This year I am reading and listening to a lot about Ireland during the famine. It is a task that is meant to feed into another task. Yes, you could call it a depressing endeavour. Diseases travelled across the continent of Europe like a biblical shadow wave of death, children starved and were buried, it was hopelessness after hopelessness.
But not for everyone. In an episode of the Irish History Podcast I learned that towards the end of the Great Hunger, middle class Dublin prepared for a royal visit. Queen Victoria came to town and buildings got fresh licks of paint. Some people were never hungry. Some people bought dildos.
At the moment people are fighting about trees in Dublin neighbourhoods and new bus corridors, or something. Some people want to save the trees. Others tell them that the trees’ sacrifice will be Dublin’s once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a city that is for effective public transport. Ribbons are involved, Twitter threads are endless.
I like the trees. I walk and take the bus everywhere. I like the shelter of trees, big dopples of rain that take their time to splash you, the mulch of the fallen leaves in autumn being dragged into houses and mistaken for bugs when dried. I feel a sort of comfort when flexible soft branches scrape the top of the bus and leaves whisper along the windows. They are objects which have survived in one place while I think of my past present future in terms of moving and progressing.
In the end, I think they will cut down the trees.
Did you do Eavan Boland for the Leaving Cert? In her poem Famine Road she mentions the man Trevelyan, a British civil servant who essentially headed up Ireland during the Famine years and made many awful decisions. One was that aid would be earned. The hungry were put to to work on unnecessary construction projects, famine roads. Boland imagines: “Might it be safe, Colonel, to give them roads, roads to force from nowhere, going nowhere of course?”
In recent weeks, a friend of mine messaged me the news of the Dublin Christmas Flea not finding a home. Then I read a statement from the music festival Beatyard. I hear of friends exploring other cities and towns to settle in. I see tweets about Glasgow. What’s the point of making a city a pneumatic, seamless place when we have nowhere to go? We’ll cut trees, the buses will be better. But we’ll keep laying out the red carpet for tech companies. People in places like Facebook and Twitter will continue to earn ridiculous money. Someone like me will have to keep on moving and try think of it as my own personal progress, frame it as a choice.
P.S. Want to read an article about female orgasm and the androcentric - that means catered to men, new word for ya - approach to sexual health which has resulted in a pleasure gap? Check it out here. Get angry about societal norms, funding shortfalls, tech conferences being chill with actual sex robots but freaked out at vibrators. Get passionate about the women who are trying to push for cliteracy. And keep this quote to hand for when you’re a half bottle of champagne deep and in the company of rowdy, confessional women: “Scientists didn’t discover the full anatomy of the clitoris until 1998—decades after they put a man on the moon.”