Brendan Landers

VACCINATION DAY

Mon, 03 May 2021 07:22:57 -0700

I'm awake at the crack of dawn. My heart is humming with anticipation for the day that's in it. I'm like a kid on Christmas morning, excited and delighted and impatient to get the day going. Deliverance is at last at hand. Freedom in the offing. Today is the day when I'll be liberated from the yoke of the fear of the Coronavirus.

Today I get my jab.

I eat the breakfast of champions. Mexican. Juevos Rancheros. One of my favourites. A bit heavy for mid-week, it's more a weekend brunch. But what the hell – there's reason to go mad this morning. I go easy on the garlic though. For the past year, stuck in Covid-imposed anti-social prison, I've been shovelling garlic with wilful abandon into my cooking. Although the little bulb is renowned for its beneficial qualities in combating infectious disease and boosting the immune system, it's also infamous for the pungent whiff it imposes on air expelled from the lungs. I don't want my breath to stink today, though. I'll actually be meeting people. Sitting in close quarters with strangers. Conversing with them. In the same room. Legally. I'm giddy at the prospect.

After breakfast I read the newspaper. Then I do 20 minutes of Tai Chi, one of the many activities I've undertaken during the various lockdowns we've endured. Today, as I hoist the chi, hug the tree and give a bit of a stretch to my wearly old bones, there's an extra little bounce in my step – it's the frisky gambol of eager anticipation, a sensation which has been a noted absence in the screenplay of my recent past.

I take a shower and for the first time in months I dress in real clothes instead of sweats. It's a treat and I linger awhile in front of the mirror, admiring myself.

I make a cup of tea and do the crossword.

At noon it's time to hit the road. I'm chuffed. I happily motor over to the vaccination centre at Dublin City University (DCU) where platoons of security personnel in high-viz jackets guide...Read More

GROUNDHOG DAYS AND CHARVET SHIRTS

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 03:14:10 -0800

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan;

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone.

Christina Georgina Rosseti

Ho-hum. Another day, another doldrum.

Here we are in Lockdown Number Three and it’s not a pretty place. Makes Lockdown Number One, in retrospect, seem like a bit of a doddle – months spent sitting in the garden with a wee dram, a good book and the sun beaming kindly down on us. Happy days! We didn’t know we were having it so good.

Now look at us – singing the blues in deep mid-winter. Plague on the rampage and the world under siege. Covid-19, the sly bugger, is evolving. Causing mayhem. Rates of infection shooting through the roof. Deaths scaling up when we thought we were over the worst.

The numbers are horrifying.

As I write, one person is dying of the virus every eight minutes in Los Angeles. Mercifully, the mad American President has shuffled off to the ignominy of his Florida netherworld. If I may borrow a phrase from Leonard Cohen, democracy is coming to the USA and some kind of sanity is being restored. For now, anyway.

Here in the land of saints and scholars we may currently boast of a shocking statistic – the highest rate of transmission in the world. This is the price we pay for our sociable Christmas; some of us were more sociable than others but nonetheless we all pay the piper. The New Zealand Prime Minister has cited Ireland as an example of how not to respond to the virus. Mortifying!

People are wrecked - demoralised, exhausted and benumbed by almost a year of living in the prison the planet has become.

The weather doesn’t help. Short, gloomy days. Dark, dreary nights. Icy chills and clouds and rain. There’s a darkness about the place. A dullness. A monotony. A grimness. Shadows on the psyche. Day after groundhog day after...Read More

A GLORIOUS KIND OF MADNESS

Sun, 06 Dec 2020 08:15:09 -0800

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that, I am sure, is why he does it. Roald Dahl

Working on a singularly challenging short story, I agonise for half an hour over the appropriate word for a particular phrase, only to see the situation remain frustratingly unresolved. It’s doing my head in, so I take a break. That’s 30 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. I’m 67 years old and more or less retired. I should be taking a leisurely stroll in the park. Counting the stars in the Milky Way. Baking a batch of sausage rolls. Watching the latest series of Fargo on Netflix. Chilling. Yet here I am, tormenting myself over the delegation of a single elusive adjective.

What’s the story here?

We wonder sometimes, don’t we?

And then we don’t.

Creation – that’s the story.

We wordmongers can be an odd assortment of nutjobs. Who of us in our right minds, if we ever found ourselves to be in right minds, would choose this writing life? What innate insanity, we wonder, impels us day after day, week after week, month after month, year after excruciating year, to pick up a pen or a laptop, imprison ourselves in lonely solitude and subject our sensitive souls to the hard labour of putting together an assembly of words and ideas that is somehow deemed to be worthy and meaningful?

It doesn’t make sense.

Hugh Leonard, the late dramatist and essayist, described writing as: an illness, a virus that no science can isolate and cure, and Ray Bradbury, in his book Zen in the Art of Writing, said: Writing is supposed to...Read More

BABEL, BOLTED BOOZERS AND THE LOCKDOWN DOLDRUM BLUES

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 04:16:52 -0800

Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.
Yoko Ono
We are deep into the season of the Winter Doldrums. The sky is gray and ominous. The weather is cold, wet and blustery. As I write, a light rain pitter-patters against my front window and the trees in the garden look skeletal. The clock has been moved back an hour and darkness, it seems, is falling earlier day by day.
At this time of year, people in the Northern Hemisphere can be vulnerable to Seasonal Affected Disorder (SAD), a depressive condition thought to be induced by a paucity of natural light. Symptoms can include tiredness, low energy levels and an increased appetite for foods high in carbohydrates. My Winter Doldrums normally manifest themselves in a gentle dolefulness that lasts through most of November and dissipates in early December, when we start gearing up for Yuletide and the good will that the holidays traditionally induce.
This year, on top of SAD, we’re coping with the Coronavirus and its attendant restrictions. We’re a fortnight into Lockdown 2. It’s a weight to carry.
Hallowe’en has just passed and a damp squib it was. The empty streets, bereft of the customary troops of costumed children trick-or-treating the night away, spoke volumes about the fix in which we find ourselves. Now our thoughts turn to Christmas and the fervent wish that we’ll be less fettered for that customarily festive season.
Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night, wrote Virgina Woolf in her novel Jacob’s Room. We all now know whereof she spoke. Meanwhile, we persevere.
And some of us write. Before the virus came amongst us, writing...Read More

LOCKDOWN BLOOMSDAY

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 07:35:52 -0700

Whack for the hurrah,take your partners
Welt the floor ye trotters shake
Isn’t it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake.
June 16 has come to besomething of a literary holy day. It was on this date in 1904 that James Joyce first rendezvoused with the love of his life Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid from Galway, and it was the date he romantically chose to immortalize in his epic novel Ulysses as the day on which Leopold Bloom undertook his odyssey through the streets, the pubs, the landmarks and the characters of Dublin City.
I attended my first Bloomsday more than 30 years ago in Toronto, where I was living at the time. Courtesy of Anna Livia Productions, the craic kicked off at 8.30 a.m. (these Joyceaholics can be obsessive about authenticity and if Bloom began his wanderings early in the morning, bejasus they will too). The waterworks on the shore of Lake Ontario represented the Martello Tower on Dublin’s Sandymount Strand, where we were introduced to stately plump Buck Mulligan.
From there we set off on our trek, stopping for songs and readings and raucous revelry at various locations that stood in for Dublin landmarks visited by Bloom on his journey.
All the old, familiar characters of Joyceworld were on display – the bemused, besotted, horny Bloom, his yesoyeswoman wife Molly, the engaging and often engorged Stephen Dedalus, the brassy Bella and, of course, Mister Tim Finnegan, dead and rising on the bed. It was a masterful performance, with buckets of audience participation, full of Joyce’s ribald Dublin wit. There was poetry, passion, patriotism, delicious profanity and woe-begotten piety, all stirred in together to make a marathon coddle of rich and lusty...Read More

KUBLA KHAN, CONSCIOUSNESS, BOOZE AND BOOKS

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 04:28:52 -0700

My liver must be the size of a football. I’ve been knocking back the liquor lately, I confess. It’s not just me though. Drinking has become something of a national pastime – even moreso than it was before the advent of the Coronavirus. In the daytime we’re fitness-mad with long-distance running, power-walking, doing yoga and lifting weights; then in the evenings we’re sucking up hooch like champions. What with the long days and nights of isolation, ennui, anxiety and fear, a zeitgeist has evolved in which many of us have given ourselves permission to guzzle booze with abandon.
Out on my daily walk this morning I met my friend John. He’s a lovely man and I enjoy his company and our chats. He confided that he has developed a fondness for 12-year-old Scotch whisky. I’m partial to the Irish and I spell my whiskey with an e but to each his own, I daresay.
John made his whisky-love sound like a hobby. A Coronavirus project. Before the pubs were closed down, he was strictly a pint-of-Guinness man who tended to look askance at me whenever I ordered a whiskey chaser to go with my beer. Now he’s necking the Scotch like nobody’s business. For a hobby. I suppose you can call it a hobby if the whisky is 12 years old.
I suspect that when this Covid-19 business is sorted, John and I and thousands of others will be undertaking detox programs that will make SAS boot camp seem like a tiptoe through the tulips. Reminds me of three decades ago when I was giving up the cigarettes. There was a challenge, at a time when cigarettes and drink seemed to be made for each other and both were made for me. I must have given tobacco up a dozen times before abstention finally took hold. I remember, at the height of it, when desperation for a smoke was at its keenest, I’d be half-wishing someone unnamed would die, just so that the grief would give me an excuse to light up a fag.
Fortunately,...Read More

MASKED AND MANLY

Sun, 31 May 2020 04:53:21 -0700

Daylight. A uniformed guard stands on duty outside the door of a bank in a suburban shopping centre. A car enters the car park and comes to a stop in front of the bank. Sits there.There’s a lone figure behind the wheel. A man. The guard eyeballs the car and the man. Scans the vicinity. Eyeballs the car again. Moves her hand to her hip, where she may be carrying a concealed weapon.
Inside the car, the driver turns off the ignition and engages the handbrake. He nervously studies the bank. Looks at the guard. The guard stares back sternly.
The man in the car sighs heavily. He picks up a protective mask from the seat beside him and puts it on; it’s made of blue linen and bears a colourful, geometric, surrealistic design that’s reminiscent of the work of Salvador Dali. The man sighs again and his glasses fog up from the condensation inside the mask. He swears. He takes off his glasses and wipes them, adjusts the mask and puts the spectacles back on. He steps out of the car, closes the door, takes a deep breath and approaches the bank.
The guard looks him up and down and smiles in a friendly, interested manner, indicating the face-covering. “I dig the mask,” she says. She opens the door of the bank and ushers the man inside.
Is this, you may well ask, the opening scene of a movie I’m writing? A crime caper set in a dystopian Covid-19 world? The Great Pandemic Bank Heist. The Rise and Fall of the Coronavirus Kid. Are the guard and the driver in cahoots? Colluding to rob the bank?
Nope. None of the above. It’s just an imagined post-lockdown description of yours truly arriving at my bank to lodge a few cheques, which is far from being the casual event that it used to be back in the days before the plague. I’m still a bit nervous about contact with strangers but I’m kind...Read More

A HOST OF GOLDEN DAFFODILS

Wed, 20 May 2020 02:50:55 -0700

Liberation is at hand. Qualified liberation, that is. As part of the gradual loosening of lockdown regulations, our government has increased the permissible distance of our daily wanderings from two to five kilometres.
And we’re all ever so delighted and excited. How easily pleased we have become.
Our euphoria is akin to that of primary school students when released from school for the first day of the summer holidays. This is an indication, perhaps, of how Covid-19, and our communal response to it, have altered our collective consciousness. Stripped of our pre-virus delusion that we were all masters of our own destinies, we have been psychologically reduced to the status of supplicant children.
It’s great to get out and about, nonetheless. As Charles Dickens wrote: The sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy; walk and be healthy.
I’ve always been a walker. I like to wander and ponder. To savour the smell of the sea or the fragrance of flowers and plants. To observe the birds, the bees and all creatures great and small. To let my thoughts run free. It's therapy for the soul. The ancient Romans had a phrase for such sauntering: Solvitur ambulando - It is solved by walking.
Prior to the onslaught of the Coronavirus, many of the people to cross my path in my wandering would have been power-walkers. Feet pounding,arms pumping, shoulders hunched, heads bent into the mission, virtually oblivious to the world around them. Always in a hurry and too busy to smell the roses, as, indeed, much of the world seemed to be. Back then.
Remarkably, the power-walkers are few and far between these days and the parks and beaches are rich with people enjoying a saunter. Times have changed. For how long, I wonder?
This morning, for the first time in a month that seemed like an age, I happily ventured down to St Anne’s Park, which used to...Read More

REFLECTIONS FROM A GARDEN

Mon, 11 May 2020 04:09:02 -0700

I’m sitting on a deckchair in my back garden, watching the world go by and whiling away a bit of the morning. It’s a lovely, warm, sunny day. We’ve been lucky with the weather over the past few weeks; it’s been uncharacteristically summery. I figure that, if it continues like this and Covid-19 doesn’t ambush me, I might actually survive this lockdown intact until a vaccine is eventually developed.
I study the lawn. Looks like it’s grown during the night. Scores of new dandelions and daisies have poked their heads up. Nourishment for the birds and the bees, I suppose. I contemplate this growth spurt for 20 minutes or so. I have all the time in the world. I resolve that this afternoon, when I log onto my laptop, I’ll google how many millimetres a blade of grass is likely to grow in 12 hours. A Biblical quote springs to mind:
All flesh is like grass,
And all its glory like the flower of grass,
The grass withers,
And the flower falls away.
The impermanence of flowers and flesh is rarely out of mind these days. Death is in the ether.
A church bell rings in the distance, reminding me that it’s Sunday. Not that you’d notice. The days now roll into each other like slow-moving streams, echoing in an ironic way, perhaps, the zeitgeist of our ancestors in bygone millennia. Hunters, gatherers and scavengers living by the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun, day after nameless day after day.
Sundays aren’t like Sundays anymore. The churches, like the cinemas, pubs and theatres, are all closed; if they were open, agnostic as I am, I might go to Mass, just for the diversion, the pageantry and the company.
Time was, during the Great Famine for instance, when priests in Ireland were to the...Read More

PERSISTENCE, PLAGUE AND JOHNNY CASH

Sat, 02 May 2020 02:20:54 -0700

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

My neighbourhood has never looked and smelled so good. The gardens are pristine and well-tended, the footpaths are washed and gleaming and even the vagrant small weeds and grasses that used to speckle the kerbside have been stripped back. So many houses have been painted that my smudgy garden wall is beginning to embarrass me. The air is full of the delicious aroma of cooking bread; baking has become so popular that it’s hard to find a packet of yeast in the supermarkets. My neighbours on both sides have taken to learning new languages, so spending time in the back garden is like sitting outside the Tower of Babel.
The Coronavirus and our consequent self-isolation have been going on for so long now that Netflix just doesn’t cut it anymore. People allover the place are taking up new pastimes to keep the lockdown blues at bay and take their minds off sickness and slaughter.
Self-improvement is the order off the day.
I’m trying to learn how to play the guitar. It’s a slow process. My fingers aren’t as nimble as once they were. I’m...Read More