Future daze

St Patrick's Day 2005

Well, it came and went. I hardly drank. But I did manage to channel the ghost of James Joyce for the PopMatters piece. His ghost tuned in from a pub in Skerries and looked on the parade at hand.

Streamers and bunting. Shaven children with tricolour faces. Ample perambulators stopstarting: mothers' talk and conference: names remembered and passed along. Remember me to him. A net of souls each pushing hungry babes in sunlight: same boat and ocean we inhabit. Orange white and bolder green, thinlegged urchins tearing through a crowd. Not so long from swaddling clothes, six of them conspire for a trinket: all eyes on the prize: all heeding mother's cries at Angelus. And yet what is to come is not so long before... Circle of life.

Are you more convinced of the aesthetic value of the spectacle?

Who this leaning lad with limp and quoting mockery? I've ten rounds on order to be dragged away for a pun and piffle. Some misquoted afterlife in Errorland.

(I must admit that quoting Joyce in his own manner seemed the best way of getting myself across. Though if you've ever been quoted direct to your face, you'd know it's very uncomfortable. Especially if you're a stickler for detail and know they've got it slightly wrong. Nonetheless his voice-within-a-ghost-within-a-statue temporarily imbued with sentient power forgave my slight lapses of precise memory and traces of un-Irish accent.)

What discrete succession of images do you meanwhile perceive? Do you still drink?

A mass, a swirl of massing people half happy and halfdrunken as they move to see then move against the tide. A pub claims them for its frothy depths and brine. A smoky bellows guards the door where money sinks in pints. Throw. It. Up. Drinkoffering. Live on beery smells they do. What's in a beer: a name like porter. Twopence a pint. Good for sick children's bones and old cod's pins. My breakfast of rashers and Guinness's. A genetic fact of diet entwined in ages. There's money to export the stuff: expert medicine to the world shipped in vats and clunking metal hulls. Whiskey beer and wine given their parade, is all I see: a crowd parade in parallel proven scientifically by intoxication. A fanfare for this shamrock isle of dreadful thirst. Not the drink that claims these souls, but souls by legal means and tender claim their drink. To each their accord: new money buys more beer.