Walking Commentary

Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023

spike milligan

Career Breaks

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‘Gaps are what you make of them.’

That’s how I concluded what I wrote about gaps a few days ago (Posts and Gaps). And gaps as lacunae have been on my mind ever since. One space holds a story a colleague told me a few years after he retired. It’s a topic that didn’t come up at his funeral though it passed though my mind on the way to the service.

‘I see there’s a gap in your CV’ is what he said to a very strong candidate during an interview for a senior management position.

There’s a Giant’s Ring near Shaw’s Bridge, outside Belfast, dating from 2700 BC.
Last seen by us this day in 2016, I wonder when we’ll be able to go back.
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Message To Margaret Campaign

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I posted late last year about a recent case in England where the Ecclesiastical Court of the Church of England in Coventry refused permission for the family of Margaret Keane to include an inscription in Irish on her gravestone without translation.

A natural mimic of an Irish symbol. I found this on from cobbles by The Grand Union Canal near Denham in 2012. It mimics the cross of St Brigid, one of the patron saints of Ireland.
A natural mimic of an Irish symbol by The Grand Union Canal, Denham.
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I Told You

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‘Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite’ is Spike Milligan’s epitaph. ‘I told you I was ill’ are the enduring words that recall his death in 2002, except they are as Gaeilge.

Some ornamental things that caught my eye this day 2016.

‘A Úachtaráin agus a chairde’ said Queen Elizabeth II in Dublin, at a State Dinner in her honour in Dublin Castle in 2011. It was hosted by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese and that’s why the visiting monarch opened saying ‘President and friends’.

Martina Devlin has a story in today’s Independent that is quite surreal. It’s about an Irish language epitaph on a headstone that has been blocked in the UK. ‘In ár gcroíthe go deo’ which means ‘In our hearts forever’, would seem to be at risk of persisting ‘in our courts forever’.

The head of the Anglican Church spoke in Irish without translation and yet, her ecclesiastical courts have consistently ruled that Margaret Keane’s epitaph in Irish must be translated to avoid misinterpretation.

If I was a UK citizen in Northern Ireland, I would see this as an insult. I would treat this as an affront, a direct insult to me, to liberalism and to freedom of expression. I’m not a UK citizen and I’m pretty worked up about it because there is a history of mistrust. Like a natural resource of enmity and bile, this Anglican Church appears to mine a seam of bitterness and bring confrontations to the surface. One could say it suggests that the society the Anglican prelates represent are sliding back towards medieval if not authoritarian thinking.

It’s a disgrace that the Church of England should deny Irish speakers of British citizenship the right to express themselves in their own language. It’s antediluvian and harks back to the worst of Victorian memories when the poorest of British subjects in Ireland were allowed starve to death else forced to emigrate. It’s hard to prove causation or understand the 1840s imperial thinking but some argue that it was helpful to reduce the numbers of subsistence farmers, that it was a necessary step towards clearing the lands so that agricultural practices could be modernised. Some have said that Stalin learned from this program in creating the Holodomor of the 1930s.

A chairde, words matter and their language matters too.