A Somerset Lad

The mood lifts.

Stepping out into the cool air of an early April evening, the sky in the east is shades of blue, fresh growth has brought fresh traces of green in the adjoining pasture. The waxing moon will be full later this week, assuming its paschal form.

There is a timelessness in this place. Centuries of forebears have been here. It is not hard to imagine their presence: weathered skin, gnarled hands, burred accents. Having just enough to hold on and never enough to move on, they have been here for centuries .

Once, there would have been a desire to appear orthodox in beliefs, to tick the boxes prescribed by the ecclesiastical authorities. Once, it would have seemed a heresy to have suggested heaven was anything other than the supernatural visions described in First Century writings.

Standing looking eastward at the windmill,  the words of Charlotte Mew’s Old Shepherd’s Prayer came back.

Up to the bed by the window, where I be lyin’,
Comes bells and bleat of the flock wi’ they two children’s clack.
Over, from under the eaves there’s the starlings flyin’,
And down in yard, fit to burst his chain, yapping out at Sue
I do hear young Mac.
Turning around like a falled-over sack
I can see team plowin’ in Whithy-bush field
and meal carts startin’ up road to Church-Town;
Saturday afternoon the men goin’ back
And the women from market, trapin’ home over the down.
Heavenly Master, I wud like to wake to they same green places
Where I be know’d for breakin’ dogs and follerin’ sheep.
And if I may not walk in th’ old ways and look on th’ old faces
I wud sooner sleep.

Mew was a Cornish poet at the turn of the Twentieth Century, her lines capture the dialect of the far south-west. Her poem sometimes found favour with clergy of a more liberal inclination, but its sentiments would be frowned upon by those of an evangelical disposition with their insistence upon doctrinal certitude.

‘If heaven is not a spring evening in Somerset, with a small dog for company,’ I thought, ‘then it’s not heaven.’

I do not smoke. I have never smoked. I accept that smoking is not good for one’s health,

But, then, there are many things that are not good for one’s health, including being constantly fixated on all the things that are not good for one’s health. Stress and anxiety seem much more common among those who examine every label and count every calorie than it is among those who live with a carefree joie de vivre.

But to return to the evils of smoking.

The health puritans presumably imagined that when the last cigarette had been extinguished, when the price of a packet had been raised so high that the price was beyond the pocket of a working man, then a promised land of healthiness would be reached. (Although, they would by then have turned on sugar, alcohol, chocolate, potatoes, cheese, red meat, milk, eggs, anything that brings enjoyment).

What has happened is not what they had envisaged, and threatens to have a far more detrimental effect than a packet of Player’s No. 6.

Anyone who has been to a secondary school will know that cigarettes were always the mark of rebellion, the sign of teenage non-conformity. The cigarette smokers that I remember weren’t bad people, they were people who were determined not to be cowed by the system.

For at least a century, contravention of the social norms has been the mark of being youthful. Smoking behind the bike shed was a fairly benign activity, a relatively harmless assertion of individuality.

The cigarettes have all but gone. Few teenagers have money to buy them over the counter and fewer have access to the contraband ones that come from Eastern Europe.

Cigarettes have been superseded by vapes, and who knows what they contain? A drag on a cigarette might have caused someone a spasm of coughing, but would have had no hallucinogenic effects.

The teenagers whose breath once smelt of smoke now stare vacantly into middle space, those who once coughed now break into random bouts of giggling. There is no regulation, no quality control. School students will gather in the toilets to share vapes. The caretaker will complain that the pipes have been blocked by the used vapes that the users have tried to flush away.

Teenagers will always kick against the system. The health puritans have made that revolt more dangerous, for, whatever its demerits, cigarette smoking was a considerably more healthy activity than the inhalation of hallucinogenic substances.

In his frustration with Padhraic, Colm cuts off each of the fingers of his left hand. The Banshees of Inisherin is a profound psychological insight.

Colm wishes to leave a cultural legacy, to create something that will outlive him, and Padhraic becomes a source of annoyance, a distraction from the music writing that has become Colm’s purpose.

To harm himself in frustration seems a strange choice. What would be achieved through such brutal violence? Yet there seemed something universal in his behaviour.

In university days, there was a student who enjoyed playing the penny whistle. Yet the aptitude for tunes that could change the mood of a place did not prevent moments when his mood became very dark and he would take his whistles and deliberately break each into two pieces.

Perhaps causing harm to oneself, in whatever manner, expresses frustration in such a way that no-one else has cause for complaint. The old Scottish song The Parting Glass celebrates the capacity for doing damage to no-one but oneself:

Oh, of all the money that e’er I spent,
I spent it in good company,
and of all the harm that e’er I’ve done,
alas, it was to none but me
and all I’ve done for want of wit
to mem’ry now I can’t recall,
so fill to me the parting glass.
Good night and joy be with you all.

To cut off one’s fingers seems a rather extreme response to the tribulations of daily life, yet it is not hard to recall times when there was a temptation toward self-abnegnation.

Being averse to pain, there was never an inclination toward physical self-harm, but, in retrospect, there seem too many moments of declining opportunities, and invitations, and kindnesses, for no reason other than to accept a chance of enjoyment would require allowing light into the frequent dark moods.

It is hard to find a rational explanation for a disposition that set in during teenage years. It was certainly not rooted in the sort of creativity attributed to the character of Colm, sitting in his beachside cottage looking out at the Atlantic. Instead, it was more an existential unease, although it was hard to discern its source.

The passage of the years has at least brought a hesitation before acts of destructiveness. Taking out my phone on the bus this morning, there was a moment of temptation to delete my Instagram pictures. There was no logical reason for the impulse, just a desire to do something negative. I put the phone back in my pocket and watched the passing traffic.

Drinking tea with a colleague each morning, conversations are nothing, if not eclectic.

Today’s meander began with a recollection of an old priest my colleague had known, a Benedictine who had the title ‘Dom.’

‘I knew a Dom Paul,’ I said. ‘A lovely old gentleman, too gentle for the Twentieth Century. He was a great man for taking snuff, much of which seemed to be left on his soutane.’

‘My grandmother took snuff,’ my colleague replied.

His grandmother had been a countrywoman born in Edwardian times. It was not hard to imagine a black and white picture of her, sitting outside a whitewashed thatched cottage.

‘My grandfather smoked a pipe’, he said. ‘Warhorse tobacco that you had to pare and rub yourself.’

(It had never occurred to me before that the term ‘ready-rubbed’ on the packs of Golden Virginia tobacco that my father smoked meant that a person did not have to rub it themselves.)

‘Pipe smoking seemed popular among the professional classes,’ I said. ‘Clergy smoked pipes, and academics. I wonder if there was a hierarchy of tobacco.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘Cigarette smokers were thought less polite.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I know there were clergy who smoked a pipe who would have met with disapproval if they had smoked cigarettes. There seemed to some sort of distinction.’

Did the distinction arise because pipe smoking had been established since the arrival of tobacco, whereas cigarettes were a phenomenon of modern mass production? Did the massive number of cigarette smokers and much smaller number of pipe smokers prompt a notion that cigarette smoking was somehow ‘common?’

Sitting pondering the conversation during the relative calm of a secondary school lunchtime, I wondered if somewhere there was a diagram illustrating the tobacco hierarchy.

Cigars would obviously have been the top, the preference of wealthy gentlemen at clubs and in dining rooms after dinner. Then there would have been the pipe smokers, the genteel, taciturn souls who puffed reflectively as they listened to conversations. Then would have come cigarette smokers, a number of whom would have also been cigar smokers, but who by their sheer weight of number would have been seen as engaged in an activity for the masses.

Cigarettes rolled by the smoker  themselves would presumably have lain somewhere between the pipe and the manufactured cigarettes (although my late father, who rolled his own, would have insisted he was the most common of being).

Where, though, would snuff have been? A Benedictine priest and an Irish countrywoman were far apart.