Rising early: the pain and the joy

How sad, I used to feel, that old people woke up so early. What a shame, I used to tell myself, that they couldn’t sleep in as I did, till 9:00. Or 10:00. Or even 11:00.

These days, as I move further into my eighth decade, I’m having to come to terms with the idea that being that old isn’t something happening only to other people, but that I’m one of them myself. Just like those old people I once felt so sorry for, I also find it increasingly difficult to sleep late. If I wake up and it isn’t yet 5:00, I try to fall asleep again. If it’s approaching 6:00, it could go either way, but I generally get up. At 7:00, well, these days that’s beginning to get into lie-in country.

There is, in any case, now a new motivation to get up when I wake. Two motivations, one might say. Each has a name: Luci and Toffee. They used to sleep on our bed, but it’s extraordinary how much space a pair of toy poodles can take up. And how little opportunity they can leave to us to get any rest. We finally decided, a few weeks ago, that this had become much too much of a good thing. These days, they get banished downstairs, a harsh decree we reinforce by closing the stair gate installed primarily as a safety measure for the grandkids, now adapted to serve as an escape-proof fence for the dogs. Against the dogs, they’d no doubt correct me if they could.

So when I come down in the early hours, these days I’m greeted by two whimpering poodles bursting with enthusiasm to overwhelm me with welcoming affection.

Despite being retired, I still find that my time just fills up with things to do. Some of them are, of course, simply leisure activities. For instance, we recently went for a walk in the hills with a group of friends. The plan was to hike 14km and end up with a paella. In the end, having spent too long enjoying coffee and cakes before we even set out, the hike became a bit of a stroll and, though the paella plan was unaffected (an amazingly good one by the way, in the Valencian hill village of Serra), we only walked six kilometres, indulging more in conversation than in serious exercise. Even so, that took most of the day. The changes in altitude, the conversation in a language I still haven’t fully mastered, the consumption of a large meal, all left me worn out by the time we got home.

When I woke early the next morning, therefore, I didn’t plunge straight into work. And I really mean work: keeping up my English history podcast (wittily entitled A History of England), now at over 180 episodes, has proven quite a task. I find myself having to read book after book, because for every authority I consult, I always feel the need to consult another, to try to cancel out bias in either and get to something like knowledge underneath. Writing the episodes is no small task either, above all the (self-imposed) obligation to keep them short. Remember Blaise Pascal who once apologised for writing a long letter, because he didn’t have time to write a short one.

Recording the episodes isn’t a brief job either. What with editing, correcting, correcting the corrections, the production of fifteen minutes’ worth of material can take several hours.

On top of that, there is of course this blog, though I write fewer posts these days. Then there are the other projects, including a third novel and booklets to accompany the podcast. To say nothing of the various jobs that keep cropping up, around the house, around the car, around administrative authorities.

So the other day, I decided I was going to have a quiet moment with the dogs. With a coffee in front of me, Toffee on my lap and Luci by my side, I put aside for the moment further study of suffragists, Home Rule campaigners and their Ulster volunteer enemies, or the steady, accelerating descent to the First World War. Instead, I chose to relax into the day by chuckling my way through the last few chapters of Lessons in Chemistry.

Between my slippered feet and the collar of my dressing gown:
Luci (left) and Toffee making my (early) morning speial

Do you know the book? As you’ve no doubt spotted, I like to think of myself as a bit of a writer. Not a successful one, I’ll admit at once. But one who enjoys churning out the stuff. And one who knows enough about writing to bow his head in humble admiration when he comes across someone with real mastery of the art. And in writing this, amazingly her first novel, Bonnie Garmus has provided an object lesson in how to do it well. It’s full of life, dynamism, humour, but also occasionally grim tragedy, with an extraordinary set of messages on how one should live and how one should treat others, between women and men, between adults and children, even between humans and dogs. 

The TV series differs from the book in many respects, but not at all in its ability to entertain and intrigue. It’s as well worth watching as the novel is worth reading, and the novel is well worth reading. 

It may be a tad early, 6:30 in the morning. But earliness is the curse of age. Though, with a coffee in your hand, two dogs pressed up against you, and a good book to enjoy, it can turn it into something more like a blessing.

A cheering irony from a land of many ironies

Having failed to inform myself on what to expect, the first time I visited Stormont, the home of Northern Ireland’s parliament, I was shocked to see the approach dominated by a massive statue.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Why, Edward Carson,” I was told.

The statue of Edward Carson in front of Stormont Castle

Carson? It seemed extraordinary. 

The year 1910 was a strange one in British politics, because there were two general elections that year. In both the Liberals, for the last time in their history, emerged as the biggest single party in the House of Commons. They didn’t, however, have a majority and depended on the votes of Irish Nationalist MPs to cling on to office.

Irish Nationalist MPs? You may be wondering how there were any of them. Well, Ireland – the whole of it – was then still part of the United Kingdom and it sent MPs to the UK parliament in Westminster.

To retain their support, the Prime Minister HH Asquith had  to go some way at least to meet their aspirations. It had once been the policy of his Liberal Party to grant Home Rule to Ireland, giving it back the Dublin parliament that had been done away with early in the nineteenth century. Home Rule had split the Liberals back in the 1880s and cast them into the outermost darkness where there is waling and gnashing of teeth – in other words, opposition – while the Conservatives enjoyed almost uninterrupted power for twenty years.

Parliamentary arithmetic, however, is parliamentary arithmetic. The Irish MPs had to be accommodated. Painful though the previous experience with Home Rule had been, Asquith was going to have to try again.

As before, there was fierce resistance from the official Opposition in Westminster. But even fiercer was the hostility of one community within Ireland itself. Further back in the past, in the early seventeenth century, the then King James VI of Scotland and I of England, had sent Protestant Scotsmen to settle in Ireland, to strengthen Protestant power over the Catholic majority. Nearly four centuries on, their descendants were still living in Ireland, mainly in Ulster, the north-eastern corner of the island. They even formed a majority in a large part of that province.

Carson had played a major role in setting up the organisation that came to be known as the Ulster Volunteer Force. It smuggled arms into the province, mostly from Germany, ready to use them to resist any attempt to bring Protestants under the authority of a Catholic-dominated parliament in Dublin. Carson was one of those Irishmen who believed that the place of Ireland was to be an integral element of the British Empire, benefiting from being part of it and helping to sustain it. That was the position known as Unionist.

He proclaimed a policy of ‘No surrender’, a slogan taken up by another well-known Irish Unionist nearer to our own times, Ian Paisley.

Now what the Ulster Volunteer Force was doing was illegal. Criminal even. Indeed, when another figure, Sir Roger Casement, tried to smuggle in German arms on behalf of the other side, the anti-Union Nationalists, the British authorities hanged him. But Carson remained an MP and indeed, despite having organised armed resistance to one British government, he became a minister in another. Why, he even became a law officer in that government, holding the post of Attorney General of England, upholding the authority of a system of laws he’d flouted himself.

An amusing irony, wouldn’t you say?

Poor old Carson. He wasn’t an Ulsterman but a Dubliner. However, Unionism was in a minority in the south or west of Ireland. He found himself having to concentrate his energies saving Protestants from Catholic supremacy only in Ulster. Indeed, even in Ulster he had to give up on his initial hope of keeping all nine counties of the province united with Britain. With their Catholic and Nationalist majorities, there was no question of separating three of them from the south and west of the country.

Indeed, there was even a question mark of whether two further counties, where the Protestant majority was thin, Fermanagh and Tyrone, might have to be left out of a union with the British Empire. But they stayed in.

At the end of this protracted and, ultimately, vicious struggle, Irish nationalists had moved away from their old allegiance to parties looking for Home Rule, to Sinn Fein which wasn’t prepared to settle for anything less than full independence. And at the end of 1921, it achieved its aim – in part. That part was made up of 26 of the 32 Irish counties, while the remaining six in Ulster, with their Protestant majority, were excluded and remained with Britain.

The six counties got their own parliament at Stormont, and in 1932, their government erected the statue to Carson in front of the building.

Now, let’s be clear what had happened. Those six counties had a Protestant majority, for sure. But it represented a minority of Ireland as a whole. So what had been achieved was to create a separate territory to manufacture a majority out of a minority. Not, perhaps, what a strict democrat would regard as strictly democratic.

That majority remained dominant for decades in the north-eastern corner of the island, the region known as Northern Ireland by the (unionist) community that likes to underline its difference from the rest, but the North of Ireland by the (nationalist) community that wants to stress that it’s still part of the same country.

One person who sticks to the expression ‘North of Ireland’ is Michelle O’Neill, a leading figure in today’s Sinn Fein. And why is she so significant? Because last week she became First Minister. So Nationalist Sinn Fein now holds the top political position in the six counties that were hived off to create an anti-Nationalist majority.

Michelle O'Neill addressing the Assembly at Stormont

Another fine irony.

It reflects the fact that the Protestants’ numerical advantage has been steadily eroding. There are now more Catholics in the North of Ireland/Northern Ireland than there are Protestants. That doesn’t mean that reunification of Ireland is on the cards anytime soon. On the contrary, polls suggest that there isn’t yet a majority for it. But, surely, another significant step has been taken along that road.

And here’s another nice irony. 

Every time Michelle O’Neill drives to work at Stormont, she’ll go past that colossal statue of Carson, the stern upholder of the law who felt entirely entitled to break it when it suited him. And it suited him to break it in order to keep anyone like her well away from the kind of post she now holds.

I hope she smiles and waves to him each time.