I seem to have been born not fitting in to my culture and then got worse with age

Am back in Malta after soaking up family and friends for three weeks in Northern Ireland over the Christmas holidays.  I didn’t get to see many friends and am amazed how the time flew in.  I also realized that I am a foreigner in my own country and find it perversely difficult to blend in.  Let me explain an incident that occurred which crystallises what is tricky to put into words.

My mother and my son were having coffee in a small café in the Whitehouse in Portrush.  It is a shop that sells everything from bedding to pots, clothes to furniture and on the upper floor there is a café overlooking the street.  I don’t shop there as when I once lifted a blouse to examine it I found that it was priced at a ridiculous price of ₤165 reduced to ₤99 and that put me in a foul mood.  Even looking around at the ridiculous ornaments, no one would want, costing hundreds, has me muttering, “Is this a joke, or what?” in outraged tones. 

It does serve reasonable coffee and that was why the three of us were having cappuccinos in the café high above the street.  A lady at the nearby table leaned across and said to my mother,

“That is a lovely colour of jumper.” 

Before I could stop myself I replied,

“Yes, shame about the face!” 

In our family we do routinely tease each other and my mother was not surprised.  The lady however was offended and her husband asked me, in cold tones,

“Have you been drinking?” 

Realising, I had offended these polite folk I tried to explain,

“No, it is just that I’ve spent years being asked if my mother is my sister and it has made me sensitive to people complimenting her.” 

My mother and son laughed and so did I.  My Mum’s recent holiday with her sister visiting me in Malta was typical.  Everyday we would walk miles along the coast and each day someone would ask, “Are you three sisters?”  We do have similar colouring but there is a thirty-year age difference, so you can understand my sensitivity.  As far as I was concerned the neighbouring table’s angry response was funny but also strangely admirable.  They felt I had offended my eighty-year-old mother and were stiff with fury!  Oblivious, the three of us enjoyed our coffees.  On my way to the toilet, I passed the nearby table and the man instructed me,

“You should swing by Spectsavers! (a local opticians)”. 

His upset was tangible and again I admired their heated defence of my mother.  After all, if an elderly person was being abused verbally, these people would not sit idly by and let it happen.  Surely, a good thing?  I returned to my mother and son and we collected our coats and began to leave.  My mother, always goodhearted and even tempered, wished the neighbouring occupants a merry Christmas, as did my son and received a warm response.  However, when I wished them the same, all three carefully averted their heads, stiff with distain, and ignored me pointedly. 

I found it all vaguely amusing but by now my son was irritated and wanted to go back to the table to speak to them.  I restrained him with a warm hug and said, “It’s not them, it’s me.  They belong here and I evidently don’t.”  At such times you identify how foreign you are, how much of an outsider you have become.  The worrying thing is, I seem to have been born not fitting in to my culture and then got worse with age!  

Getting ready for the New Year

In many ways this Christmas sticks in your mind when disasters are spoken off.  The Mayan calendar ending  spanned a huge range of doomsday scenarios and it was quite disturbing the number of elderly relatives who confessed to being quite content if the world ended.  They obviously felt life had gone on long enough and going out with a bang and lots of company held a certain appeal.  Unfortunately, these turbulent times are nothing new. 

Imagine living through the World wars or even the Spanish flu, which alone wiped out 40 million.  My great grandmother lost two sons in one week from that Flu.  I cannot begin to imagine what that was like to endure.  With World War I fresh in the mind there must have been a feeling that the horror would never cease.  The young and the strongest, the flowers of each family mowed down with breath taking speed.  The Spanish flu took out those with strong immune systems and so it must have seemed as if the blood let, in those trenches was not enough. If ever you walk, as I did with a cousin, through the war graves in France the scale of such losses hits you.

As far as the eye can see there are graves and as you crest one hill more stretch out in yet another vista of never ending crosses to mark lost lives.  The real consequences of war, its horror hit home and we were silenced by the horrendous loss before us.  

Years later, I had a similar feeling in Auschwitz when visiting the camp with a friend, Pari.  We entered a huge barn like room with shoes of those killed in the camp. 

It felt as if one’s heart was being squeezed in a vice, tightening with the absolute horror of it.  As the train pulled out of that place, Pari and I sat opposite each other in a carriage, in silence.  I found myself rubbing at my chest as if trying to ease the physical pain that knotted there.

Who can forget the more recent disasters such as the Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 that wiped out 227,898 lives in terrifying unexpected swiftness.  If someone had predicted these disasters we would not have grasped even the possibility that such things could occur.  Our brains would have rightly denied the forthcoming horrors as impossible, intolerable and unendurable.  But our disbelief does not prevent such tragedies happening. 

Likewise, the fact that such tragedies do occur, does not necessarily mean we learn from our mistakes.  Wars still occur with depressing frequency; even natural catastrophes that afflict the world fail to unite us in response.  Instead, a strange lethargy keeps us continuing with business as usual.  As if daily routines will soothe things.  It strikes me that knowing the future might not help.  In fact spelling out such disasters would not be meet or seemly.  Our perversity in not awakening to such tragedies, adapting, learning and changing is however, distressing.  There are lessons to be learned and such losses of life should instil in all of us an urgency for change. 

If nations can endure such horror when we rise up to war, we must wage peace instead.  When humanity is facing such natural calamities and disasters, the need to be a world united in the race to save lives becomes achingly apparent.  These are lessons none of us can afford to forget.   

My Criminal Childhood with Cousins

My cousins and I were experts at fiddling the machines at the amusement arcade.  In Ireland we have cousins the way other countries have mosquitoes.  I remember being shocked by a visiting English child who confessed to having just one cousin; I had figured cousins always came in batches of dozens, like eggs.  Aged between 8-13 our gang knew the ropes like old convicts.  Mind you, we’d learned the hard way.  These blasted machines had eaten our sparse holiday money for years, so we’d grown hardy and wily. 

My cousin Bill was the best.  Only trouble was, he was so good he got barred very quickly from all the establishments.  He was also rather ruthless in his methods.  His favourite trick was to smash the glass window of the first cylinder of a one armed bandit.  Then he’d put coins in and pull the arm while carefully moving the cherry round to win two pennies each time.  It took patience but gradually, in a day, he could empty a machine.  The trick, he said, was breaking the glass cleanly so that no tell tale cracks could be seen.  One of the older cousins, Tom, felt Alan’s technique was not moral and spoke at length about how illegal it was.  The rest of us were conflicted about this issue and would hold long debates about the ethics of it all.  Tom was righteous and managed to save some of his holiday money each year putting it aside in a responsible manner.  As one of the debaters admitted, it was tricky, on the one hand there was no one more righteous than Tom but Alan was by far the most generous of all of us, so which virtue was more important.  The general consensus was that generosity trumped righteousness.  We would not use Alan’s technique, as the majority felt it lacked finesse but we would not condemn him either that would be altogether far too righteous.  Our acceptable methods were subtler.   

People often forgot to press the refund button on machines, so we’d feed off their carelessness once they’d gone.  The joy of those large round illicit pennies warm in your palm!  Old money felt much more substantial and indeed one penny could in those days buy you a paper bag full of sweets.  Or, we’d find coins lying under the bottom rim of a machine kicked out of sight.  There was a favourite change machine in one arcade that was meant to change half crowns into pennies but was the very dickens to use.  It took the half crowns easy enough but then sullenly refused to spit out pennies in return.  The poor punter would press every button available to no avail and then go to the booth at the middle of the arcade to complain.  In a flash, we were on the machine and would give the side panel high on the right a swift blow.  Like a choked person the reluctant machine would cough up first two pennies in rapid succession before vomiting the rest into your waiting hand.  You couldn’t let it hit the bottom for fear of announcing your success to the world.    Ethically, we felt secure.  Sure, didn’t people who dropped money need to learn to be more careful? We were practically providing an educational service! When using the change machine play, we always insured that one of us would be left with the machine so that when the technician came with the punter to investigate they would confirm he had indeed put a half crown in and proclaimed loudly that the machine often didn’t pay out as it should.  This meant the punter got his change and also meant we were up front about the machine’s weaknesses.  We felt no guilt whatsoever, after three hours of wandering desolately around the amusement arcade penniless, we felt we were due some reward.  We learned gambling was addictive. 

One summer our youngest cousin, Sarah , stood transfixed at the penny drop, pumping not just ten but every single one of her valuable pennies into a money clogged waterfall that despite a sliding log refused to fall.  She tearfully begged money from her Mum on the beach, while I minded her machine from the ‘jumper inners’ waiting to take advantage of all her priming of the pump.  All to no avail, even a half crown later not one penny fell.  She dropped to the ground sobbing in anguish and despair.  Bloody machines, we all stood appalled by her pain.  The hero of the hour was cousin Henry, built like a brick house, he tried to pull her to her feet and in doing so leant his considerable weight against the glass fronted machine.  That was all that was needed and there was an ecstatic machine gun of pennies firing out into the tray, the logjam freed.  I still remember her shocked face as pennies rained down over her head and shoulders.  It wasn’t every day you witnessed a miracle. 

However, all these tricks were as nothing compared to our biggest triumph.  There was a machine at the back of an arcade that consisted of black and white stripes moving over rollers.  You slide your penny down a chute and it rolled on its side until it fell over on the black and white stripes.  If it landed on the white stripes not touching the black, you won.  We discovered that if you took the chute and wagged it from side to side like a demented table tennis player, the coin would come out in a perfect straight line each time and flop on the white middle line like a beauty.  We were delighted with this discovery and made a real killing.  Imagine our outrage when the arcade closed this machine, taping an ‘out of order’ sign across it.  It took us a while to discover another in the back of a smoky arcade across town.  More success followed and we were exultant.  After years of the amusement arcades taking our pocket money we felt we were on a righteous roll.  Gradually, they disappeared these black and white beauties to our deep disappointment.  Decades later, I discovered one in an amusement arcade in Brighton.  I cannot begin to describe my ecstasy on spotting the familiar friend behind a pinball machine.  Within seconds, I was whipping the chute to and fro like a pro and winning coins hand over fist.  My three sons looked on in awe as we left, all our pockets bulging with coins.  There are always moral issues to tackle in life but just occasionally success is down to sheer skill and you can only celebrate that.

One minute you're defending the whole galaxy, and, suddenly, you find yourself sucking down darjeeling

Was invited out to tea by an eighty three year old Irish woman on Malta, yesterday.  We’d never met before.  I had been at a restaurant and her daughter, sitting at a nearby table, heard my Irish accent and said her mother would like to meet me.  She gave me her card and her mother’s phone number was written on the back.  I took a chance and phoned the next day before I lost courage and forgot.  A lovely Donegal accent replied and we arranged to meet at her home.  This was how I found myself at a lovely villa overlooking the sea along the coast outside Sliema, sharing a large laden table with this sprightly lady and her two friends (around the same age).  It felt surreal to find beautiful china, elegant linen napkins, homemade bread, apple tarts etc. with the strong Irish brogue coming at me.  Mother of eight, she spoke her mind and I loved listening to a familiar tune washing over me.  Despite having lived in Malta fifty years her accent was as strong as if we had just met on the back roads of Donegal today.  I cannot begin to tell of the delight of this company.  Their wit, the laughter, shopping exploits, collections of spoons, husbands all illuminated by three ladies who had lived life to the full.  Their openness and friendliness was like an antidote to homesickness delivered intravenously with copious gallons of tea.     When you are far from much that speaks of home it is delightful to fall into such company.  I thank God that my Irish accent was overheard, that her daughter handed me her card and for encouraging me to call and that for once I took the opportunity offered.  Life is far too short to waste what it brings unexpected to your door.  Unexpected kindness takes you by the hand and urges you gently to start thinking of others instead of yourself.  A memory from childhood blows to me on familiar breezes. 

When I was a child we had a caravan in Donegal on a windswept beach that even in bad weather was breath taking.  It struck me how empty all this landscape was with sand stretching off into the distance devoid of any humans.  As we made the journey to our caravan and back we’d go down tiny bumpy back roads equally empty.  But, if  ever we did come across a solitary human being high in the mountains it was usually an old farmer type, wearing formal dark suits.  He would straighten as the car passed and wave a warm welcome and nod their head sweetly in our direction as if you were a fond cousin newly arrived.  I asked my father why they did this and he said, in olden days everyone would out of simple courtesy.  Sitting in the back of the car I watched the green fields flash by and I mourned the loss of such simple civility in our brand new world. 

A strange thing would happen when we passed a funeral cortege.  My father would slow the car and remove his hat, setting it on my mother’s lap beside him.  A sober silence would reign and as a young child I knew that no talking was allowed.  Later, I would ask, why this careful ceremony and he gave different answers, like “every man’s death diminishes me”, or “every life deserves respect as does every death” and “it reminds us all powerfully of our own mortality”.  Every time, a different answer as if the actual answer was too deep to put into normal words.  Even now, when passing a funeral, I long to have a hat to remove and show my respect.  I make do with a silent prayer and remember my father’s small gesture and the lessons it inculcated in all of us.

Once, we caught the train to Dublin and my father played chess with a friendly priest in our compartment.  As they played they discussed Irish history, politics and religion.  It was like watching two experienced swordsmen testing each other capabilities.  Quotes would be used from historians, writers and the bible.  Anecdotes given and tales told to make a point and always laughter as the wheels of the train rocked us south.  You could tell they were pleasantly surprised to meet a worthy opponent both on the board and off.  At times, the discussion became heated but it was always courteous.  From the clash of differing opinions the truth does emerge and it was thrilling sitting eavesdropping on this epic battle.  When they said their polite farewells, my father asked his name and the old priest replied, “It’s William, sure you’ll not forgot crossing the Boyne with Father William will you?”    I drank it all in, their wit and good humour along with their eagerness to test their insights and experience with each other.

Yesterday, drinking gallons of tea at a laden table, listening the Donegal accent work its magic, a fragrance of that lost world wrapped itself around me.  That old-fashioned courtesy and kindness no longer extinct, as I feared, but sitting opposite me, pouring tea and forcing slices of freshly baked cakes onto my plate.

“Well is it with him who is illumined with the light of courtesy”

Rich Tit Bits

I am reading a wonderful book at present.  Entitled, “the best American magazine writing” 2011 it contains wonderful gems worth digesting indeed.  Michael Hasting’s piece “The runaway General” frightened me only because I’d already read the impressive piece before and was for a moment horrified that the book would turn out to be all too familiar.  But no, the rest were new to me and delightful in their range of topics and insights.  Jane Mayers wrote ‘Covert Operations’ and dealt with two wealthy brothers who have fought a furious war against climate change science and helped to seed the tea party movement.  They criticize political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffectual and unnecessary.  The fact that their own company was named one of the top ten air polluters in the US might have had something to do with that.  In 1997 when the Environmental Protection Agency acted to reduce surface ozone, caused in part by emission from oil refineries, one of industry’s arguments put forward against this reduction was that smog free skies would result in more skin cancer!  Unbelievably, this argument was accepted by the Court.  You, really have to just shake your head in bewilderment at times!  Such is the funding strength of the two industrialists mentioned in the article that they even manage to colour the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History exhibits.  In a multimedia exploration of mankind and climate change, the human element in influencing such climate change is carefully whitewashed out.  Obviously, linking increases in carbon dioxide to fossil fuels would not hit the right note for these particular funders. 

It reminds me all too painfully of the new Giants Causeway Centre in Northern Ireland where the creationist belief finds its place in the display.  Please, let us be real!  In educational establishments that play, one hopes, a role in shaping young minds of the future can we try to avoid fantasy land, fake science or the polluter’s agendas.  The Giant’s Causeway was created by volcanic eruptions 60 million years ago, not by mystical giants laying down a bridge to Scotland and clearly neither is it consistent with the creationist’s claim that the earth is a mere 6000 years old.  The fact that increasingly educational programmes pussy foot around the truth to humour the rich or the religious is a worrisome sign.

This book challenges many other taboos including how we treat the dying in our medical system.  A must read article by Atul Gawande entitled ‘Letting Go’.  Scott Horton’s article on the three suicides in Guantanamo on June 9, 2006 is troubling.  It does seem highly suspect, as is claimed by American authorities, that the three could managed to have hung themselves, hands bound with rags down their throats.  I am only halfway through this book but it is toe curlingly good.  Well written, thoughtfully researched it feels like a long cool drink in the desert, refreshing, unexpected and rejuvenating. 

It is astonishing what the human being can achieve

There are times when you begin to doubt yourself.  To see flaws, imperfections in all aspects of your persona.  Then cracks appear which effect your outer façade.  How you seem to others deteriorates until huge chunks of who you once were begin to fall away.  It’s not that we are, what others think of us.  It’s more that we are easily polluted by our environment.  We all like to think of ourselves as impervious to such erosion but unfortunately we’re not.  Once the slide into disintegration has begun no energy goes into reconstruction. All of it is diverted into keeping up appearances.  Trying to fool the onlooker that, actually, all is well.  So many organisations and  individuals are in that mode.  They don’t take criticism well because it strikes at the very core of what they have become.  Hypocritical shells of themselves.  Criticism to them can only fuel huge self-deception and aggressive defensiveness.  It is so easy to lose the plot.  Principles go out the window as pragmatism dominates.  In such a slippery state the hardest thing to do, is exactly what you need to do.  You need to set aside your own perspectives and learn from others.  It is perhaps hardest to do because it demands a trust of others at a point when we no longer even trust ourselves.  

One example of what one individual can achieve when they believe in themselves and go for their goals is the Edhi Foundation.  Abdul Sattar Edhi started a welfare centre in Pakistan with the equivalent of fifty-three pounds.  He bought an old van, which he called "poor man’s van" and he drove around providing medical help and burying unclaimed bodies. 

With his wife, a nurse, he has built a foundation that has grown to have 300 centres across the country, runs 8 hospitals providing free medical care, eye hospitals, diabetic centres, surgical units, a 4- bed cancer hospital and mobile dispensaries and they have in addition to a fleet of ambulances their very own air ambulance service.

Their achievements are breath taking indeed and include:

20,000 abandoned babies rescued

40,000 qualified nurses have been trained

50,000 orphans are housed in Edhi Homes

1 million babies have been delivered in Edhi Maternity Centres

1800 ambulances (the largest ambulance fleet in Pakistan and the largest private ambulance service network in the world)

He is now 82 years old and has been working for 60 years to serve the poor and the suffering. Here is a description of this modest man and his home,

“Edhi remains a very down-to-earth person, dressed always in grey homespun cotton local clothes.  Apart from the one room, which he uses for his living quarters, the rest of the building serves as his workplace in Mithadar, a locality of old Karachi that is full of narrow streets and congested alleyways. Adjoining their living room is a small kitchen where his wife usually prepares the midday meal. Next to it is a washing area where bodies are bathed and prepared for burial.”

It is astonishing what the human being can achieve when it sets out to try and solve the challenges society faces.  He may be half way around the world from us but isn’t it heartening to hear of an individual making a real difference. 

Humanity seems really weary for want of a better pattern of life to which to aspire.

My father was headmaster of a school in a small village in Northern Ireland high in the Sperrin mountains.  You learn a lot from your parents, not so much from what they say but more from what they do.  From my father, I learned tolerance and a search for knowledge.  In that small polarised community, Catholics on one side and Protestants  on the other, two communities existed side by side.  As one village wit sarcastically pointed out to my father, “You try and stay on the fence between the two communities and there isn’t room on that f__king fence!”  In a place, where some parents would stone the visiting psychologist’s car, in fear of them labelling their child as having special needs, it was tough at times.  Ignorance is scary, not funny.  Those who shout loudest are not necessarily the people we should listen to.  Volume rarely equates with insight.  Those who stir up hatred and prejudice do not appeal to our intellectual side but to our more animal instincts.  The few that try to speak to grander principles, such as the independent investigation of truth, will never be given the populist platform bigots possess.  Perhaps, it is easier to speak to the worst side of human nature rather than engender thoughts of the nobility of mankind.

I had a colleague who ran a business in the town nearby, a good man, married with two children.   For decades he was a pillar of society and then he lost his footing.  He had financial problems and he used client’s money to make up the shortfall.  Of course it was discovered, only the hardened criminal with expertise or the very lucky escape such deeds.  The local paper was frank but surprisingly fair, highlighting in an article the financial mistakes and criminal charges but also speaking to his forty years of service to the community.  The national tabloid newspapers were not so balanced.  They ran lurid headlines that assassinated that quiet man.  He was found in a fume filled garage dead, the tabloid newspaper open beside him.  When did these newspapers get the green light to degrade, humiliate, eviscerate, hound the famous, plague the bereft and expose only the very worst of our civilisation?  We have cultivated that taste for excess and the perverse in all of us and it sells newspapers very well but at what cost to all of us?

Is that the only way individuals can feel good about themselves, by constantly observing and gloating at the degradation of others?  To me it is akin to a short man digging a trench around himself so that he can appear taller.  The sad news is there seems no end to the depth of this trench.  Just when you think the press has reached an all time low they discover a whole deeper darker level.  Reporters should enquire into situations as much as possible and ascertain the facts, then set them down in writing.  Such news is a mirror of the world and it is a potent instrument that should be used with justice and equity, not to torture the subject and degrade the reader.  They have a  mighty responsibility.  They are not meant to manipulate for material gain, malign for malicious intent or magnify the misdemeanours of our society. Humanity seems  genuinely really weary for want of a better pattern of life to which to aspire.

It is surely in finding a better of pattern of life real hope lies.  My mother taught me kindness not with words but deeds.  A neighbour’s cat died after giving birth to five kittens near our home and I remember being awed as my mother set herself the task of hand rearing these five small bundles of fur.  We had big thick brick storage heaters, which were great for sitting on, and she used one of these for the kittens, placing their bed just above the heater.  She used an eyedropper to feed them regularly and had names for them all including the best feeder Big Boy who was impossible to fill.  I watched as she fought to save them all even the runt a tiny still shape under the feet of the rest.  They all survived and I watched engrossed at how much work and dedication it took to keep these tiny fragile animals alive.  It seemed to require incredible act of determination and will power.  When they were fully weaned she found owners for all of them.  The local postman took two of them.  Within weeks, he and his family suddenly decided to immigrate to Australia.  Unbelievably to me, as a child, he had the two cats, one of whom was Big Boy, euthanized.  I was devastated by how much work it takes to keep something alive and how little it takes to end a life.  It suddenly seemed when it comes to ending life, thoughtlessness is an advantage.  

Now, as an adult I look back and wonder at my Mum’s thoughtfulness and kindness.  She worked, had three children, nursed my invalid grandfather fighting gangrene and yet found it within her to lavish such kindness on five vulnerable kittens.  I suspect that, is what good people do, they instil in themselves the habits of kindness, every hour and every day.  Steeling themselves to do good in this world.  It is not easy, it is backbreaking and it is hard finding that extra energy to see to the needs of others.  But there are so many like her around us, looking after our young, our elderly, the disabled, the ill every day and night.  Pushing themselves past limits of human endurance and we will never read about them in newspapers.  It is a shame really, because these are the people at whose feet we should be learning what it is to be a real human being.   They, by their deeds, foster families and communities whose ways give real hope to the world.