“So there it is; work it out for yourself
Yeah, be selective, be objective
Be an asset to the collective
‘Cause you know you gotta get a life”
Beresford Romeo, Hayden MacLaren Browne
The title of this week’s blog was due to be ‘Paperback Writer’ and would have started with these lines from The Beatles song of the same name :
“Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job
So I wanna be a paperback writer”
But I’m two chapters short of finishing it and ….. hopefully next week.
It’s a book about our Drumlin Giants and a boy called Sonny who dreams them into existence and it will be quite cool.
What distracted me from completing it was a First Aid Course, mowing a lawn, and another lawn, a delightful dinner for two, a trip to Dublin with my Soulmate, a run/walk with Tiny Ray, a Reformers Pilate session, an industrial tribunal, a mystery involving a receipt for 23 Pornstar Martinis, two llamas, a cat ( not Tuna), a breakfast in a boathouse, a dog cart, the meaning of life, shrubberies…
“WAIT ! Did you just say ‘the meaning of life’ ???”
Yes, and shrubberies. Do keep up…
“You mean, the actual Meaning of Life ?”
Yes ? Strange that that’s what you latched onto, Dear Reader, I thought an order for 23 Pornstar Martinis was much more intriguing, but hey ho…
“People have striven for centuries, millennia to discover the meaning of life !!!”
Really ? You do surprise me. My Dad and my friend Micky hit upon it again today while we spent the day pottering around Farmleigh House, and later Collins Barracks.
“Sorry, but you, your Da, and your friend Micky discovered it…today ???”
No.
“I knew it ! Religions have been founded, lives have been sacrificed, countless years of study and contemplation spent, without an answer. I knew you were joking.”
No. I wasn’t joking, I meant ‘No’, we didn’t discover it today…we already knew it, we just hit upon it again.
“So ???”
So what ?
“WHAT IS IT ???”
Oh that ! Have you been sleeping well this week ? You seem a little irritable ? Maybe you should add a little roughage to your diet…or a Pornstar Martini ?
“Can you PLEASE just tell meeeeee !”
No.
“AAAARRRRGGGGGH !!!”
I can’t tell you what THE meaning of life is.
I can’t tell you what the meaning of life is to you.
But I can tell you what it means to me.
Today, Thursday, my Dad and I went to Dublin. We collected my friend Micky at his house. His wife Helena came out to say hello to Dad, as they hadn’t seen each other in many years. Dad was chuffed. We were due to head to the Halfway House for breakfast, but Micky directed us to Farmleigh House, which neither Dad nor I had ever visited before. It was a gloriously sunny day and we marvelled at a large knotty tree on the path up to the house. The tree was pollarded, but I’ve just looked that word up now, when we looked at it we just thought it was wonderfully knotty.
We went to the boathouse for our breakfast, had very nice coffee, while looking at the ducks. Then we had another coffee. While ordering the second coffee a man bumped into me in the queue and we both said ‘sorry’ at the same time. He said that he was really sorry, but that he sometimes wobbled a bit. When he was served I offered to carry his tray of teas and coffees outside for him, but he insisted on doing it himself. The barrista was going to call after him because he forgot his pot of tea, but I said I’d take it out to him. As he got to his table , his wife said “Well done ! You didn’t spill anything.” And he beamed from ear to ear. I left the teapot on the table, and got two smiles.
After our leisurely breakfast we strolled around the lake…leisurely. We chatted about the cost of things. It sounded like a very grown up conversation, so I left it to Dad and Micky.
In the walled garden we were followed closely by a cat. Another visitor said that he’d never seen a cat ‘walk to heel’ before and asked what her name was. We said we didn’t know, that it wasn’t ours, and we were just following her as she seemed wise. The visitor gave us a worried smile and walked away, looking back a few times to make sure we weren’t following him.
We walked to the sunken garden and then to some rather ornate sheds.
On our way back to the car Dad, knowing that Micky was retired, asked him what time he got up at each day.
“I’m a creature of habit , Johnny, I get up every morning at half seven, I have a coffee, a wee smoke, a little potter, and then I go back to bed until ten, or so.”
Dad smiled and clapped him on the back. “That’s what Kathleen and I do !” ( I should point out that my parents do not smoke, and that Dad does go back to sleep until ten-ish, but Mum gets up at half eight.)
“Tell him the best bit.” I said to Micky.
“Oh yes. In the afternoons, I have a bit of a siesta.”
I think I saw a tiny tear escape Dad’s eye, and he looked at Micky with an admiration that I never recall him bestowing on me or my brothers.
We drove to Collins Barracks.
None of us had been there before.
There was a beautiful illuminated neon piece of art that simply said “we make our own histories”. I loved it. There were canons recovered from the Spanish Armada, there were medals, WWI posters, tanks, uniforms, pocket watches…and a coffee shop. We had two Americanos, a Flat White, a slice of apple pie, an almond croissant, a square thing with pear jam, and chats about the 1926 census.
On our way back to Micky’s house we picked up a box of Magnum ice creams and we ate them out the back in Micky’s garden in the sunshine.
We exchanged hugs.
On our way home Dad said “ Do you know, I can’t remember a day in Dublin as good as that in a long time.”
When we got home Mum asked Dad what his highlight of the day was and he said “ Micky gets up at half seven and has a coffee and then goes back to bed until ten….AND he has a siesta in the afternoon !”
Mam smiled and told him that he was NOT going to be having siestas. She then asked me what my highlight was and I said “Seeing Dad meet his hero.”
We had a wonderful day.
And that’s what’s it’s all about.
Or it’s 42.
Toodles,
Paul
P.S. This is a classic, as are you.
P.P.S. This is an audio of an old blog. Dad informed me today that he hates it when I curse in the blog, but especially in the audio versions. If you’re of the same persuasion don’t listen to the last 10 seconds.
P.P.P.S this is this week’s worky blog
Boots, You Say ?
My brother John has just popped his head into my office and gently said “ Just a wee reminder, could you do a blog for work ?”
I held up Tim Hartford’s ‘Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy’ which I’d been reading, looking for Monaghan connections, and replied “Researching it now.”
“Em…is there any chance you could write it about footwear ?”
“Of course….everybody wears shoes.”
This did not reassure him…
We know footwear.
Our Mum and Dad met while working in the Clarks Shoe factory in Dundalk, which employed 1,100 people at the time. Our Granda, Frank, worked in the boot factory in Mullan village in Monaghan in the 1950’s before he moved to Dundalk, and Dad ended up moving us all back to Monaghan in 1976, as he’d been appointed as the production manager in the same factory, James Boylan & Son. So we grew up visiting the factory on Saturday mornings and holidays.
I ended up working there temporarily in 1984 , while waiting to go to college, and left sometime in the early 90’s. My brother Stephen worked there after I left.
So we know footwear.
In the factory we made men’s shoes and boots. The boots were generally agricultural in design, nature and application. Before my time there the factory had made climbing and hiking boots, and even sponsored part of Chris Bonnington’s 1978 unsuccessful attempt to climb the K2, wearing Monaghan made boots. I remember years later seeing a documentary about the expedition on the BBC and seeing them burn Dad’s boot boxes as they gave up after one of the climbers had died in an avalanche. Whenever I asked Dad what Bonnington had been like, he only ever said “Tall.”.
There was a low cut boot that we made called Errigal which was a very simple walking style that was only kept in production because Gay Byrne bought two pairs each and every year. For our Yankee and across the sea readers, Gay Byrne , for most of my life, was a radio and television presenter who had the most popular daily radio show in Ireland every weekday morning and then , every Friday night, had the most popular television show in the country, The Late Late Show, which ran for over 2 hours from 9.30pm until he ran out of things to say.
Dad always admired him, as he always insisted on paying for his Errigal boots, whereas other celebrities expected them for free. And then , sometime in the early 1980’s , the factory decided to sponsor the inaugural National Walking Day , a nationwide event with organized hikes and walks on a Saturday all across the country. The main one was to take place in Glendalough, and several government minsters and the President, Patrick Hillery, were due to attend. Gay Byrne was a known rambler, so Dad called him and asked if he could do them a favour, as an Irish manufacturer , and publicise the event, and maybe even compere the launch. He said ‘No’.
Dad never watched the Late Late ever again…not even the Toy Show !
Incidentally, when I was at school, a chap in our class, told us that his Dad was in the army and sometimes had to accompany President Hillery. The Irish navy had three ships at the time, the Aoife, Emer and Deirdre, and for three weeks every Summer from 1976 – 1990 , one of them was out of active service, as it took Hillery, an avid golf fanatic, around the coast, stopping at all of the links golf courses.
It became more and more difficult for an Irish based manufacturer to compete with imports, starting with Ireland joining the EEC , and the removal of duties on Spanish, Portugese and Italian imports. Dad was always looking for niches. When roller discos became popular he made Jbees shoes, when skate boarding became popular, he made leather kneepads and elbow pads. He made Levis shoes under license from Clarks, and I made extra pocket money, selling the seconds to classmates.
An annual staple was the boost to the business around Communion and Confirmation times. Again , for possible overseas, and non-Catholic readers, in Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, back then, boys and girls in primary received their first holy communion around 7 years of age, and their confirmation , a ceremony where the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost as we used to call her, is invited to confer wisdom on the 11 year old member of the congregation. They were both very big family and community affairs, and the girls wore white dresses for their communion, and ‘Lovely Girl’ dresses for their confirmation. The boys usually got their first suit for their communion and their second for their confirmation. The suits were literally mini me versions of whatever their Dad’s were wearing, and necessitated the purchase of wee dressy shoes.
This was a niche market, and Dad filled it.
Outside of that , as the years went on, while I worked there, we began to depend more and more on Irish government contracts. There were fewer and fewer Irish manufacturers left and the government tried to protect them a little by specifying that goods had to be Irish made. We supplied the Irish Army with boots, the infamous 24B, for many years. It kept us going.
At one point we also got a contract to manufacture and supply ‘runners/leisure’ shoes to the then current guests of the Irish Prison Service. This was at a time , the Eighties, when Adidas was the dominant brand on the Irish market. They achieved this dominance despite not having a copyright over their three stripes here due to O’Neills Sportswear registering it first. Dad took this as a free license to ‘interpret’ their bestselling shoe at the time, The Rom, and supply it to the prisoners. It went down a treat. Prisoner officers told us that when a prisoner gets released that they always leave everything that the prison had issued to them behind, the tee-shirts, trousers, overalls, toothbrushes, everything…except the runners.
I always smiled at the fact that the government were paying us to manufacture and supply counterfeit runners to prisoners who may have been incarcerated for counterfeiting.
In 1985 there was an attempted mass breakout from Portlaoise prison. This prison was the maximum security prison in Ireland and, this being the 80’s, with The Troubles at their height, had a large population of IRA members. They were the ones who had attempted the breakout using a bomb that they had made …in the prison. The breakout failed because the bomb didn’t go off.
This breakout attempt in turn led to an unexpected visit by Special Branch officers to our factory to determine if our runners could have been used to smuggle in components for the bomb. Our factory seemed like a promising lead to them as it was only 1 mile from the border and in an area known to be ‘sympathetic’ to ‘the Cause’. As soon as word whipped around the factory that ‘the Branch’ are here, five members of staff left though the back gate of the factory, crossed the river and headed over the border. It turned out that they’d been making poteen and they thought that’s what the Branch were after. It took the Special Branch officers only 5 minutes while I stammered through an explanation of how we packed the shoes that it would have been impossible to signify in a delivery of 20 cartons, each containing 24 pairs of the shoes , which one , if any , was to be identified as different to anyone. I stammered because I was only 18 and had never had occasion to be standing in a warehouse surrounded by three rather large men casually holding Uzi machine guns. They then asked if they could buy some shoes at a discount.
I channeled my inner Gay Byrne and said ‘No.’
Nowadays our main brand here, in Monaghan’s 4th largest workwear store, is Haix. If, God forbid, we were ever asked if it is possible to identify a pair of Haix we would happily say yes. Each pair is individually barcoded, internally, and on the box. From this barcode we know when it was made in the factory, which order it was on, and who it was sent to.
Spookily reassuring.
If only they made them in kids sizes we would once again conquer the market in Communion and Confirmations shoes.
