‘I love you.
I am the milkman of human kindness.
I will leave you an extra pint.’ – Billy Bragg

‘It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and to find at the end that one has no more to offer than by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’
-Aldous Huxley

Saturday at the Met
‘I like painting best when it looks eternal without boasting about it: an everyday eternity revealed on the street corner: a servant-girl pausing a moment as she scours a saucepan and becoming a Juno on Olympus.’—Renoir.

1. Don’t go hungry to the Met. Wandering around the still lives yesterday, Claire kept saying. ‘Mmm. I’d love a peach.’ We gave one painting of dripping Brie far more attention than it deserved. ‘God, I’d love some cheese now. Do you think that’s Camembert?’ Jason wasn’t impressed at our suggestibility. ‘God, I’d love a bonnet right now,’ he said, ‘Or maybe some really large milkmaid breasts.’

2. I am lazy about fine arts. I spend most of my time in galleries—when I can be dragged in—reading the little plaques. I want to know who the subjects are or what story is being told, and I need it explained in words before I can appreciate it. Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa has stayed with me because of Julian Barnes’ chapter on it in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. When we saw those familiar muscular buttocks in another painting yesterday, Jason told me that Géricault claimed he couldn’t paint women. Every time he tried, it turned into a horse.
3. At sixteen, I worked a summer as a jeune fille au pair in Quimper, Brittany. My host family was very dutiful about exposing me to Culture, and we trekked to Pont l’Eveque to see the Gauguin hometown museum. Lots of paintings of Breton women fetching water. The colors were subdued; the grays and browns of Brittany, and the strange birdlike black-and-white headdresses of the women. To see Gauguin’s riotous Tahiti paintings is like watching the Wizard of Oz when it bursts into Technicolor. That Tahitian Madonna is worth death from syphilis.
4. In Corot’s Hagar in the Wilderness, an angel flies like Superman, face down, wings overhead. This bothered me. Angels fly standing up, as if they had jet packs. Everyone knows that.
5. A man and woman argued in front of Van Gogh’s Irises. I was drawn in by their Indian accents.
   ‘Why is this good? Why is this great? Look, it’s so simple. Easy. Why do you say this is great when anyone could do it?’ His male friend nodded.

   ‘You can’t assess it just as one single painting. I mean, you have to take it as part of a body of work…’ She trailed off, and he was unconvinced.
   Van Gogh has the same marketing problem as Shakespeare. They taught us a whole new way of seeing, and they taught us so well that we can’t remember what it was like before.

6. Irving Penn’s Nudes are extraordinary, good enough to cut through the curator’s cloying prose about ‘yeasty breasts and thighs’ (ugh!). The square Rollei prints cut off the women’s faces, but they are still vital as they twist from one frame into the next, not so much posing as dancing or rolling over in bed. The photos are sometimes monumental desert landscapes, sometimes portraits. Once I was taken aback by the Mona Lisa smile of a woman’s navel creased in fat, topped weirdly by the ‘eyes’ of her nipples. The skinny New Yorkers who wandered around the exhibition fixated on the mounds of fat. ‘Oh my God,’ they kept saying, clearly terrified by proximity to these cinnamon rolls of flesh. Could such abundance be catching?

I have a dog
Mum was teaching dictation to her class of five-year-olds. It was hard labor.
‘I…have… a…dog…
I…have…a…dog…
I…have…a…dog…’
They bent over, clenching their pencils, while she repeated endlessly. After twenty minutes most of them had mastered their three prescribed sentences, but she noticed one blank copybook. She asked the little boy (‘he’s bright but a divil’) why he hadn’t written anything.
‘Cos I don’t have a dog, Mrs. Hangley.’

As seen on TV
A few months ago, Liza and Tim made fun of the way I say ‘television’. “Tele-VIZH-un,” they chanted, “Go on, say it again.”

My parents got a black-and-white television when I was five. RTE was the only station and it ran from 3 pm to 11 pm. Quicksilver, a quiz show, was on at half past six. Bunny Carr, the balding gnome of a host, had a catchphrase, “Stop the lights!” that was repeated for years until we forgot where it came from. Then there was Hall’s Pictorial Weekly, a satirical show set in the fictional Ballymagash. At five, I failed to get it, but it brought down a government. There was Feach, a current affairs show in Irish, despised by all kids. And there was endless News read by Charles Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell was our Walter Cronkite. I was shocked to see him interviewed on a chat show when he retired ten years later. It didn�t occur to me he could have a life beyond bringing us news, or indeed, that he might have legs as well as a pinstriped torso.

Most of the ads on RTE were for agricultural supplies and public service announcements. Ciba-Geigy, Hoechst, Massey Ferguson: these were the brands of my childhood, more than Kelloggs or Mattel.

Stamp out mastitis! �
You can’t beat a Massey Ferguson tractor.
Liverfluke. Roundworm. Tapeworm. Scour. Triple X knocks them out—fast.

One striking ad (in color—this must have been later) showed a cartoon Labrador dozing by the fire while his owner patted his head, turned out the lights and went to bed. By the light of the moon, we saw the dog wake up, steal out of the house and run across the cartoon hills of rural Ireland. In the next frame, a flock of sheep bleated and bled, trying to escape this snarling predator.

“Family pets can be killers. Don’t let your dog worry sheep,” warned the ad. This dog worried me.
In 1980, we got a second station, RTE 2. Things didn’t improve much. Wanderly Wagon was a bright spot; a kids show with puppets and Godmother and the kindly, portly O’Brien.

Here comes the wagon
Wanderly, wanderly wagon
The most unusual wagon
You ever knew

At Christmas, they invited a group of children on the show, sitting in little primary school chairs or cross-legged on the floor while Godmother and O’Brien told stories and Judge the puppet dog interrupted. I was fascinated that ordinary children could be on telly. I quizzed my mother about it, but came to accept that it was not for the likes of me. Every Christmas Eve, I tried to hold my breath for as long as possible while Santy read out dedications on the radio to the kids he was about to visit. I was afraid that the breath rushing in my ears would make me miss my name being called. But I never heard it, so I supposed that Santy also only dealt with Dublin children.

Years later, I discovered that the Wanderly Wagon writer was my future husband’s uncle. I was unable to keep two notions of the show in my mind satisfactorily and preferred not to think about Joe tapping out all those scripts in a Blackrock attic. But Barry, his son, had been one of those children on the Christmas shows! I tried to be casual, but I felt touched by showbiz glitter and not a little envious. Was Judge really cranky? I wanted to ask. Did Barry feel the same way about the characters that I did? Or were they like my schoolteachers, powerful creatures to my friends, but to me just Dad’s work friends who drank beer in the living room?

I never learned how to watch TV properly. Having a single state-sponsored channel, or even two, teaches you to accord too much respect to the box. I don’t know how to flip channels. I watch programmes from start to finish, even when they’re patently stupid. And I can’t concentrate on anything else because the television is on and I never learned to treat it as wallpaper. So I avoid its voodoo now.

Every time you say ‘I am not the kind of person who…’, you simply add to the ticksheet of How Little You Knew.
This isn’t always bad.

Every time you say ‘I am not the kind of person who…’, you simply add to the ticksheet of How Little You Knew.
This isn’t always bad.

Guinness confirms longest ear hair world record.

Guinness confirms longest ear hair world record.

May God curse the night
That’s grown uneasy near the dawn
Sometimes Americans wear me out. They’re so industrious. ‘He is sleeping,’ they say, and the active gerund conjures a man striding through dark corridors swinging a briefcase, pausing for a vigorous eyelid workout every few hours. The subject is firmly in charge.

In Ireland, we say ‘He is asleep’. It’s a gentle, swooning state, not an action. You may wander the halls of that kind of sleep, but you are not the CEO of the enterprise.

I couldn’t sleep last night; can you tell?

How lusty a swinger
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is excellent for passing the time at work. Unless, as I did, you get caught with Signior Dildo on your monitor. Sample verse:

‘The Countess of Falmouth, of whom people tell
Her footmen wear shirts of a guinea an ell,
Might save that expense, if she did but know
How lusty a swinger is Signior Dildo.’

Samuel Johnson said of Rochester:

“in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness”.

I can’t decide between Rochester and the Dalai Lama as my moral compass this year. Today I lean towards R., but it’s Friday.