I left the gathering after a couple of hours and went back to my daughter’s house in a very contemplative mood.  For reasons I will not bother you with, I had not seen the lady, my first cousin, for a number of years.  As you all grow up and move around and settle into a path of life, touch can easily be lost and this is what made this death all the harder for me.  At one time I was so close to her and her family and now I would not have recognized her in the street.  She died before I knew her and yet at one time I knew her well.  Somehow I had missed out on a good life and that is a big miss.

Away I came and the following morning was more than pleasantly surprised from a comment I received on a blog I wrote  on 12 January 2010 called The Importance of Blogs. I had just heard that Catherine, who has just died, was terminally ill and I dedicated this blog to her and her family.  It traced her mother’s  family tree back to the Famine in Ireland, it was a piece of their history they were unsure of because of their mother’s premature death, nearly 50 years ago.

This comment was from a lady who had just read this blog and realized that she was a second cousin of mine and Catherine’s, her grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.  She was from a branch of the family that had gone their separate ways in the 1930s and for whatever reason  touch had been lost.

That is why the blog is such an amazing and powerful tool if used properly.  You often think that once a piece has been posted, that is it, gone and forgotten, but the internet and blog field leaves it there like a bright shiny cherry on a tree waiting to be picked and eaten by passing strangers.  It is there for evermore, hopefully to be appreciated by everyone and that is what happened.  So now as one cousin goes another comes to light and hopefully will not disappear as quickly.

As I was writing these words this morning, there came news that  will only double my efforts in this field.  My daughter, Katy, has entered the final stages of pregnancy with the anticipation of twins.  She is slightly premature but the experts say that this is normal with multiple births and that mother and foeutuses are fine, with estimated weights of 5lb with still four weeks of cooking  to go.  However she will now have to go into hospital for their delivery,  a thing she dreads.  She was looking forward to a home birth and had an army of midwives lined up to take care of any eventuality.  She will have to be forthright and clear minded and not let these tinkerers of mortality, the doctors, try to bully her into treatment she does not want, just to suit the timetable of the maternity suite.

My wife has flown the coop and is now in Dublin boarding the Holyhead boat with a rolling pin in hand.  God help the doctors at Stepping Hill Hospital.   I am left with the young fellah, a mop and bucket and various dusters and told to make sure the house is perfect on her return.  That might not be until these twins are weaned so I have plenty of time.  The male’s station in life as with all things historic is a lonely one, but I suppose I have the pub and my blog and all the interesting things that both these channels deliver, but I must get on, the mop is doing a lonely dance in the bucket of hot water I prepared earlier.

St Patrick’s Day 1973 dawned clear and bright: it really was a lovely day for March.  The sun shone and it was very warm, in my recollection probably the best St Patrick’s Day for weather.  After a couple of liveners at the Conservative Club, it was down to St. Robert’s church, where we had chosen to marry because of its light and colour as opposed to Helen’s parish church, St. Cuthbert’s, which was brown in its different shades.  Kevin, my brother, was best man and Ann, Helen’s sister, was chief bridesmaid.  The two of them still courting and for a good while longer until their final sad breakup.  The other two bridemaids were Helen’s school friend, Angela Pelham from Langley and Carmel Caffrey from Leicester who was at university in Manchester and was courting Matt Towey, Helen’s brother.  Helen looked a treat in her wedding dress; even now looking back on wedding photographs of the beautiful bride, I bless myself on my luck.

The wedding breakfast took place at the Vth Inn in Manchester, on Crown Square, a part of the Stanneyland’s empire and soon to be an upmarket Italian restaurant, Isola Bella.  We had the feed and I, nervous as a kitten, spluttered out a few words of thanks.  We all agreed that speeches were all a serious waste of drinking time.  We left the Vth Inn in our gleaming green 1600GT Capri and headed for the club where a full afternoon and evening’s entertainment was on the cards.

Cleverly I had instructed my mother to have a wrap up of bacon, egg and sausage waiting at the Club for the first breakfast at our new house the following morning.  We had bought a house in Chorlton on Mauldeth Road West for £7,000 from an old lady.

Everyone gathered at the Club whilst some serious drinking took place and in the evening a band called the Kentucky Ramblers took the stage, I have never heard of them since but what a great show they put on.  We were drinking till 2.00am when I left with my bride.  Jim & Peg Towey had done us proud paying for the meal and a few rounds of drinks, my mother paying for the flowers and I paid for the buffet in the evening.  When you think that after 12 hours drinking, I drove home with Helen, we certainly took some chances those days.

With my last dregs of energy I carried Helen over the threshold and I was soon snoring my head off in the new bed upstairs.  Worst of all I had left my breakfast parcel at the Club and so on wakening at 7.00am the following morning, starved with the hunger, we decided to head for Towey’s, where Jim was just up and we soon had breakfast on the go.

After that the whole of the following week was taken up with a male celebration of the union.  Jim Towey and his brothers, Pake, Mick, Tom, Matt,  Malachy and myself and Jim Duffy, their brother in law, and a fellow from Clare called John Lehane, used to sit down at the lunchtime opening and drink our fill.  These men were all in their middle 50s and having gone through that period myself, I can only admire their concentration, powers of endurance and attention to duty that week.

I remember one dinnertime session, the pubs shut at 3.00pm those days, Bert Flint, the landlord of the Old House at Home on Burton Road, gave us some leeway and did not start shouting time until five minutes past the hour.  There was the Towey’s, Jim, Pake, Mick, Matt &  Malachy, Jim Duffy, myself and of course the ever present John Lehane, eight men and twenty four pints on the table.  We drank them and were on our way home for 3.15pm.  Back to a wonderful dinner at Peg’s and then a quick snooze before setting off once more for the Old House at 7.00pm. the women with us this time, those that wanted to come that is, most of the older women had seen this craic so often they stayed at home and waited for the men to run out of steam.

After a week of this enjoyment or carnage, everybody went home and we were left to our twosome and hard facts had to be realised.  I was one week into married life, totally skint, with a mortgage and HP payment due.  Over the previous two years I had been playing golf and with my previous good fortune I had bought a highly prized kangaroo skin golf bag of professional size and quality off the Australian professional at Shifnal Golf Club in Shropshire.  I sold it for £60 and threw in the clubs for nothing, thinking I was that poor I would never play again.  This gave us some respite and I settled down at last learning how to make a family with my beautiful and patient bride.

It was the summer of 1972, my courtship of Helen was stuttering along and we were invited to the wedding of an old mate of mine, Kath Knight from Notre Dame days and after, who had decided to marry this man from Oldham, who called buses, ” buzzes”.  They were going to Paris for their honeymoon.  Helen, her sister Ann and a lovely girl from Marple called Josie, who unfortunately died recently, had also decided to have a week there and the dates collided.  So I decided to go for the craic.

Not a good idea in retrospect but I was never any good at testing the temperature.  The women thought I was muscling in on their precious week away and Kath Knight’s husband could have done with less interference.

However after a tetchy few days,  I lost the uncomfortable feeling in the presence of my friends, at the counter of a local bar which stood on the corner of the street our hotel, Hotel Blackstock, was situated, in the Pigalle district.  The bar was owned or managed by a chap from Alsace, who had a particular liking for his native wines and tried to pass on that passion to any old sod who would listen and embibe.  He met the right person, I had both time and inclination and while the girls went sight-seeing and Kath did what pretty young brides are supposed to do on honeymoon, I sat and drank with my nouveau ami, while we toasted the wines of Alsace, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris, Riesling and Muscat and that lovely pint of mixed,  Edelzwicker.  We also toasted the towns and villages of Alsace, Riquewihr, Ammerschwihr, Colmar, Mittlewihr, Ribeauville, Barr and Turkheim.  A two day experience that has stood me in great stead and has remained with me all my life.

Anyway towards the middle of the week I managed to corner Helen on the deuxieme etage of the Eiffel Tower and while she patrolled the kaleidoscopic view of Paris with a telescope, I dropped on one knee to the flesh grinding open grid floor of that etage and proposed my intention.  Helen, intent on the view and caring little for her suitor, mumbled a disinterested “O K then”.  I rose in pain, lifted her off her feet, kissed her and took her away to the nearest bar to celebrate, before her dormant prurience awoke.  After a good feed and a load of cognac and champagne, the nearest I could get to Brandy and Babycham, her favourite tipple, she collapsed to the floor with the emotion of the occasion and I had to carry her lifeless 45kgs over my shoulder, back to the Hotel Blackstock.

The date was fixed for St. Patrick’s Day 1973, about eight months away.  I took her into town one Saturday, to Terry’s the Jewellers, on Cross Street.  It was where my mother had gone in 1941 with my father.  She came out with diamonds, Helen , appropriately enough came out with emeralds and I came out £1oo lighter.

Realising one holiday was not enough, I took her off to Ireland to introduce her to relatives she had not seen for years.  Martin Doherty, a lad from Foxford, came over with us to ensure the two of us did not get too excited with our situation and we arrived in Rooskey, just north of Charlestown in Mayo, in record time.  Previously when I had gone over to Ireland, it was always in male company and it normally took us three days to hit the west.  Kilcock, about 20 miles from Dublin, was the farthest we ever got the first day, drinking bad poteen in a house we knew there.   The next day Mullingar, or on a good day Mostrim (Edgeworthstown today) was as far as we could venture, finally hitting Charlestown and the beginning of the west late on the third day and that was after shutting our eyes driving through Balaghaderreen as we might have stayed a week in that town with all its pubs  But there we were in Charlestown four hours after leaving Dublin.  Unbelievable and praise be to women.

Martin wanted to hire a car to get down to Foxford and we heard of a place in Aclare.  We went down with Helen’s two cousins, Tom and John.  The man immediately took us into a ball alley where we played handball for an hour.  Finesse on the handball court was more of a credit reference than a letter from a bank manager to this man.  Martin drove off in a green Cortina and we went back to Rooskey.

The following day I went with Helen’s uncle Pake to buy some poteen from a man who made quality stuff outside of Tubbercurry.  We sat inside drinking tea and eating biscuits, surrounded by lots of little kids, whilst Pake was outside earnestly talking to the man.  You would think they were buying or selling cattle and not the nefarious game they were at.  The Garda Sergeant lived across the road and although he might have been this man’s best customer, certain protocols and subterfuge had to be abided by.  Funnily enough, one of those little kids who surrounded us grew into a strapping young pipelayer and worked for us years later when we were constructing a new drainage system in Macclesfield,

The following day, cousin John, a lad called McDonough from Derrikinloch and I went out shooting.  We had Pake Towey’s gun, McDonough’s father’s gun and a gun belonging to the Clossick family, who lived in Rooskey opposite Henry’s house.  All the guns were licensed but unfortunately not to the happy gang of gunmen that went out that morning.  We shot a couple of duck on the bog, near the lake and bored, we went off to the outskirts of Bunnanadden where John knew there was some hares.

I shot a hare and was a little surprised to see a Garda coming across the field to us.  I knew him well, his name was McRudden and only days before I had been shaking his hand and he had wished me a nice holiday as Pake and I delivered turf to his house.  Sentiment did not deter him and he confiscated the guns and cautioned us for breaking some law or other.  I did not realise that I had sinned most greviously but the other two lads did.  I understand the guns were reinstated a week later on payment of a small fine and I have wondered whether my name was still in the Hall of Shame at Garda HQ.  The crowning glory of this chain of events was that McRudden left us with our booty, which we took home to Aggie, Helen’s aunt, who made the finest duck and hare pie I have ever eaten and possibly the only one as well.  It was delicious and well worth the pain of arrest.

We went back to Manchester and started scrimping and saving for our wedding, a deposit on a house and a new car.  We bought the car first, a Capri 1600GT.  Emerald green with a gold stripe up either side and white-walled tyres; a 120mph Irish flag.  We were tremendously proud of this wonderful car but it was an ill-timed purchase.  I now had an HP bill each month as well as trying to get together the £700 deposit for a house, but we enjoyed ourselves for a while living off this last luxury of our single lives.

Today I want to tell you a story about a remarkable Roscommon woman from the town of Lanesborough.  Now I know Lanesborough is in Longford, so she must have been from the west bank of the Shannon, she was very proud of her Roscommon roots.  She was born Kathleen Gill in 1928, I think, which would have made her 82 if she had lived today.  Kathleen came to Manchester in the early 1950s along with thousands of her countrymen and women and met and married a man from Bellavary in Mayo, James Nolan or The Bundle of Rags as he was nicknamed.  The cabs of construction plant were notoriously cold and Jimmy used several layers of old clothing to keep himself warm.  By 1970 the pair had been married about 17 years and between them had five children.  A boy first, two girls and then a set of twins of either sex, who were three years old when she was found to have breast cancer at the age of 42.

My story really starts in the Christmas of 1969 when a friend of mine, Jim McHale from outside of Castlebar, invited me to spend Christmas at his mother in law’s house in Rooskey, about six miles north of Charlestown, on the Sligo/Mayo border.  Once at Mrs Henry’s house, where we feasted on the finest potatoe cakes I had ever eaten, we called to a neighbours house, who Jim said had relatives in Manchester.  The lady of the house welcomed us as she has done many times since and started telling me of her husband’s three brothers, Jim, Matt and Malachy, in Manchester.  Within seconds I had them pinned and that was the start of a 41 year friendship with that woman, Aggie Towey.  In fact Jim Towey had a son who was at school with my brother in Grange over Sands and what was more important, he had two long haired blonde daughters, Ann and Helen, who I had met up with at a garden party some years before and had slotted into my memory for future research.

On my return I determined to  look them up and did  but it was not for a few months afterwards that I ran into Helen again who had originally took my fancy.  She was a lovely blond haired, round faced girl who at 5 foot nothing and seven stone weight, was perfectly formed, going in and out in all the right places.  She had a mind as sharp as a razor and a tongue of equal quality.  Her temper had been moulded by her father; the type who hit first and ask questions later.  I thought the plusses far outweighed the minuses and I would soon have her under my spell.  In retrospect, with our two years courtship and 37 years of marriage I have not managed to tame that wildness yet but I am hoping.

At that time Helen spent most of her time at Nolan’s house looking after Jimmy Nolan’s five kids. Kathleen, who I had not yet met had been taken into hospital for a mastectomy and Helen’s every waking hour was spent in this house doing the cooking and cleaning.  I thought what a hero and made my clumsy play that was instantly rebuffed.  I could see Helen’s attachment to the family and a short while later after Kathleen returned from hospital and we had been introduced, I started turning up at the house more and more frequently trying to impress Kathleen as much as Helen, that my suit was in earnest and that I was worth considering.  Kathleen, a lovely woman, could see my providence before Helen.  Realising this I pressed on knowing that Kathleen would also impress on my intended all the wonderful characteristics I then posessed.  I had plenty of money; I could drink like a fish; I could handle myself in a scrap; I was of Irish Catholic stock and many and much more

In some things I had a certain clumsiness like not being able to say the things that girls liked to hear.  I had lived and worked all my mature life with a bunch of savages, so I knew it would take time for the edges to be smoothed out.  The problem was did I have that time?  I asked Helen out again and with Kathleen’s urgings from her sick-bed, she agreed to go for a drink.  Down to the Old House at Home on Burton Road we went and I was just into my first game of Don, a local card game, and my first pint, when these two lads, who were full of booze, started making a nuisance of themselves.  I said something to them and immediately we were rolling round the floor in a kind of horizontal quickstep.  We were eventually pulled apart and I was able to continue my game of cards.  Helen was goggle-eyed and we soon left and I took her home to Kathleen who revelled in the story.  Not only did I tick all the right boxes, I was a hero as well.  This was the Roscommon spirit coming out in her.

Helen came out of shock a few days later and on Kathleen’s exhortation, consented to another night of pleasure in the pub.  I am certain that if it was not for Kathleen, we would never have got together and I think that for the last 38 years, (she died in !972 just a few months before our wedding) she has been looking down on us and laughing at the correctness of her hunches.  Certainly if it was not for Kathleen I would not be sitting here now.  Her hand has pushed me along the road.

Doesn’t time fly?  It only seems a couple of weeks ago when I was 40 and running around Manchester, at the height of my powers, worried about nothing and scared of no-one.  Happily married with at that time four children and starting to realize that there was still a long way to go in life.  As I said that seems only a couple of weeks ago when I was 40.  This week I am 64, still happily married thank God, but with an extra two children to manage and three and a half grandchildren to consider but not now at the height of my powers, worried about everything and scared of a few and starting to realize that if those 24 years went so quickly, I should probably be dead by the time March comes along, having lived to a very grand 88 years of age.  Doesn’t time fly?  My first 18 years felt as though it was a tortoise propelling me, the next 46 was by Concorde.

I am telling you this because I just wanted to warn all you thrusting 40 year olds out there that you have only just got two weeks to go before retirement, so if there is anything in your life that needs improvement, get out this afternoon and start the process.  The Queen (or possibly King by then) and her £200 per week is nigh, prepare yourself for a humbling experience.  For you people have possibly noticed how the population prostrates themselves before you, in two weeks time they will be spitting at you and kicking your arse.

Here is me making plans for you vibrant ones and what I should be really doing is making plans for myself because that chronological equation tells me that I have only two weeks myself.  So what do I want to happen to the former me in that first week of March.

Well for a start I do not want some hole in some dauby hillside, I want to be as free as a bird, I want to be able to fly like I did in my twenties, I want to be scared of nothing, I want to feel the sun on my back and the wind in my hair.  I want to be cremated.  A much more civilized and a much older way of saying goodbye, than a hole in the ground.  The folk round here were burning their lifeless ones 5000 years ago so it is not a passing fancy.  Also I am remembering the words of the old Tipperary priest, Fr. Denis Maher I think is name was, parish priest of St. Paul’s in Hyde, Cheshire, who speaking after Dr. Harold Shipman’s life sentence was passed in 2000, said that if grieving relatives could see the condition of their loved ones after a year in the ground, nobody would be buried.  Harold Shipman was the good doctor who murdered his patients.  The authorities proved by exhumation and scientific examination that he had killed 218  of these people, with the big possibility that there was another 200  as well.  By a requirement of law Fr. Maher had to attend about half these exhumations and was horrified by the state of decay he witnessed.  Just as a passing thought my Aunty Betty, a stout hearted farming lady, was thrown off her horse when she was about 70 and damaged her hip and eventually had to have a hip replacement. If it was not for her agricultural heritage of trusting her vet, who looked after her both before and after her operation, she might have been dead now as Shipman was her doctor.

So to get back on course and with this in mind it is the crematoriam for me.  Of course I would love a funeral pyre on the top of some high mountain with the gathered multitude singing Nearer My God To Thee, but practicality was always a subject close to my heart therefore some holocaustic oven in a Dublin back street will have to do.  From whence my gathered dust, having first of all been placed in a suitable container, will be taken up onto the Speckled Mountains or the Bricklieves as they call them round here, handily situated in South Sligo and 50% of my remains will be thrown into the air and let wander down the mountain, wafted by a warm westerly breeze in the direction of Lough Arrow and let mingle and blend with the myths and legends of this astounding place.  Our ancestors certainly knew how to let go.

The other 50% of my clinker I want taken to another calm place, the graveyard of Eastersnow, high up on the plains of Boyle and etched on my memory by John McGahern’s book Amongst Women.  It is to this place he brought his mother in this work of fiction walking her coffin from Cootehall Church to this graveyard.  His real mother was buried in Aughawillan in Leitrim but he must have found something beautiful about the name and place of this quiet graveyard with it’s centuries old ruined chuch.  After this second scattering my life’s purpose will be over and condemned to distant memory.

By the way before you do any of the above give me a kick, if I flinch you will know that I am not quite ready for the oven.

One of the finest things that the Irish language has over the English language is the ability to come up with a word that takes the English about twenty words to describe.  One such word is conán, or it was such a word spoken of in East Galway many years ago and it succinctly summed up a man’s motive in dealing with advantageous and deliberate action when partaking in one of the Holy Sacraments with a woman.  The English have a word Hypergamy but it applies to both men and women and does not have the same raw natural cunning implication as conán has and funnily enough the hypergamous protocols are observed by gay couples whereas there is not a tint of homosexuality in conán. It has become a serious topic of debate in America where 42% of well educated professional black woman are unable to find a compatible black mate and have to resort to a lower status marriage if wishing to bend to her natural instinct of motherhood.  They will not and therefore this massive pool of black, hopefully, virginity exists and why the black cunán has to use all the skills at his disposal when faced with this discrimination.

To help these hapless souls in their quest for hypergamy I list some of the famous men who have benefitted from this dubious ploy of being a cunán

Prince Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel of Saxe Coburg and Gotha (1819-1861)

A little known prince of a germanic duchy who married Queen Victoria in 1840, who bore him eight children.  Many a town, regiment and lake bear his name which of course would not except for his propitious betrothal to his first cousin, Victoria, when they were both 17.

Prince Philippos of Greece and Denmark (1921-Present)

Another impoverished european prince who caught the eye of the nubile Princess Elizabeth, heir to the English throne.  Dashing as he was in his naval uniform, he did not have a pot to piss in but served England well during the war and many a titled lady also.  He married the future queen in November 1947 after renouncing his Greek and Danish titles, being bestowed English nationality and adopting the surname Mountbatten.  He would probably have worked as a well paid gigolo except for his fortunate marriage.  Whereas he did participate many times in this tawdry pursuit after his marriage it has never been recorded that he ever asked for money for his endeavours.

William “Bill” Towey of Cloontia (1810-1870)

Born in 1810 in Cloontia, in the townland of Shanawalla, he started courting a recently widowed young woman, Mary Casey of Kilgariff East, who had a fine farm of land and the makings of a shop left to her by her recently departed husband at the crossroads in Kilgariff.  From that innocent and yet earnestly contrived courtship sprung a judicious coupling which resulted in a fine dynasty being formed, which found its way to the far corners of the earth with the male members excelling in the copper mines of Montana and the coal mines of England and the women bearing children galore to propagate the said dynasty.  William easily survived the famine due to his wife, Mary’s, strong constitution and vigourous work ethic. He lived the whole of his married life at the crossroads, neither bothering a soul or borrowing off anybody.

Tom “Bill” Towey of Cloontia and Cloonlarhen (1879-1945)

A grand son of the above who after an apprenticeship in the copper mines of Bute, Montana, came home and searched far afield from his native land of Kilgariff and found good pasture in Cloonlarhen in Rooskey about three miles from his home, where Ann Hunt, a tall lithe woman of 30 was farming 30 acres with her ailing father.  Tom took a labouring job with his widowed sister Mary Gallagher, who lived in the next house to the Hunts and set his cap at Ann, who for all her straitlaced unmarried ways succombed to Tom “Bill’s” charms and married him in 1911 and soon begat nine children in thirteen years, in spite of Tom “Bill’s” wanton need to earn money in Montana.  It is from the above two propitious unions did my wife Helen decend

Larry Fortensky of Stanton, California (1952-Present)

Larry Fortensky, a rough, tough and obviously well hung construction worker was hand picked out of some 100 million active American males, at 39 years of age, to be Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth husband.  Elizabeth at that time was almost 60 and at the prime of her sexual life and needed something hefty on which to cut her false teeth.  His divorce in 1996 prompted him to beat up his current girlfriend for which he was imprisoned and also caused him to nearly kill himself by falling down a spiral staircase a year later.  Larry became so famous after his marriage to Taylor that he had a poker hand named after him.  One with four tens in it.

Alex Reid of Aldershot (1975-Present)

An ex territorial army paratrooper and martial arts expert who was the 7th Celebrity Big Brother in January 2010 and promptly married the famous beautiful and much under-rated glamour model, Katy Price aka Jordan, on 2 February 2010 in Las Vegas.  Reid who considers himself to be trysexual and has ceased his cross dressing phase, has bigger pectoral muscles than his new spouse who has slowly built hers up over a number of years with help from a friend of her gynaecologist. After five days of this hypergamous marriage, he is suing for divorce after receiving instant fame following his unknown spell making pornographic movies.  He is worried sick that his new wife will involve him in publicity he does not want or crave for, because being a mother’s boy all he wants to do is go home and put his feet up.

Paul Malpas of Manchester and Boyle (1946-Present)

Born in a slum in Central Manchester of mixed race parents, plagued by low intelligence and shortage, even lack of mazuma and was on a treadmill of destruction by his early twenties, spending all his money on drink and cigarettes, then he remembered a girl he had befriended years ago at a garden party and resolved to train her into being his wife.  He surreptitiously met, courted and married this god-fearing, honest to goodness girl, Helen Towey, who at that time had the added distinction of being as pretty as a picture.  Helen was a virtual rose of high minded thoroughbred Irish parents who had settled  in pre-war Manchester and were well positioned to pull England out of its post-war melancholy.  Helen who had been snatched from the bog at Shashkin at a young age, still had the bright dew on her nose when Paul met her, who thinking it was snot offered her his sleeve.  Beguiled by such gentlemanly acts and dazzled by his silver tongue, Helen, to her delight was soon under his spell and his lazy demeanour tantalized Helen’s parents in their South Manchester mansion.  Helen was a woman of strong ideas and disregarding parental advice pulled Paul up by his bootstraps and set him on the road to fame and fortune.  As Sean Mannion , a man from Glenamaddy in Co. Galway and blessed with the wisdom of Solomon said, “yee’d still be in a room on Stockport Road if it was not for that girl” pointing at Helen.  It was plain that this was a hypergamous marriage of the highest order and he was pleased to be christened the Cunán of Longsight.