Twenty-Fifteen Vision...
Actually when I was nine, I took Isolde as my confirmation name. I was sure I picked it myself, but I suspect now that my mother (recipient of this wrap) played a far greater role in the choice than I knew. My classmates were taking Bernadette, Brigid, Anne, Catherine - you were supposed to pick a saint’s name - but my mother had an interest in celtic folk tales and I knew the story of Tristan and Isolde.... And the way I was raised, attention seeking was considered especially bad in girls, but showing off what you knew educationally fell in a different category .... VG/Excellent at any age or gender... She said I chose it but...
You don’t always see everything as it plays out, but nor does passage of time always make for accuracy either, and on that score a new political mini series is bothering me over what's excluded. It's a biopic attempt to explain the allure of a contentious Irish political figure of the late '70s and early '80s.... The acting is mostly great, the storyline mostly clear, but thin ... news clips interspersed from the time add flavour but visually it's romantically pastel and slightly misted (which it just wasn't) and then an accent is jarringly now, definitely not then... .....Then, when things were dark, cramped, flock wall-papered, heavily carpeted, definitely there wasn't soft tasteful light... Then, when most people hadn't two pennies to rub together but there was an aspiration to swank... ...Swank, where cars were big, steaks well done, in butter, followed by black forest gateau and suited pomp abounded in every back room snug... and not just there, but everywhere, cigarettes, cigars and pipes were a way of life... Windows stayed closed to keep in heat and children choked on unfiltered smoke on the top deck of buses or in the back of grey cars. ...
Some makes the series but the, erm, totality of the situation somehow seems stilted (and you possibly need to be Irish and of that era recognise that very hackneyed political phrase)....
...And in every Irish town and village, the pub was the nerve centre, meaning politicians and public were inextricably linked and often one and the same. The old bar in the parliament of that era was no exception and fulfilled all the requirements of a local shebeen....
So far at least, it hasn't merited even a mention....**** There's what I assume was purportedly the restaurant (although it's too appealing and harmonious by far), but...no low, pokey dive heaving with vital action that would never feature in any formal report on exactly how decisions were reached - It's the story of the leader and it's true that you wouldn't often see the leader in the visitors' bar, but his satellites certainly kept it busy and were even busier carrying back all they found out there.
It was a dingy windowless room at the end of a back corridor, and on sitting days opened with a startlingly brisk trade in heavily fortified morning coffees before business commenced at 10.30am - absolutely nothing out of the ordinary to encounter public figures kickstarting their day in this way. Clearly many didn't too, but that was a literal measure of an era that didn't seem to bat an eye over entrusting matters of state to men with glaringly evident health troubles. In fact, it would have been perceived as bizarre, the height of bad manners or pure meanness of spirit to have passed any remark and here's my impression of the best way venturing that kind of question might have gone...
"What?! That's just how it is... goodbye..."
dial tone...
All of which I think was linked to the level of unchallengeable male power which still prevailed to an extent quite unimaginable now (and in my opinion imposed pressures on both genders that were unreasonable), and also goes a way to explain how much faith could have been placed in one man. What men said went then: they were believed, even as women believed we were becoming incredibly liberated. Very sexist environments still existed wholesale all over the country and people had faith in them: political life was simply a reflection, and if men saw fit to run the country from the bar, well weren't they the wise ones. Politics and journalism saw a small number of women make it on merit alone but they were few and exceptional (in my opinion, all the more admirable for that). Women who properly flourished in that world mostly tended to be wealthy with independent support systems, or connected to existing political men or male dynasties and there were an awful lot of opportunistic sex arrangements. One of those features in the storyline, but seemed remarkably idealised to me.
Odd what comes back once you begin delving - it also completely slipped my mind that once I'd been taught to embroider. I picked up a needle to try a green zig-zag and was astonished that it came so easily - and only then it came to me that I was taught at school sometime around the era I gained the name Isolde.
**** it got one very brief reference in a subsequent episode