When I was a child growing up in London I got a tremendous kick out of the fact that, in some people’s back gardens, you could dig down and find a layer of black soil. That soil, perhaps a little richer, a little grittier than the loam above, down where only the deepest roots reached, was the scorched earth that was left when Boudicca, the Queen of the Iceni, attacked the Romans at Londinium.
When you live in a city that has stood in the same place for hundreds and hundreds of years you live on the past. When you walk down the street you are walking on top of history. In a city like London, or here in Dublin, that history can reach back hundreds if not thousands of years. Most of the time we don’t pay attention. We go about our lives in blissful ignorance. But sometimes history breaks through. Just as gardeners can dig down and find those ancient London cinders, so those who crack the modern surface can touch a more visceral time.
Yesterday workmen digging ditches for drainage pipes under cobbled streets near Smithfield made the grim discovery of a pair of legs. The arms and the skull had been lost but what indications there were suggested that they were male legs. Work on the drainage pipe stopped and the gardai were called. It didn’t take long to work out that the shiny, heavily stained bones did not belong to a victim of recent violence and the investigation was passed to the archaeologists.
The area was fenced off and this morning a crowd of locals and tourists on their way to the Jameson Whiskey Distillery peered through the metal links at archaeologist Franc Myles hunkered down in front of a large gaping pipe, wielding a makeup brush. Once the legs had been removed for further examination another even grimmer discovery had been made. There in the clay, right in the path of the drainage pipe, was the skeleton of a child. Impossible to tell the sex, all that can be known is that he or she had only lived till three or four and had lived it’s short life in the 1600s.
The skeleton of a child is so much more interesting than a pair of grownup legs and a torso (when foul play isn’t suspected). Peering down into the shallow ditch were locals shocked at the thought that such small death had lain beneath their daily route for so long, children transfixed by a skeleton that somehow didn’t look remotely Halloween, tourists happily snapping away at a splendidly macabre addition to their tour. Occasionally glancing up from his work Franc threw up facts when he was asked, or to stop the steady stream of intermittently hysterical speculation. He didn’t mind working with the crowd, he said, the job had become so sanitised by health and safety regulations in recent years the public didn’t get the opportunity to see archaeology in the field much.
Lying half exposed, it’s little arms crossed demurely in front, the little skull cocked to the side in an accidental approximation of infant piety, the small skeleton was the centre of attention just as it would have been when it was laid to rest in the 17th Century. It’s easy to imagine the pudgy hands grasping at a mothers hair in life, the grieving parents standing over the grave, which would have stood then within the graveyard. The church, St Michan’s, is still there – it’s home to a celebrated crypt with a lanky crusader and fallen revolutionaries. The graveyard though has shrunk over the years and forgotten bones it seems lie beneath the streets in the area.
It would have been so different in those days. I’ve cut down May Lane so many times on my way to the Four Courts but they weren’t even built when the child was buried. Ireland’s first Inn of Court was in an old Dominican priory near the spot where the Four Courts now stand back then. In the 1600s the Inn’s gardens stood where the Four Courts are “with knottes and borders of sweet herbs, pot herbs, flowers, roses and fruit.” The scents from that garden would have been carried on a summer breeze to the graveyard so close behind, where the child’s grave lay.
These days, where the churchyard would once have stretched, the large glass King’s Inns building lies empty. I’ve only ever seen someone in it once, when hurrying home to write up the day’s proceedings, I saw white suited swordsman fencing for a film crew in the cavernous ground floor. The barriers that now surround the child’s resting place usually ring the empty building – god forbid rubbish should gather in it’s white elephant corners.
In another four hundred years what will be left of our world? What relics will we leave under the roads of our descendents? The child will be gathered up and taken away for further study. We’ll never know whether boy or girl, what was its name, perhaps even why it died so young to end up under a busy side road. It’s sad but it’s what it means to live in a city as ancient as this one. We walk on what came before, we live on top of the lives of those who lived here before. The life of a city is vertical. You rarely get the chance to see so except on days like today. Sometimes history really feels all around us.
I frequently bang on about Twitter on this blog. I wasn’t one of the early adopters, those hardcore few in Ireland who wandered around the large empty virtual room of Twitter chatting amongst themselves. I joined just before my first book came out, in November 2008, ostensibly for marketing purposes but it wasn’t long before I was hooked.
The thing about Twitter is that it’s a nice place to hang out. Whatever reason you poke your nose round the door, if you get the whole virtual cocktail party thing, you’ll soon find yourself sliding round the door to join in one of the fascinating, or silly, conversations going on around you. Over the past three years I’ve made friends, found a new way to do my job and found out about more about the city where I live, all through Twitter. I’ve live tweeted my way through several trials, found new opportunities and many new connections, not to mention some great nights out.
I could wax somewhat evangelical about that little blue bird for the rest of this post but this post has a purpose. One of the things Twitter is best at is bringing people together. It underpins how the whole thing works after all. One of the best examples of this I’ve seen jumped out of the Twittersphere this week into a bookshop near you.
About 18 months ago Jane Travers came up with the idea of putting together a Twitter cookbook in aid of charity. It started gently, almost like a game. Every day or so Jane would send out a challenge. In 140 characters using the hashtag #tweettreats she asked for recipes for pasta dishes, or sweets treats, or quick and easy dinners. The Twitter enthusiastically complied – hashtag games are a very popular way to pass a long evening and everyone knows the Twitter fixation with lunch plates (heavy sarcasm there before someone picks me up on that old cliche!) But this was more than your run of the mill hashtag game. This was for charity – and a damn good charity at that. Jane announced that proceeds would go to Médecins Sans Frontieres.
This was something everyone could get behind and it’s great to see that so many did. There are recipes there from writers Like Ian Rankin and Joanne Harris, TV personalities and actors like Dara O’Briain, Richard Madeley, Lou Diamond Philips and Paula Adbul. The recipes range from the severely mouthwatering-sounding Cthulhu Crumble from award winning author Neil Gaiman, to the jokier Mrs Fry’s Saucy Surprise (“Smear lovingly and beat feverishly until fully hardened. Whip to a frenzy then drizzle before taking a cold shower & preparing your meal”) from "Edna Fry”, the much put upon “wife” of broadcaster & global national treasure Stephen Fry and author of Mrs Fry’s Diary.
There are over a thousand recipes and 140 celebrities not to mention cooking advice and cooking tips from chef Marco Pierre White, who also provides the foreword. There seriously is something here for everyone with recipes to suit every pocket, every mood and every occasion – and did I mention it’s all for charity?
Full disclosure here, I do have a recipe in there (a very nice and easy pasta dish, if I do say so myself), and Jane has very kindly put a celebrity star by my Twitter name. Also the book is published by the O’Brien Press who published my most recent book Death on the Hill but don’t let that stop you rushing out to grab a copy. In all honesty it’s a great little book with some truly mouthwatering recipes that I’m itching to try. I don’t usually do book reviews or plugs here but Tweet Treats is a worthy exception. It’s an example of the best Twitter can bring and deserves to do extremely well. So what are you waiting for?…
One of the first things you’re taught as a journalist in terms of court reporting is how to avoid landing yourself in contempt of court. There’s a very good reason for this. There are limited workplaces where putting a foot wrong can land you in a cell but it can be a hazard of the job if you work in the courts.
The thing with contempt of court is that it’s perilously easy to land yourself in it, whoever you are. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious contempt of court could be broadly described as anything that breaks the rules of the court. It could be a witness contacting a juror directly or, as happened in a recent case in the UK a juror contacting the accused. For a journalist it could be printing something prejudicial to the defence during a trial or printing matters said in the absence of the jury, even turning on a recording device in court. Some of these things are easy to avoid if you know the job – though mistakes do happen – but other forms of contempt are harder to duck.
There are many reasons not to comply with a court order. It could be journalists refusing to reveal their sources, as happened to Colm Keena of the Irish Times some years ago or a case like that of Offaly pensioner Teresa Treacy who was jailed for contempt for not allowing the ESB onto her land to cut down her trees.
But not all contempt is as easy to spot. There’s a type of contempt known as “scandalising the court”. This is the rule that, broadly speaking, means that a judge can throw anyone in his court into a cell for not showing sufficient respect. That might call to mind Soviet dictatorships or the Wild West but thems the rules. I’ve heard gardai threatened with contempt for gum chewing and an accused threatened for not sitting up straight. Last week in Bray District Court a barrister ended up on the wrong side of a contempt charge for not sitting down when he was told. Apparently the judge in that case, Judge Murrough Connellan has a bit of a name for running a strict courtroom. Back in 2006 he jailed a punk father for wearing a Sex Pistols t-shirt in court.
Judgements like the Bray one and Teresa Treacy’s incarceration might raise considerable comment but it’s the nature of things. The judge is in charge of the courtroom and some wield that authority heavier than others. There aren’t many judges now that would throw contempt at someone who’d arrived in court in jeans, or the wrong t-shirt for that matter, but it’s usually a good idea to dress neatly – just in case.
In a totally unrelated matter, I’ve been writing elsewhere this week. The National Library of Ireland asked me to write a post on my specialist subject ahead of their Thrillers and Chillers season of Library Late talks. I’ve been spending a lot of time there recently, researching far more lawless times than these so I wrote a post on our fascination with murder and how some things never change – with examples from the 1850s.
Every day we’re bombarded with advice on how to be perfect. Whether it’s the magic cream that will keep you young or the latest newspaper column on how to garden, how to cook, what gadgets will elevate your life onto a plane of Zen-like calm as the minutiae of life are sifted into ever smaller boxes, there are always voices feeding our insecurities with the promise that if you could only follow these three simple rules life will flow like it does on the movies. With money tight and time even tighter it’s hardly surprising we feel like we’re floundering, but take heart. We’re not the first generation to feel swamped by the image of the perfect home, perfect life. It didn’t kick off in the 50s either whatever you might think from watching Mad Men. It goes much, much further than that!
At the climax of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew Kate instructs her sister and step-mother with her newly hard won wisdom. “A woman moved is like a fountain troubled” she scolds “muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty; and while it is so none so dry or thirsty will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.” She could almost be selling the latest anti aging miracle potion.
Next week an 18th Century guide to how to cut it in the modern world will go under the hammer. The Lady’s Companion with the snappy subtitle An Infallible Guide to the Fairer Sex, was pitched as essential reading for “virgins, wives or widows”. So dogmatic, so L’Oreal.
My own interest in the impossible dream started when aspirations to domestic nirvana were limited to singing along to Somewhere That’s Green from The Little Shop of Horrors. It was the early 1990s and I was living in a bedsit in Rathmines that was straight out of Rising Damp. The wiring was certainly straight out of the 70s – ah the heady days before landlord registration! So the 70s edition Good Housekeeping Home Encyclopaedia seemed like an essential reference when I found it on the dusty lower shelf of a second hand bookshop. It was only when I got it home I discovered the wealth of information about stain removal and household budgets. In those days I tended to skip the bits about how to cater dinner parties and look your most alluring with a gin & tonic when your husband came home from a hard day at the office.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s surrounded by strong women, many of whom were going it alone I never doubted that I would build a career. There was never any suggestion that happiness was in any way contingent on a well appointed kitchen or, come to that, a man. By the time I reached my teens and my 20s I saw the perfectly rouged, high-heeled beauties in the “House Wife” manual as nothing more than Stepford Wives, enemies almost, who were very definitely letting the side down.
My stance softened when I met The Husband. I seized the idea of building a warm and inviting nest with both hands, consumed with the urge to build a glowing, sweet-smelling home just for just us two. I bought an apron and matching saucepans. I learnt to make cupcakes and bread. I was never going to be a kitchen goddess – the keyboard will always have more of a lure than the kitchen – but suddenly I could kind of see the point. It was in the euphoria of early married life that my little collection of “Good Wife” manuals took shape. Even when newsroom shifts meant I was living off M&S microwave meals for one I would look at the colour plates in these books and marvel at the spotless kitchens and gargantuan cleaning schedules.
The earliest book I have is the didactically titled Book of Good Housekeeping published by the Good Housekeeping sometime in the 1950s. “The modern housewife”, the introduction informs, “has to combine many functions with those of mistress of her house; she will almost certainly do her own shopping and cooking, and probably a good part of the household washing and cleaning; more and more she is her own interior decorator, handywoman and often gardener…Even with the willing help of the “man about the house”, the average housewife today leads a very full life.” The book covers everything from balancing the household budget to plumbing and beauty (all vanishing cream and makeup that looks it’s best from the other side of the room).
The schedule for housework alone provides a full working week and the requirement for table linen (2-3 table cloths, 2-3 breakfast cloths AND 2-3 afternoon tea cloths) means life would be a never ending cycle of table laying. But despite the frankly terrifying standards you’re supposed to aspire to there’s something comforting about the photographs of primary coloured kitchens and living rooms. For all the fish knives and grapefruit spoons, the book makes ideal home perfection look attainable – even if it is a full time job.
Then there’s Frankly Feminine published in England in 1972. Times have changed and it’s no longer enough to match your lipstick to your suit colour (or to dress up when doing the housework for that matter). The book starts off with a list of the calories in everyday foodstuff and many pictures of a very supple blonde girl in a red leotard but the housework plan is as strenuous as ever. As the foreword says “This book has been compiled for today’s complete woman – who sees the stars around her and finds her happiness still in her home, with her family, and her friends.” “Today’s complete woman” is still going to be spending a hell of a lot of time with table cloths and dinner parties even if the fish knives have now been superseded by fondue sets.
These were the books bought by and bought for brides. I can all too easily imagine how their calm, dogmatic tone could be tinged with the mother-in-law’s hectoring tones. They set the bar pretty high and, when not viewed as social history, must have seemed like the Stepford rule book. But I read them from a different world. I might not come close to their exacting standards but I don’t have to. I find it comforting not nagging that they break down domesticity into a simple set of rules. With their diagrams for everything from changing nappies to laying out a kitchen to putting on eye shadow they break down the esoteric secrets of grown up life into a few easy steps.
Generally speaking I restrict my domestic goddess tendencies to Christmas and the very occasional dinner party and you’re a million times more likely to find me sitting at my desk with birds nest hair and ratty pyjamas than turning the mattresses and laying the table for breakfast. But if I had the spare cash I’d love to bid for the Lady’s Companion…how fascinating to see how the mother-in-laws of the 1740s would given their instructions.
I sprained my thumb recently. After a couple of weeks with it immobilised I’ve gained a new appreciation of the opposable thumb. I’ve also been thinking a lot about left handedness. The injured thumb is firmly attached to my left hand and suddenly I’m back to the level of awkwardness I remember all too well from childhood when I was first learning how to negotiate a world that had been built for the right handed.
Like many left handed people I’m so used to the fact that life is the wrong way round to the extent that I’ve developed a degree of ambidextrosity. I can use right handed scissors, corkscrews and tin openers with my right hand – even if it will always feel a little bit “wrong”. But my left hand will always be the dominant one so it’s been a frustrating couple of weeks. Not being able to hold a pen is head wrecking and my poor little Esterbrook SJs have been sitting on the shelf drying out. Holding a book and turning the pages became a ridiculous struggle and even using the remote control for the TV meant the bloody thing kept leaping out of my hand onto the floor – much to the Husband’s amusement. Even the things I’m used to doing with my right hand seemed more awkward without the left hand to steady everything.
So I’ve spent a lot of time dropping things, complaining and pondering the plight of the left handed. In fairness the left handed thing isn’t a new preoccupation. It’s a fact of life that comes up on an almost daily basis. When I’m working in the courts for example, being the only regular left handed court reporter for a long time meant that I was always the one who would get to sit next to the accused when we reporters used to share a bench with them in the Four Courts. If I didn’t sit on the left end of the row I’d always end up getting elbowed as I tried to take my notes. Then if the case took place in one of the smaller courts on the upper floors, with their cursed seats with the fold out table…I really hate those little flaps, if it’s not me twisting into knots to get my notebook on them and try to write, it was the one beside me grazing my elbow every time I lifted my pen.
The only time being left handed was a positive advantage was when I used to fence. Sparring with right handed people I had a slight edge as it was harder for them to block me across the body while at the same time I was naturally better covered. It doesn’t help much when whoever you’re fencing is better than you granted and it’s damned confusing when you come up against another lefty but on the whole it was a plus.
Statistically left handed people are more likely to be accident prone (I can definitely attest to that one) and we even have a shorter life expectancy than the right handed. We’re not the ones to ask for directions either as a lot of us have difficulty telling right from left after years of confusion. I could go on ad nauseum but I’ll leave other examples to this excellent site from Dr M.K. Holder of Indiana University.
An estimated 10% of the population are left handed and it can be hard for everyone else to understand what the fuss is about. We don’t think about the hand we pick things up with or the hand we use to button our clothes. It’s one of those things that we do instinctively and that’s what makes it so awkward to be programmed to go the other way. Even social greetings slip easily into farce when the majority lean one way for that air kiss and you dip in the opposite direction.
It’s awkward and all too often the left handed lack of right handed coordination is dismissed as clumsiness, stupidity or even something darker. The word “sinister” for example means left on the one hand, on the other it’s all Halloween. The Irish word “ciotóg” meaning left handed person, is all too similar to the Irish word “ciotach” meaning clumsy, but also has echoes of something far wilder – the strange one, touched, perhaps, by the Devil himself. Certainly when someone calls you a “ciotóg” (pronounced kitogue) it certainly doesn’t sound like a compliment.
Evil spirits were supposed to loiter behind the left shoulder – which is why salt is supposed to be thrown in that direction when it’s spilt and the French believed that witches greeted the Devil with their left hand. Even wearing the wedding ring on the left hand comes from the Greek and Roman practice of wearing rings on that finger to ward off evil spirits. And it’s not just Europe. Apparently in Kenya the Meru people believe that the left hand of their holy man is so evil he must keep it hidden. There’s a lot more in that vein here, from the UK site of Anything Left Handed, who used to have a magical shop in Soho, in London that was my first introduction to things like left handed scissors.
I was lucky though. At least I was left to be left handed. So many people, in so many countries were forced to learn to write with their right hand. Many were left mentally scarred, with speech and even with learning difficulties because of it. Left handed people were for a long time believed to be rules by the right side of the brain – the intuitive side that’s good at the lateral, creative stuff. It’s since been found that it’s not quite that simple but there do seem to be quite a few left handed people in the arts – based on my own completely un scientific observations.
I’ve learnt to negotiate the world just fine but the very fact that it’s always my left side that gets injured probably puts the lie to that. Over the years I’ve had a broken arm, broken ankle, sprained wrist, sprained shoulder and the most recent sprained thumb – always on the left. It’s just an extra level of annoyance in day to day life. Walking down the street with a right handed person there’s always that introductory waltz as I try to walk on their left while they would prefer me on their right for easy conversation. Even my all consuming stationary fixation is necessarily tempered by practicality – school years spent with ink stains all up the side of my hand have left me with a preoccupation about quick drying inks and flat opening notebooks. It’s such a pervasive kink it’s impossible to ignore – even if it’s something I rarely discuss because for 90% of the population these things just aren’t a problem. That’s just the way it is.
But before I stop I’d like to mention a new entrant to the world of the sinister. Irish company On the Other Hand have recently launched an Irish left handed shop so if you’re based here in Ireland you can still buy Irish and get left handed scissors and tin openers galore – and the rest. I’m not connected to them in any way but it’s always nice to see people who understand how irritating the right orientation can be – even if you’re used to it and deal with it just as you’ve always done.
The thumb is now almost better and I’m sure I’ll be back to normal in a couple of days but I’m not going to stop being left handed. We all move through life in our own groove – I’m just more likely to bump into others because I will invariably go the wrong way!
It’s been almost three years since I started this blog. I started it to help publicise my first book The Devil in the Red Dress, which was due to be come out that November. The idea was to write about the process of being published for the first time as well as to talk about the case that Devil centred on and others that I covered day to day in the courts.
Since then I’ve written two other books and covered many other cases. All the while I’ve written about what I was up to on here. For the past few months though I haven’t been posting much. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a daily post and even longer since I followed an unfolding story over successive posts as I used to with the trials I covered. I’ve felt increasingly tongue tied when I went to post and have recently been considering stopping the blog altogether.
But this isn’t goodbye – just a bit of a change in gears.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this year. Back in May my agent retired and I was faced with the prospect of having to sell myself from scratch again. I may have a better CV these days but any new agent is going to have to believe in me and in my ability to have a long and hopefully lucrative career. But selling yourself when you’re having doubts about the product yourself isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
I fell into court reporting almost by accident but once I started I grew to love it. I loved the almost academic ritual of the courts and the drama of each individual trial. I’ve written many times here about the stories that can be found in the most brutal cases. The administration of justice fascinates me as a writer – it’s pure human conflict – the raw material of stories since the dawn of time. As long as I could sit quietly in the bench behind the barristers with my notebook and my pens cataloguing what went on before me I was never short of something to write and some of the stories that unfolded in those panelled courtrooms played out as dramatically as any fiction I could dream up at my desk.
I had thought that I had found my niche, somewhere I was happy to work for years to come but there’s the rub…for the past year or so it’s dawned on me that perhaps it wasn’t where I wanted to serve out the rest of my time. It’s an odd thing working as a reporter in an Irish court. I firmly believe that it’s vital that journalists cover the courts. Justice must be done in public and the press bring justice out of the courts and onto the breakfast table where it can be openly discussed by all. That’s not always the way it feels though. The press are viewed as irritants at best, at worst an infestation that in an ideal world would be eradicated just like rats or cockroaches. It’s an attitude you find amongst the legal professions, the gardai and the public. I’m not saying it’s held by everyone but it’s widespread enough to get a bit wearing on a daily basis. There’s a perception that the only reason the courts are covered is to titillate the baser instincts of the masses, a freak show that makes a circus out of the august institution of the Law…and having seen some of the scrums after particularly high profile trials I can see how that perception could have come about.
As a freelancer I’m limited in the kind of trial I can cover. I can’t afford to sit in court for weeks on end when it’s a story I can’t sell. Against the backdrop of the smoking embers of the Irish economy only the sensational trial will stand out with a suitably photogenic cast. Unfortunately for me but fortunately for Ireland these trials are extremely thin on the ground. It might sound cynical but that’s the name of the freelance game and it’s not one I have any chance of changing.
This year the one thing I keep coming back to is that I’m tired. I’m tired of justifying what I do. I’m tired of explaining the difference between a court reporter and a crime reporter (we cover the trials – they cover the crimes). I’m tired of arguing about my right to do my job and I’m tired of people taking exception to me describing things as I see them. I’m tired of the shocked looks when I describe my day in work – especially when it’s a day we’ve heard post mortem results. Most of all I’m tired of people thinking I’m a one-trick pony who only does one thing. I’ll have been working as a court reporter for six years come October and I’m ready for a change.
Now I know it’s not something I can just step away from. I’m the author of two books on memorable trials that still manage to make headlines. I’ve contributed to a couple of shows on true crime that still find their way into late night schedules. I still know what trials are coming up in the new law term and which ones will probably draw me back to court but there’s so much else. For the past three years I’ve written about murder trials here and in the Sunday Independent, on Facebook and on Twitter and jealously guarded the brand I was trying to build. But increasingly that’s not enough. I love the conversations I’ve had late at night on Twitter about 70s British sci-fi and horror films. I’m a total geek when it comes to fountain pens and old Russian cameras and I love French music. I’m currently obsessed with the idea of finding natural alternatives for the various potions I find myself slapping on my face far more earnestly than I did in my 20s and I’m resurrecting my ancient 1913 Singer sewing machine. I’m toying with the idea of starting a blog for fiction where I can post short stories and maybe start to outline another novel. It might mean confusing the Google bots who come to catalogue my daily ramblings but I want to give murder and prisons and social unrest a break for a while and talk about anything and everything else.
After all there’s so much more to life than death!
I’m in the Irish Times magazine today. For once I’m not on about murders and mayhem, this time I’m bringing my low tech fixation to a wider audience. Anna Carey’s piece is looking at the pervasive use of obsolete equipment in the modern world. Radio star Ryan Tubridy still uses pencils, author Charlie Connelly prefers to let his fingers do the walking with phone books and I’m there extolling the many virtues of my beloved Esterbrooks.
I’ve written about these great little pens before on this blog and, apart from smart phone and netbook, they are the tools I rely on most on a day to day basis. Using a fountain pen has made my shorthand faster (handy for long legal digressions) and when I’m not court reporting the way the pen glides across the paper does seem to allow the ideas to flow more freely when the writing isn’t flowing as it should.
Mind you, if the truth be told, I’m a closet luddite in more than just my choice of writing equipment. While I love technology and everything it enables us to do, there are some times when making the switch from digital back to mechanical just seems the obvious thing to do. Apart from my little Esties I also collect old Russian film cameras. There’s something about working around their many eccentricities to take a decent photograph that can seem so much more rewarding than the cocksure precision of digital photography. Don’t get me wrong. Digital cameras are great and if I want to make sure I get the shot I want I’ll use one, but the alchemy of the film process seems to infuse the whole photograph with a kind of magic – or maybe that’s just what I say to myself to explain the stripes of the light leaks and the fuzz of my less than accurate manual focusing.
Using these old film cameras is a completely different experience to digital photography. When I bring out my 1953 Zorki 3M, people stop and ask about it. They don’t mind if I point it at them (I’m a purely amateur snapper I hasn’t to add but I’ve always enjoyed street photography) and the whole expedition turns into more of an adventure – even if the shots aren’t as good as the one’s I might bring back from digital outings.
Maybe my clinging to the manual and awkward has a little something to do with my 70s childhood. Some of my earliest memories revolve around brown outs and power cuts that swept across England in the mid 70s. It always seemed like a good idea to have access to equipment that didn’t require a power supply and could work in any environment. Apart from my cameras and my pens I have always kept a manual typewriter handy…well you never know!
Whether the attraction comes from paranoia or nostalgia or just plain practicality I’m not about to upgrade my old school equipment any time soon. There’s a time and place for technology and then there’s time to do things the old fashioned way. Quite frankly I wouldn’t want it any other way!
I’m sure I’m not the only journalist glued to the whole cataclysmic mess that is the UK phone hacking scandal. It’s a proper toe-curling political and social scandal on the scale of Watergate and at its heart is the press itself…and whatever else we might or might not get up to we do love reading about ourselves.
The dust is very far from settling on that that story and it’ll be a while before everyone knows just how far the toxic fallout has settled but even at this stage one thing is certain. This is a story that will be talked about and written about not just for the coming months but for years to come. It’ll be picked over and analysed and agonised over while many breasts are beaten in hollow mea culpas and many other shoulders shrugged.
So I’m getting in relatively early. I’m not getting into the rights and the wrongs of phone hacking and whatever else is lying in wait to come out next. There’ll be plenty written in other places than here. This is simply a personal view.
Journalistic ethics are in the spotlight at the moment and the general consensus is finding them absent at best, if not festeringly rotten. In a survey commissioned by the Irish Medical Council earlier this year only 37% of Irish people trusted journalists to tell the truth. We came in above politicians but given this was before the last general election that really isn’t much of an achievement. But it’s not a recent slide. I know the guarded look that comes across peoples faces when I tell them what I do and I know the reaction of some of my actor parents’ friends when they learned my chosen profession. It’s not just that people are worried at ending up in the story it’s that they expect me to twist their words if they end up there. What’s really crazy is that a lot of them relax when they find out I write fiction as well – even though the odds are far greater of them ending up there, unless they kill someone.
I’m not wringing my hands and whining that no-one likes me because I’m a hack. I know that by writing true crime I’m skating on the edge of what’s considered respectable to write about. Once again I would probably get less flack if I wrote crime fiction – because then I’d only be dreaming up interesting ways to kill people instead of writing about peoples’ actual attempts. The fact that I cover the trial rather than doing the death knocks and chasing grieving families doesn’t count for much when I’ve written not one but two books picking over every bloody detail of stories that might have faded away as the public looked to the next big thing…or so some may think.
But that doesn’t make me unethical. It just means I’m doing my job. On the back page of it’s final edition the News of the World quoted George Orwell. The essay they quoted is called The Decline of the English Murder and in it Orwell examines the public fascination for a good murder. He talks, tongue in cheek, of the “golden age” when murders harked back to a sense of melodrama that chimed with the public consciousness. Modern murder happened too easily, he argued, to stick in the consciousness of a nation numbed by war. Orwell’s modern murder happened in the mid 1940s…but his point still stands. There’s still an appetite for death, one that is part of human nature, but as life has been cheapened with an increase in thoughtless deaths so that appetite is increasingly seen as a guilty thing, one of our baser instincts that has no place in a civilised society.
The ongoing revelations of the hacking of murder victims phones and the rest feed into a perception that’s been there for a long time. The dodgy journalist is a stock character anywhere from Harry Potter to Coronation Street. I suppose it goes hand in hand with the fact that part of a journalist’s job is asking questions that people don’t want asked and on occasion snooping where some would rather you didn’t go. But if journalists didn’t have this instinct how many injustices would have gone unremarked? How many scandals would have gone uncovered?
It all goes back to ethics and journalistic ethics are something that perhaps have been increasingly overlooked over the past couple of decades. When there’s an increasing pressure to sell newspapers in a market that’s changing so quickly and shrinking even faster then the urge to satisfy public curiosity with gory details and juicy revelations will grow and can in some cases leave taste and ethics languishing in its wake. When I studied journalism in the mid 1990s, in a four year course that covered everything from languages to philosophy to film theory, there was no dedicated strand of the course that covered ethics. We were made aware of the NUJ Code of Conduct but a dedicated class, where ethical issues could be debated and fully understood, was lacking. How can you trust that young journalists will have a sufficiently strong moral compass to negotiate frequently complex ethical issues if you don’t give them the training to recognise these issues when they arise?
The exclusive has become the be all and end all and “human interest” has become a driving force. Everyone who covers murder trials knows that even that formulaic process has it’s money shots. The tears of the victim’s mother, the stoney face of the accused when he’s sentenced. We write according to narrative rules that are embedded in instinct. In order to sell a trial you have to draw out the emotion and spoon feed it to a public numbed by constant repetition. We fit the characters in a trial into the same roles that they have occupied since the popular press came into existence, the dramatis personae of a melodrama with a fixed outcome and set pieces. It really is nothing new…even Jack the Ripper himself, it’s been suggested, had help from the press – the infamous letters with their bloody signature that gave a monster such a memorable name may even have been hoaxes written by newspaper men to drum up more readers.
I write about murder trials because that structure fascinates me. I’m interested in what drives someone to kill, on how easy it can be to take that decision to break one of the deepest taboos and end a human life. It’s an interest that hasn’t just been limited to the so-called gutter press. Charles Dickens covered many a murder and Truman Capote’s greatest work was not the tale of Holly Golightly but the examination of the brutal murder of a family that rocked a small town. But I know that in the eyes of some people out there I might as as well be rooting through people’s bins and papping celebrities.
I’ve always cared about ethics. It’s not enough to observe the law, there is a moral responsibility there as well. It’s important to be fair, not just because I’m afraid of influencing a jury, but because it matters. The press have always been known as the Fourth Estate and with that comes a duty. We are allowed in the courts to make sure that justice does not take place behind closed doors. It’s the press who keep an eye on the politicians to ensure that they have the public’s best interests at heart. That’s the way it should be and that’s still often the way it is. In the face of all these recent revelations those sentences might sound trite and insincere but if the fall-out of the hacking scandal results in a hamstrung press that cannot shine a light on bad men and corruption society as a whole will be all the poorer for it.
There will always be a grey area here, a blurred line between public interest and what the public is interested in but without strong ethics journalism, and investigative journalism in particular, will suffer. The subject will be done to death in the weeks and months to come but somehow that trust will have to be rebuilt. As long as the press is attacking itself and there’s ammunition for it to do so, other stories are being ignored. Even by making that distinction between the “gutter” and the “quality” press journalism isn’t being served. There are plenty of ethical journalists out there but it’s too easy to tar us all with the same brush. This is a massive subject and far too big for a single post. By the time the dust has finally settled in this almighty mess I just hope that journalism doesn’t take too big a hit. I don’t know how this is going to fixed but I hope someone out there does. I became a journalist because I wanted to make a difference not because I wanted to rake muck. There should still be a place for making a difference when the last shots have been fired.
When my family first moved to Ireland when I was a teenager I was asked by a neighbour “Do you have prayers in your religion?” That was the first time I ever felt I was on the other side of a fence. Even though I had grown up hearing about sectarian attacks in the North and knew the difference between Cavaliers and Roundheads in the English Civil War it had never occurred to me that the church I had gone to as a child belonged on any side of any fence. It was a place of bells and smells, somewhere that occasionally held jumble sales and children’s parties, somewhere where my less exciting friends hung out.
By the time we moved to Ireland I had gone off the idea of becoming a nun (a week long fad after watching A Nun’s Story and Black Narcissus in quick succession) and pretty much lost interest in religion as a whole. It’s an interest I never particularly regained. But as I got used to living in the west of Ireland it was a subject I couldn’t quite leave behind. It was there when my school was selected. It was there on the doorstep when I moved north to college in Belfast. It was in the countless jokes I shared with friends over the years – measuring differentness be it remembered kids’ shows (me Bagpuss & Saturday Swapshop, them Bosco & Wanderly Wagon), pub snacks (me salt & vinegar crisps or dry roasted peanuts, them Tayto or King). Even though none of us went to any kind of church from one end of the year to the next we all knew which tribe we belonged to for that game at least.
The thing about the religion question was that it always did and always will underline differences. It builds a them and an us and running under “them” and “us” is usually a current of entitlement. Heirs to the kingdom and all that. But surely now the kingdom is up to it’s armpits in mortgage arrears and we are all apparently up a proverbial creek without propulsion “them” and “us” should be put aside.
This morning on the Ryan Tubridy Show on RTE’s 2FM there was a light hearted discussion about how to spot an Irish protestant. As frequently happens these days with light hearted radio discussions it came with a Twitter hashtag. Everyone had lashings of fun pointing out those differences (including at least one physiological one concerning optical distance). There was no harm done, no offence taken and no malice meant…well mostly. Tubridy addressed the negative comments beginning to clutter up the Twitter stream as belonging to a po-faced minority and advised them to turn off and listen to something else.
There it was again, the Them and Us. They can’t take a joke.
The problem is that perhaps encouraging a large group of people to itemise how they differ from another large group isn’t very funny. It’s not really something that encourages empathy and understanding. Pointing and laughing at another peer group wouldn’t be funny if that group was made up of gay men, or black families, or Jews or Muslims. Everyone knows this. There would never be a slot on how to spot an Irish Jew or How Good’s Your Gaydar? We’re all the children of the PC 80s in one way or another. We are so careful not to offend.
And what was there to offend about the Irish Protestant slot? It was all meant as a bit of a joke. Why am I even writing about it –I’m not even in the group being (gently) slagged? The problem is that it encourages Them and Us thinking. Ireland’s come a long way in terms of tolerance as last weekends Dublin Pride proved. We no longer send unmarried mothers into slave labour in the Magdalene Laundries or turn round to stare at an African on the street.
But racism and sexism and sectarianism haven’t gone away, you know, and they won’t while Them and Us is the default joke position. It might mean being a little po-faced once in a while but surely tolerance and empathy are worth the hassle? There’ll always be forms of tribalism in society, but couldn’t we just leave it on the pitch? We should be looking for similarities not differences and not pointing and laughing at the other side.
