31 July 2025
So the Brits are to recognise Palestine, apparently. Shame Lord Balfour didn’t do this in 1917 - it would have saved a lot of lives. Starmer’s hand forced against his own desires I suspect.
Picture of the Week
Byzantium by Garrett Cormican from his exhibition Trading Places currently on at Taylor Galleries. Cormican’s show is inspired by his visits to Istanbul - the storied Byzantium, where east meets west. Cormican is a man of many parts. In addition to his talents as an artist, he has written the definitive biography of the elusive Camille Souter (The Mirror in the Sea), and is a partner in Clyde & Co. a legal firm with a global reach.
Notes from the Trenches
This week I’ll confine myself to these horrifying images taken from an Atlantic magazine photographic feature on 29 July: Starvation and Chaos in Gaza.
Musical Interlude
Watermelon in Easter Hay by Frank Zappa
Sporting Highlight
You’d have to acknowledge the Lions’ series win in Australia with a match to spare - and Irish players featuring prominently. Australia looked the better side for a lot of the game but the Lions toughed it out. It was great to see Keenan get the decisive score - he’s had a shitty tour so far - and I don’t meant that figuratively. The nonsense about Jac Morgan’s clear out was a desperate last throw of the dice by the Aussies - such clear outs took place throughout the match with nary a squeak. It ill became Schmidt to emulate the “whinging poms” of legend. It was by no means a vintage Lions performance so we look forward to seeing something better this Saturday. I’d like to see Blair Kinghorn start this time - probably on the wing.
Kerry duly won the All-Ireland football final. The new rule of two points for kicks from 40 metres out suited the bigs boys from the Kingdom. Donegal never looked like winning despite being steered by the astute Jim McGuinness, the best-looking manager in the sport.
Bedtime Reading
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan. I’ve been an admirer of O’Hagan’s non-fiction for years - mostly to be found in the London Reviews of Book. This novel is a bit of a challenge, weighing in at 650 pages. I’m half-way through and just about hanging in there. It’s a mildly diverting romp through modern London with Russian oligarchs, corrupt business men, white slavers, young political activists, dodgy politicians and cynical journalists. The main character is an art historian with a biography of Vermeer under his belt and a desire to make more money. I’ll persist for a while longer.
Poetry Corner
From The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh
These are the opening lines from the very long poem that was rural Ireland’s The Waste Land. The straitened, loveless lives of the rural male in De Valera’s Ireland. The women all fled to embrace life in London and New York - or join the Civil Service in Dublin. Kavanagh was inclined to discount his epic in later life, but I loved it from first reading and still use some of his lines: “like the wick of an oilless lamp” or “the cry of fillies in season”. Applause, applause, the curtain falls.
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges,
luckily.
Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
Or why do we stand here shivering?
Which of these men
Loved the light and the queen
Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised mar-
riage to himself
Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en?
We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,
Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay
Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles
Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.Rancid Ruminations
Anyone tried to apply online for a new passport recently? Anyone that is with an apostrophe in their name. Well you can fuggedabout it. Having been told to enter your name exactly as it is on your birth certificate, the application proceeds to give you an error if you include your apostrophe. O’Sullivans, O’Neills, O’Connells goodbye - and goodbye O’Mahoneys. Was it not beyond the wit of the Government Department (Foreign Affairs) to customise what is clearly a generic solution to the specific requirements of a country riddled with apostrophes. Poor show. And I haven’t even mentioned the struggle to provide a photograph that satisfies the ludicrously pernickety requirements of the same fucked-up application.