Kafka and The Dead

I haven't read as much as I normally do so far this year for various reasons, but yesterday I got round to something I probably should have before, James Joyce's short story The Dead, from his 1914 collection Dubliners.

As well as his novels, I've read other short stories from Dubliners, my favourite being Ivy Day in the Committee Room with its famous scene of bottles of stout being opened in the absence of a corkscrew by placing them in front of the fire and waiting for their stoppers to pop out (The Dead has a few beery references too: "three squads of bottles of stout and ale...drawn up according to their uniforms...black, with brown and red labels").

One of the things that struck me about The Dead is its almost Kafkaesque atmosphere, its plot resembling in some ways that of the short story A Country Doctor (a journey by horse-drawn cab through a dreamlike snowbound landscape late at night, awkward encounters with servants, and an epiphany about life and death).

Apart from being leading figures in modern European literature, Joyce and Kafka share a surprising number of similarities once you start thinking about them: born within just over a year of each other, in countries at the edge of multi-ethnic empires and with a growing national consciousness, expressed in both politics and culture, which would see them become independent states after World War I; writing in a language imposed by the colonial power rather than that of its native people; from prosperous middle class backgrounds, which they later largely rejected; plagued by health problems; a more prominent posthumous reputation than when they were alive; and having complex and ambivalent relationships with their fathers, women and religion.

A Bottle Full of Rye

I drank and enjoyed a bottle of rye IPA from the Kinnegar Brewery in Letterkenny yesterday, one of a couple that my brother in law kindly brought back from Ireland for me the other week.

I hadn't drunk this style of beer before, but its colour and spicy taste reminded me a lot of the darker wheat beers (Dunkelweizen) that you get in Bavaria (some of which, Roggenbier, also contain a large proportion of rye in their grists) .

The now defunct King and Barnes in Horsham, Sussex, once brewed a brown ale with rye; in Russia, they drink kvass, a beer made by soaking and fermenting rye bread; and in Finland, sahti, a farmhouse ale brewed with rye and other grains before being flavoured with juniper berries. All ones to look out for in future, I thought wryly...

Guinness is good for youth?

Channel Four's Inside the Superbrands last night looked at the world's most popular stout, and major Irish export, Guinness.

When I started drinking in pubs as a teenager in the late 80s, I occasionally drank bottle-conditioned Extra Stout as well as the cask bitter in my local Holt's house, or Draught Guinness in keg-only places, but since the former became a filtered and pasteurised, and to my palate rather thin, product and the latter is now usually sold in the Extra Cold form that tastes of nothing, the only version I really still like is bottled Foreign Extra Stout, which is much closer in both strength and mouthfeel to the original Extra Stout.

There was a bit about the alleged continuity of their brewing methods which I found a little hard to believe when they were standing next to a row of shiny new, sealed stainless steel vessels, but I didn't spot any of the many myths about Guinness which often pop up in things like this. There was also an interesting section about how the famous Guinness adverts began in the late 20s (although I thought they might have mentioned the Anglo-Irish Trade War just after that, which led to Guinness building a brewery at Park Royal in west London, too).

The programme spent a lot of time discussing Guinness's lack of appeal to young people in Britain and Ireland and the likely impact of this on future consumption of the beer, although as long as it still sells well in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean I can't see the company being too threatened by that, and despite the marketing spiel rolled out by PR agencies and pluggers I'm still unconvinced that the key to attracting them is the non-alcoholic Guinness Zero which they launched a couple of years ago.

A Different League

Amid the numerous news reports yesterday about a proposed breakaway European Super League, a money and power grab by the continent's richest clubs redolent of arrogance, greed and contempt for fans and the communities around them, it was good to watch a football story that represents the polar opposite of all that.

Derry City, whose ground stands at the edge of the Catholic Bogside, suspended play in 1972 as the Troubles exploded around it and other teams refused to travel there for away matches. It was resurrected by its fans in 1985, joining the League of Ireland, based in the Republic, whose border abuts the city, rather than the (Northern) Irish Football Association and recruiting local hero Felix Healy as well as international players such as Brazilian Nelson Da Silva, black South African Owen Da Gama and Serbian striker Alexsandar Krstic.

For some reason, the documentary, Different League, eschews surnames, so as well as Felix we get to meet former manager Jim (McLaughlin) and veteran Derry left-wing journalist and civil rights campaigner Eamonn (McCann). There are also cameo appearances for Sven (Göran Eriksson), manager of Benfica when Derry played their first European Cup match against the Portuguese club in 1989, and former IRA commander in the city Martin (McGuinness) who made sure that the match went ahead by tying a rope to a suspected bomb and dropping it down a manhole in the adjoining cemetery, on whose cross-planted slopes impecunious fans had gathered for a free, if somewhat obscured, view of the game.

Irish Blood, English Heart

The untimely passing of the comedian, actress and scriptwriter Caroline Aherne, who died last week at the age of just 52, led me to reflect once again on a particular aspect of her prodigious talent.

Like many other comedians, musicians and performers who came out of the Manchester area in the 1980's and 1990's, Steve Coogan, Morrissey, Marr and the other members of The Smiths, Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Terry Christian, Shaun Ryder of The Happy Mondays and Mani of The Stone Roses, Aherne was the child of Irish immigrants. As a Catholic born in Manchester of Irish descent, albeit farther back, I've often wondered what it is about that combination that seems to produce such talents.

I think there are two things. One is that being an outsider allows you to see things more clearly than others and, even if only unconsciously, feel little affinity for or need to respect an Establishment (Protestant, pro-monarchy and Empire) that you're not a part of. The other is that as the child of immigrants you belong to the "other" not just in the country you live in, but also the one your parents left, a "double outsider" if you like.

One of Caroline Aherne's earliest, and funniest, comic creations, the Irish nun Sister Mary Immaculate, must surely have been based on her teachers at the Hollies FCJ Convent Grammar School in Manchester.

Guinness Dublin and West Indies Porter

As it was St. Patrick's Day yesterday, I thought I'd try the bottles of Guinness Dublin and West Indies Porter I picked up the other week.

These beers from the Guinness Brewers Project have had mixed reviews, both for their taste, or lack of it, and also for being "inspired by" rather than brewed to the specifications of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century brewing logs in which they appear.

Dublin Porter struck me at 3.8% as a slightly weaker version of the ordinary, bottled Extra Stout. Maybe a few more caramel and chocolate notes but overall it has a very thin body and mouthfeel and little head.

West Indies Porter at 6% is better, with more body and head and a little more of a burnt, roasty flavour, but I'd still rather drink Guinness Foreign Extra or Special Export Stout than either of these.

Finnegans Wake

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

I'm now just under half way through Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's final novel, of which the above is both the end of the first and beginning of the last sentence, separated by a little over six hundred pages of – many would say unreadable – prose.

I'm not going to say that Finnegans Wake is an easy book to read – although Harold Pinter once claimed, somewhat dubiously, to have finished it without any problem as a sixth former – nor that there haven't been moments, especially in the first couple of chapters, when I haven't been tempted to give up on it. So why haven't I?

For one thing, Finnegans Wake with its puns and jokes ("flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marylebone", "peats be with them", "boy fiend") can be very funny, especially the encounter between an Irishman and an invading Dane in the first chapter. As for long passages that seem bewildering when you first read them, I'd say two things. Firstly, as Joyce himself said to a young reader, it's possible to enjoy the flow of the language, the layers of legend, historical and literary allusions and the images they create without fully understanding their meaning: one of the fun things about Finnegans Wake is that nearly every sentence has multiple possible meanings and your own interpretation of them is as valid as anyone else's, although unlike some, mainly American, reading groups (over)analysing them, I plan to finish the book in a month to six weeks rather than a year or more. Also, it helps if you have some knowledge of Irish language and literature – Finnegan for instance refers to both the music hall song Finnegan's Wake, in which a hod carrier comes back to life after being splashed with whiskey at his wake, as well as Finn MacCool, the mythological hero also destined to rise again –  read what others have written about the book before you start, use a guide to it (I've found this one quite useful) and make notes as you go along.

Like Ulysses, Finnegans Wake also has plenty of references to pubs – the main character is a Dublin landlord called Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker – and beer, including Allsopp's, Guinness and Reid's family stout. I've a feeling I may reward myself with a drop when I become one of the few to finish it...

Guinness crisps

Someone brought me a packet of Guinness crisps back from Ireland this week.

I like Guinness and I like crisps so I'm among those the Diageo marketing team is aiming for with this product. And I did enjoy them, although you can't really tell that they're made with Guinness.

A Special Guinness

I rounded off my festive drinking with another beer I hadn't tried before, Guinness Special Export Stout.

I've drunk Guinness Foreign Extra Stout before. Special Extra Stout is the 8% version brewed by Guinness for the Belgian market (David Hughes in A Bottle of Guinness Please explains how that anomaly came about).

Special Export Stout is quite like Foreign Extra Stout in having a smooth, velvety mouthfeel which reminded me of Graham Greene in Brighton Rock describing a woman singing in a pub as having a "rich Guinness voice".

Return to bottler

I'm still reading the chapter about bottling in A Bottle of Guinness Please by David Hughes.

In the 1980's "smaller bottlers could not make money out of NRB's [Non-Returnable Bottles] and dwindled away...In the EU, all countries get Guinness Original 4.2% ABV and most are NRB except for Germany where recycling is important and Belgium, where John Martin gets Special Export 8% ABV."

The idea behind returnable bottles is that the purchase price includes a deposit which you get back when you take your empties back to where you bought them. They are then returned to the bottler who washes and reuses them, reimbursing the retailer for all the deposits they've paid out. I just about remember R. White's returnable glass lemonade bottles from the 1970's. It's clearly a greener method than plastic disposable bottles which are though cheaper to make than glass bottles, especially the returnable ones that are slightly thicker.

The stuff about returnable and non-returnable bottles reminded me of an episode in one of my favourite books, My Brother Brendan by Dominic Behan. Behan and his brother are drinking in McDaid's - a Dublin pub that, like many tourists, I've also drunk in - before heading off to a party with crates of bottled Guinness.

"'Mr McDaid charged you on each bottle no doubt?'

Brendan said, 'Three shillin's on every sacred dozen.'

"'How nice,' sang Bertie, 'only last week I took back a brigade of empties to that horrid Murphy's and the dreadful man merely said, "Thank you very much, sir, it's not often people bring them back on their own." I'm bloody certain it's not. Three jangling miles to the accompaniment of ragged children asking if I was giving balloons for rags."

Bottling Guinness

I'm still reading A Bottle of Guinness Please by David Hughes, a history of the famous Dublin stout brewery.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Guinness sold casks to independent retailers and shippers who then bottled the beer.  Guinness started bottling itself in the 1950's but carried on supplying independent bottlers. By then though the number had dropped, from 12,000 in 1904 to 1,400 in 1953.

This report of a Guinness bottling inspection in Tipperary in 1970 made me laugh:

"The man is a long-retired creamery manager who is probably in his nineties and he bottles a barrel a month. The pub was closed when we called and we found him half-lying, half-sitting on a sort of couch in a room at the the back of the house.

My partner Sonny explained why we had called and asked if we could see the bottling store...The store is in a terrible state...The floor is a combination of mud and flags, the walls are unplastered and there was a heavy unpleasant smell of decaying matter. There are no shelves and the bottles are stored on the floor...

We tried to explain that there was no question of court cases or cutting off supplies and were interrupted by Mr Nolan who said that a Mr Gray of Guinness took away samples of his about twenty years ago and he assumed his stout was first class as he hadn't heard from Gray, good, bad or indifferent, since. He then inquired: "Is that fella living or dead?"

At this stage his grandson arrived and Mr Nolan told us he is thinking of handing over the business to the grandson. We enquired when this might be and were told: "sometime between ten and fifty years from now." Sonny made a very suitable comment and for a moment we thought Mr Nolan was going to fight us as he attempted to remove his shirt."

A Bottle of Guinness Please

I'm reading A Bottle of Guinness Please by David Hughes at the moment, about the famous Dublin brewery.

I was tipped off about it by Martyn Cornell on his Zythophile blog. As he says, it's got more information and illustrations than you could possibly need and the only real problem is the lack of an index.

One of the most interesting sections for me is the introduction in which Hughes recalls his time as an underbrewer at the Park Royal Brewery in West London in the early seventies. Guinness opened Park Royal in 1936 to get round tariffs imposed by the British government as part of the trade war with De Valera's Ireland and brewed there until 2005. As well as the excitement of being responsible for operating the brewery, Hughes remembers the daily beer allowance being increased the more people drank and the head brewer only drinking bottle-conditioned Extra Stout rather than Draught Guinness.

There are some photos of Park Royal just before it was knocked down here.

Guinness is good but FES is better

I've drunk Guinness pretty much as long as I've gone to pubs. I've drunk draught Guinness in keg-only pubs and bottled Guinness in ones that served cask beer when it was still bottle conditioned. But I had another type of Guinness for the first time the other day, Foreign Extra Stout.

I've never seen FES in a pub or off-licence but it is sold by most supermarkets. It's a cut above Guinness Original/Extra Stout in a number of ways. For one thing, at 7.5% abv it's a lot stronger than the 4.2% draught, bottled and canned Guinness. And the taste is completely different.

FES reminds me in some ways of a dark strong Belgian Trappist beer. It's got some plummy fruitiness and a warming alcoholic punch to it as well as a little bit of smokiness I thought. You can also pick up the vinous character that is the result of blending fresh and vatted stout. If I hadn't known it was filtered and pasteurised, I'd have been quite prepared to believe that it was bottle conditioned.

Royal meets Republican

–  The blood-soaked chief of British imperialism I believe.

–  The killer of one's cousin I presume?

With apologies to David Low.

Bloomsday

Saturday was Bloomsday, the day in 1904 on which Leopold Bloom walks around Dublin in James Joyce's novel Ulysses (the title is an allusion to the wanderings of the Greek hero Odysseus as he attempts to return to his kingdom of Ithaca after the Trojan War).

Along with War and Peace, I'd guess Ulysses is the novel that most people know about but have never read. I must admit that while I've read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners, I've never made it past the first couple of chapters of Ulysses. I've wandered around the same streets in Dublin as Leopold Bloom and drank in some of the pubs he pops into. I've even read the opening chapter on a touch screen console in the National Library of Ireland which was a bit surreal given you couldn't read the book in Ireland for decades (an exhibit in the Dublin Writers' Museum points out that, unlike in the United States, Ulysses was never banned by the Irish government but rather the Catholic bishops advised booksellers not to stock it, which amounted to the same thing).

I really must have another go at reading it.

Goodbye Dr No

The news that the Rev Dr Ian Paisley is to stand down as a preacher in the Free Presbyterian Church he set up in 1951 is hardly surprising given that he's 85.  He has already stepped down as moderator of the church, a MP, Northern Ireland First Minister and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in the last couple of years. It's certainly less surprising than him becoming First Minister in the first place, let alone one seemingly on friendly terms with his deputy, former Provisional IRA Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness.

Paisley always reminds me of what a Catholic priest I know used to joke: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was No."  Those who see his career as a question of showmanship are only partly right.  Beyond the political stunts - like heckling the Pope in the European Parliament in 1988 - and the Bible thumping preaching was a conviction politician who actually believed what he said he did.  In many ways, his unbending Ulster Protestantism was more suited to the seventeenth than the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

This song by The Dubliners allegedly about Paisley sums him up.

Ireland, changed utterly

I can't believe I'm going to write the next sentence.  Ireland has broken off diplomatic relations with the Vatican.  Just a couple of years ago, that would have seemed as inconceivable as Ian Paisley becoming a Catholic or Manchester City winning the European Cup.

The news isn't entirely unexpected.  Earlier this year, the Vatican recalled its ambassador after the Taoiseach Enda Kenny attacked the Church's role in covering up child abuse. 

The official reason for closing the Irish embassy at the Vatican is to save money.  But given that the amount involved is under a million pounds a year - less than Charlie Haughey, the spectacularly corrupt Taoiseach in the 1980's, spent on posh French shirts - it seems almost certain that it is a result of the Church covering up child abuse.

More evidence of the new mood in Ireland came in last week's presidential election when the openly gay senator David Norris beat the staunchly Catholic candidate Dana into sixth place by almost sixty thousand votes.