Across the Borderline

But hope remains when pride is gone 

There's a place where I've been told 

Every street is paved with gold 

And it's just across the borderline 

I cruise west, the concrete and steel towering over me as I pass through the shiny gateway to heaven.

And when it's time to take your turn

Here's a lesson that you must learn

You could lose more than you'll ever hope to find

The price is £6.70 to enter these Elysian fields these days, but wtf? With the way the world is spinning we need to treat ourselves. All we really need is the band from the Titanic to play us out, and we can sink happily.

When you reach the broken promised land

And every dream slips through your hands

Then you'll know that it's too late to change your mind

But then it is always too late to change your mind….. There is never a going back. I still believe in the England of Yore (whoever he/she was) where Postman Pat (and his black and white cat) delivers simnel cake and Private Godfrey’s sister Dolly makes the sandwiches. Come to that I even sometimes live in a world where Betsy Trotwood chases donkeys out of her front garden, Justices Shallow and Silence preside over the magistrature, and The Pardoner’s Tale passes the time in the traffic between Sittingbourne and Faversham.

But that is fantasy.  There is no going back,

'Cause you've paid the price to come so far

Just to wind up where you are

And you're still just across the borderline

So I pursue my first intent, to be a pilgrim for the day on Offa’s Dyke, up the hills near Abergavenny, in Monmouthshire. This is border territory, sometimes known as the Anglo-Welsh Border. The England-Wales border runs for 160 miles, from the Dee to the Severn estuary. It has followed much the same line since the 8th century, and for part of the way it is marked by Offa's Dyke. Offa was Trump of Mercia from 757 to 796, and his walled ditch was constructed (at his own expense?) to keep the immigrants from Powys out. The modern boundary was fixed in 1536, when Henry VIII melted the lead off the roof of Tintern Abbey and simultaneously created both the Romantic Poets and Secular Tourism.

Now the only signs of Welsh independence are signs on the road instructing you to go ARAF and a charge of £6.70 to cross the Severn in a westerly direction, where:

A thousand footprints in the sand

Reveal a secret no one can define

The river flows on like a breath

In between our life and death

Tell me who's the next to cross the borderline

En la triste oscuridad (In the sad darkness)

Hoy tenemos que cruzar (today we have to cross)

Este rio que nos llama mas alla (this river which calls us further away)

But hope remains when pride is gone

And it keeps you moving on

Calling you across the borderline

Up on these beautiful hills, with views across England’s green and pleasant (?) land to the East, the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons to the west,

and the flatiron top of Ysgyryd Fawr (Skirrid) between me and the Mouth of the Severn to the south,

it feels good. I am away, temporarily, from it all – or so it seems. The corrugated end of a farm building carries verses from Edward Thomas’s The Lofty Sky:

Today I want the sky,

The tops of the high hills,

Above the last man’s house…

…where naught deters

The desire of the eye

For sky, nothing but sky.

The skylarks agree.

The ponies agree.

I am alone with my thoughts, where once border patrols might have shot me on sight.

And other borders, other boundaries, come to mind. What is this United Kingdom if full of care? Will Gretna be Greener when Scotland detaches itself? What about Ireland? In Sunday’s Observer Sean O’Hagan asks Will Brexit reopen old wounds with a new hard border? 

A recent Irish government survey noted that there are now around 200 border crossing points and an estimated 177,000 lorries, 208,000 vans and 1.85m cars travel to and from Northern Ireland every month. In spite of this progress, the prevailing question now occupying people either side of the Irish border, particularly those that live in its hinterland, is: does Brexit mean that checkpoints of some kind could reappear, to prevent the movement of goods and people from European Ireland into British Northern Ireland?

The border is 310 miles long, and, as we soon find out, can be difficult to follow even with the help of an Ordnance Survey map. It skirts five of the six counties of Northern Ireland – Down, Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Derry – as well as five Irish border counties – Louth, Monaghan, Cavan, Leitrim and Donegal. Along the way, it bisects mountains, towns, townlands, fields, rivers, bridges, farms and even a few houses wherein the occupants sit down to supper in Ireland before going to sleep across the hall in Britain. [Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd]

And O’Hagan reminds us of Seamus Heaney’s chilling poem From the Frontier of Writing:

and everything is pure interrogation

until a rifle motions you to move

with guarded unconcerned acceleration – 

a little emptier, little spent

as always by that quiver in the self,

subjugated, yes, and obedient. 

Do we need these borderlines? Will the ponies be safer? Will the larks fly higher? As Robert Frost, in Mending Wall, said:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall…

…Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 

What I was walling in or walling out, 

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Though he recognises, and challenges, the opposition from his neighbour, but:

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

The received wisdom of ages: the black, the white, the binary choice. What are we doing with these enclosures, these barriers? In due course they will all be reduced to dust and ashes as the world warms, and meteorites gather speed in the vacuum, teeming towards our fragile planet, mindlessly careering through our futures. Why make things worse?

However, despite this life of care I enjoy a beautifully unfettered walk over Hatterall Hill in Crucorney, with a steep descent in to the Vale of Ewyas, with a stop at the wonky Cymyoy church,

which was built on slippage from the cracked old red sandstone of the surrounding hills (cf Matthew chapter 16, verses 18 & 19, And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it…. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven…. I feel reassured?)

and end up in the Queen’s Head, which isn’t really a very Welsh name for a pub, is it? In fact neither the lady of the house, nor any of the clientele switch to Welsh when I enter….

In fact, none of them are Welsh…. A sandwich and a pint, and a few clues in the communally shared giant crossword (The Ghost of Thomas... five letters beginning in K?), and then it’s back across the borderline to Bristol….

Though, as Ry Cooder, Jim Dickinson and John Hiatt wrote:

When you reach the broken promised land

Every dream slips through your hands

And you'll know it's too late to change your mind

'Cause you pay the price to come so far

Just to wind up where you are

And you're still just across the borderline

Now you're still just across the borderline

And you're still just across the borderline

There is no going back…… There is only hope!


Please sponsor my 100 mile hike in support of research into Dementia through Alzheimer's Society by donating online at http://www.justgiving.com/Richard-GIBBS5

For Bob Dylan's Farm Aid rendition of the song, please see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0iTXU8bSpk


For one throb of the artery,
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate
Mankind inanimate fantasy.

W B Yeats
A Meditation in Time of War

Dublin 1

WHEREVER GREEN IS WORN

This piece was written quite a few years ago - at least ten - following a stay in Dublin at Gino and his Dublin born wife Mary's home in Dalkey. In those distant days the Celtic Tiger was barely a cub - now it is just a skin on a waiting room floor. In those days Bono had just bought the end house of a row on Sorrento point, reputedly for several million euros; now his money is said to be on the continent.... Anyway, although some of the personnel at "Il Baccaro" may have since changed, Gino still commutes between Rome and Dublin and "Il Baccaro" still thrives, even being said by one reviewer to be the only Italian restaurant in Ireland! And Kilmainham Jail, the history of Ireland, and Dublin's fair city are all still there and ever will be. In fact, since the excesses of the Stag Party days, Dublin has settled down into married life, and it is possible to wander the streets without being oppressed by people desperately having a wonderful time, as if marriage opened the gates of hell and it was a duty to exceed all bounds before entering. So, if you'll forgive the odd metachronism......

The Panopticon, Kilmainham Jail

Kilmainham Jail symbolises much of the darker side of Irish history. In harder times than these there was a queue of people committing crimes to gain imprisonment. In recent times, films, such as “In the Name of the Father” have been made on location inside the Victorian East Wing, recreating in two dimensions the claustrophobia of some of the country’s past and simultaneously glamorising it and creating the romance of stardom. In some ways, it makes a stage set of the past, “unless, soul clap its hands and sing,” that recreation helps us build a better world to come. 

To stand in the rock breakers’ yard, hemmed in by high stone walls, on the spot where in early May 1916 fourteen leaders of the Easter Rising - Pearse, MacDonagh, Plunkett, MacBride and fellows - faced the firing squad, and to imagine those bullets smacking into flesh and bone is to take a serious view of Ireland yet, perhaps, such imaginings may be a trifle melancholy in the general scheme of things. For Ireland, or at least Dublin has come a long way since then. Kilmainham Jail represents something deep in the Irish soul and the men who died there in 1916, let alone the hundred thousand or so who passed through there in its 128 years of active service, stood for belief in political freedom and died for the rights of others. Their revolution may have failed at the time, but Ireland has flourished because of their determination and spirit.

Sorrento Point with Dalkey Island behind

There’s no looking back. Dublin has changed. There are few scars left from the bad times, the revolution or the civil war. There are few undeveloped plots, few derelict Georgian houses, and few bars where James Joyce or Myles or Brendan would feel at home. John Mulligan’s of Poolbeg Street (established 1782) prides itself on its authenticity, but the towering modern buildings around it are not conducive to imaginative recreations of a Joycean night out. John Kehoe’s, at 9, South Anne Street (until recently the last of the resident owned pubs in the city centre) allows drinkers to occupy the family lounge upstairs, and the wooden partitions downstairs allow private conversations to remain private despite the throngs of young patrons who have replaced the seriously dark suited men of yesteryear. The craic is good, if you can hear it! Even the National Gallery of Ireland, home of the masterworks of Jack Yeats, has a brand new “Millennium Wing”, which, with its collection of modern and contemporary Irish Art, was opened this year.

 

John Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street, not much changed since its appearance in "Ulysses"

Dublin is now truly cosmopolitan, and the tiny area known as Temple Bar has become an international byword for a good time. In terms of places to be it is in the same league as Amsterdam, Greenwich Village, the Parisian Left Bank, Prague and the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Weekend flights from the UK are full of bright young things heading for the bars and restaurants in the warren of streets just off the south side of the Liffey, across the Ha’penny Bridge and through the Merchant’s Arch. Almost bulldozed into a new bus terminal in the 1980s, Temple Bar was saved from one kind of oblivion and, partly thanks to Charles Haughey and his social conscience, the place suddenly took off in the 1990s, with such institutions as the Irish Film Centre, the Arthouse (the centre for the Artists’ Association of Ireland) and the Temple Bar Music Centre, being created in state of the art reconstructions. In Meeting House Square a whole-food market attracts attention in the daytime and open-air film screenings, concerts or theatre productions draw the crowds at night. Although the area has something of a reputation for excess, especially in connection with stag and hen parties from the UK, there is a convivial good humour to the evening jostle. Street performers entertain the passers-by while innumerable bars attempt to satisfy their thirsts.



The Ha'penny Bridge over the Liffey

And tucked into a corner of Meeting House Square, in what was until five years ago a disused and dingy eighteenth century cellar, there is “Il Baccaro”, one of the most natural Italian Restaurants you will find outside of Italy. The name derives from Venetian wine shops, where it is customary to stand with a group of friends eating appetising snacks while drinking local wine, and its inspiration also comes from the Roman Osterie, traditionally simple in their fare. The mastermind behind this venture is Gino Bottigliero, an Italian originally from Naples, whose long greying hair, drooping moustaches and dark flashing eyes give him a piratical air. Gino met and married Mary Pyne, a Dublin girl from the top of O’Connell Street, and, while living in Rome, had the bright idea of opening an Irish pub in the Italian capital. That was in 1976, since when Irish theme bars have become almost de rigeur in every neck of the woods in Italy, and The Fiddler’s Elbow in via dell’Olmata is just one of Gino’s series of very successful bars in Rome and Florence, and now Dublin.



Gino, Lorenzo and Sofia

Gino’s success comes partly from a no-nonsense approach to business, where he recognises the need for efficiency and quality, but also derives from a fertile imagination and the ability to create a friendly ambience. His partner, Dubliner Tiernan Maguire, spent several years working with Gino in Rome, and he shares that warmth of personality that is engendered by a blend of cultures. “Il Baccaro” looks just as you would expect an Italian place to look, with posters of Sophia Loren rubbing shoulders with photographs of Gino’s own grandparents on the walls. It is ever so slightly kitsch, and also retro as symbolised by the poster for “La Dolce Vita” but somehow that does not seem out of place in Temple Bar, and it is evidently utterly acceptable to the diners who pack it out every night. The low brick arches and wooden furniture make a cosy environment and the Italian staff, including Claudia and Manuela alternating behind the bar and Marina waiting, are expert in welcoming and dealing patiently with customers.

Lorenzo, the chef, from Rovigo, is a highly qualified and creative cook. Among his specialities is “rotolo di crepe con ricotta alle erbe e vegetali,” which is a combination of cream cheese and vegetables cooked in a thin pasta roll. He also delivers an unusual risotto made with pears and Gorgonzola, and a tasty “caponata di melanzane,” a Sicilian aubergine stew. Gino contributes to the ideas, as well, and he found a butcher in Dun Laoghaire capable of recreating traditional Italian “porchetta romana”, which is pork stuffed with herbs and spices and cooked slowly in a huge oven. There is also an interesting pasta dish called “penne all’arrabbiaciana”, which is an imaginative combination of the fiery “arrabbiata” sauce with chilli pepper and the bacon flavoured “amatriciana” sauce from the town of Amatrice in the Abruzzi Mountains. If you can manage a dessert, the home-made “tiramisu” is excellent and then, in true Italian style, an evening can be rounded off with Vin Santo and cantuccini or amaretti, traditional biscuits that are just right with sweet wine.

Temple Bar and Kilmainham Jail may not have too much in common, nor do, superficially at least, the Irish with the Italians, but there are connections in the spider’s web of culture and history that hold them together. The origin of Celtic culture actually lies in the Po Valley of Northern Italy, from whence the Celts moved north and west, through France and Brittany to Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The Roman Catholic Church, once universal, now less so in Europe at least, is a linking strength between Eire and Italy. The excesses of Temple Bar and the austerities of Kilmainham Jail are two sides of the same coin; without one, you won’t have the other. Like sin and repentance, or joy and sorrow, they are the faces of Ireland. In my visit to Kilmainham I was accompanied by Gino, and though neither of us was born or brought up in Ireland, we both have long-standing ties to the country and deep sympathies with it; we were both impressed and moved by the experience. The prison has iconic and metaphorical value. We are just passers-by, but we are also a part of the fabric. The economy may thrive, but not in a vacuum. The history is remembered, but not by chance.

The last prisoner to walk free from Kilmainham Jail, was.....

The last prisoner to walk free from Kilmainham Jail was Eamon de Valera, who vacated his cell in 1924. Later in his life he became Prime Minister and then President of the Republic of Ireland. The Ireland he helped to create is a land of opportunity, and a land that welcomes an Italian Osteria in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar: “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” Like a soup made from leeks and potatoes, food can be universal or particular. Call it “zuppa di porri e patate” and serve it with a little olive oil and a good glass of fresh Pinot Grigio and it will seem ever so Italian. Even in Dublin. It may not be quite what the youth of Europe flock to Temple Bar for, but it will do me fine. As William Butler Yeats also said, as well as the above quotation, “I have prepared my peace with learned Italian things.”

Il Baccaro

Meeting House Square

Dublin

Telephone: 671 4597

http://www.ilbaccarodublin.com/