Cashman's Diary - April 1982

Monday 15th
Another Davitt book is brought. The hagiographers of this Lancastrian monster are inexhaustible.

Contemplating that period I someetimes repine over the many years I spent guiding and steadying Bismarck's hand. For, on my return to this counntry, I found that irreversible mischief had been wrought by Davitt and others of his kidney.

Great hordes of bumpkins had been removed from that benign tutelage which had preserved them in a station congruous to their ignorance - or, perrhaps, in ignorance congruous to their station. Either way, their hands were now turned to the construction of an edifice designed to epitomise their material and intellectual freedom and maturation. It was topped out in Crosshaven in the 1950s and called 'The Majorca'.

Inside 'The Majorca' anthropocenntrically actuated adjurations such as "Gettum offa yah" and anatomically axiomatic asseverations such as "beetween urn she hov it" found full, frank, free and frequent expression. And rewards of a synergic nether connvulsive nature were unstintingly beestowed upon their most diligent and stentorian articulators.

And the spawn in their season went to Dublin. And lucidity became as, scarce as food, and food as scarce as truth.

Ah! if only during my Prussian abbsence C. C. O'Brien had been here to keep his firm foot on the brake of hisstory.

Thursday 18th.

I order Casey of Galway to cease impersonating Desmond of the Kingstown Party. My order is based upon the requirements of artistic inntegrity which I explain to Casey as folllows:

(a) His logorrhoea, whilst adequate in such properties as prosaicism and irrelevance, is neither synntactically solecistic nor intellecctually offensive;

(b) He is not a troglodyte, nor yet a hair on the brush of a mongrel fox;

(c) He does not consort with spivs who gammon to "lead the workkers of this country".

(d) He is not a prick.

Monday 22nd.

Dinny Byrnt: and Pat Barry appear with a report that Bracken has been overrun by some dagos. I expect they were on their way to get that groom or farrier person out of his Sallvadorean mess and strayed a little; map-reading will soon, I fear, be an extinct skill. I shall have to speak firmmly to them, and I earnestly hope that

Miss Fiona Victory will not have been lolling about half-dressed - there is nothing more conducive to bolshieness in the heathen.

Lest there should be some nastiness afoot I shall have Randolph consult with Mr. Tyrie and his stout lads. How reassuring their devotion to our dear Victoria is! I shall also alert the suppporters of Manchester United, Chelsea and Everton, which should be quite sufficient to let the chilli bashers know who's who.

Any scrap will have to be staged before 1979 as dear Dickie Battenberg and Airey Neave simply cannot be left out: and a doughty duo they will make when we put them together.

In any case, the macho muddlers have in recent years rather concentratted on an anti-civilian strategy - as, in fact, we have. How absolutely ripping if some kind of tourney along these admira bly less hazardous lines could be devised! But there are only eighteen hundred of these civilian creatures in the place - hardly enough to go round and see honour satisfied.

Thursday 25th.

I am nauseated by malodorous vappour .about unemployment from the members of Dail Eireann. I commmandeer the place in order to enlighhten these possessors of status with neither breeding nor achievement to account for it. But I flinch in the abbsence of Flor Crowley's civilising mansuetude and gracious support.

This age has no "employment" or "unemployment" problem: it has a futility problem. The "employed" waste their time doing things that machines do much better; the "unnemployed" waste theirs campaignning to have perfectly efficient machines put out of work. One hundred and three years after the inception at Knock of transcelestial levitation Wilde's man disturbing dirt at a slushy crossing should have had enough of it.

Consider that you may find any day many hundreds of overpaid illlshaven little males in rubber gloves and Volkswagens prowling the countryside doing "work" that other males - bulls - would do freely and frabjously. Consider lexicographers and grammmarians. Consider Independent Newsspapers - briefly.

I shall shortly inaugurate a regime which will allow superliterate citizens the time to deduce the intent of Magill ~ authors from the product of its typesetters/proof-readers. Lesser citizens, if they exist, will continue to buy the Indefensible - perhaps the hedge-schools were, indeed, a failure. But it seems to me altogether more likely that all two million copies are daily snapped up for himself by Sadly Smitten. .

Saturday 27th.

Ghandi, Sheehy-Skeffington, Denis Conroy and myself are elected patrons of the GAA for all eternity.

We meet at Elysium, and Denis and I take a stroll through the Fields. Achilles, Cuchulainn, Father Murphy, Tom Barry, St. Joan of Arc and Chrissty Ring rush to greet us. We firmly snub them.

Further on we find Sidney Webb and Bertrand Russell and eagerly parrticipate in their examination of the question whether, were he to lose his copulatory faculty; Mr. Wells might not cease to be a cad. Skeff and the Mahatma join us. The question is not susceptible of a ready resolution. A sprite, remarkably resemblant of Claud Cockburn, whispers that it has been in contention since 1946. I fear that Charlie Waish of Rome alone is commpetent to decide.

Paine and Connolly, Behan and Ho Chi Minh, Swift and Carson saunter by. They are civil enough, but at no great pains to hide their relief that they are not required to tarry with our group.

We yearn for the day when Tom Woulfe, J. A. Murphy and Sean Killfeather will be there to put them in their place.

Tuesday 30th.

My strolling players return from Connacht.

They are perplexed by the shock, horror and outrage caused in those parts by their mammary and procreaative appendages. I cannot sympathise.

They should, directly upon entry to that province, have noticed the natives' total want of such paraphernalia. Mr. Healy of Mayo frequently records in print his wonder at sight of these enngines attached to members of the other provinces and Brussels. Besides, there is the matter of the place's dissappearing population.

I take the Reverend Murray's point about the need for something a little more traditional on St. Patrick's Day. Next year I shall transport the popuulace of Sligo to March 17th 432 A.D. I am not entirely convinced of my ability to bring them back, but I don't think Father Murray will feel out of place if I fail.

Should I hear of even one death from the shock of my company's alien physiology I shall instantly proclaim the people of Connacht an endangered species, and decree that any and all visitors to the West of the Shannon are to have s. x .. 1 0 ... ns impounded at the point of crossing for the duration of their visits. KEVIN CASHMAN