An Irish Chip On My Shoulder (From The Argus)

An Irish Chip On My Shoulder

6:05pm Friday 15th January 2010 in Blogs By Quentin Delahunty – Liberal. Creative. Brightonian

Food For Thought. And Food.

Many of you, my dearest fans, have contacted me in relation to my Christmas blog, or lack thereof. Well, you see, to cet écrivant, the idea of spewing out seasonal clichés like some kind of cliché-spewing cliché-spewer is akin to artistic suicide. Q Delahunty is an individual, not a slave to some homogenised corporate “Christmas” brand.

However, we at chez Delahunty are not without heart, and therefore Lex and Nimsie did receive presents - Lex got a goat, well we bought one for a Honduran family in his honour while Nimsie’s gift was a buffalo for a village in Laos. Both wonderful presents which the kids really appreciated. And there was more – we even had a pseudo-traditional roast turkey, made of Quorn, but even this “qurkey” couldn’t convince me that the whole holiday was little more than a big jolly commercial sales pitch.

Anyway, just as the whole season was on its last legs, pummelled by the icy winds of maxxed-out credit cards and the slushy drifts of flabby guts, I got a call from across the Irish Sea. My good friends Nobbo (an uber talented avant-artist and son of a prominent high-court judge, real name Nigel O’Looney) and Izzy McNamee-Smurfitt (former model & actress) were in a spot of bother. Their planned naming ceremony (they are both fervent Humanists) for their new boy Titus, was now sans male guide parent after Pascal Le Guen banjaxed his knee in a snowboarding accident in Chamonix. While his knee ligaments had been ruptured, my nose was somewhat out of joint after failing to receive an invite to the bash in the first place. However, the chance to return home to the land of my forefathers and their fathers before them proved too good to turn down, so I humbly accepted their request to be Titus’ guide parent, a role I would not take likely.

With a fair amount of Irish blood coursing through my veins, most notably courtesy of my Grandfather Edward Delahunty III, the chance to return to the old country was a welcome distraction from the post-Winterval gloom of January. The Celtic string to my bow has no doubt played a major part in my undoubted creative skills. Indeed, if I do say so myself, and I do, I see myself as keeping alive the great tradition of Irish scribbling talent, from Swift to Joyce, and Behan to, yes, Delahunty (me). Indeed, if the Holy Grail was the bloodline of Irish writing genius, then I would be it’s latest possessor, chased all over the place by a dull character from a Dan Brown novel.

Anyway, after enduring a god-awful mucho-delayed journey from Gatwick, that first pint of home-poured Arthur G (Guinness) back in the land of saints and scholars quickly re-hydrated my Gaelic soul and plugged me back into the Celtic power-grid. As I strolled around the streets of Dublin’s fair city, I realised how much it reminded me of Brighton – the sea, that warm laidback vibe and the rampant drug abuse.

The naming ceremony itself was a thing of liberal, joyous beauty. With a gay American presiding over the ceremony, and with a cross section of the happy couple’s multi-ethnic friends and family present, including at least one person with a handicap (partially deaf, I think), it was a celebration of the wondrous power of people in a world without a God, without a hell below us and above us only sky (and airplanes and satellites etc, obviously).

The post-ceremony vegan meal, a lentil soup-retro potato stew-melange of fresh kumquat, star fruit and mangosteen fine-dining triptych was as warming and enriching for the body as the ceremony had been for the soul. Indeed, while the famed Celtic Tiger has long since left the Emerald Isle, chased off by gung-ho bankers and tempted by fresh meat overseas, the residue of the opulent nineties and early noughties still pervades auld Dublin city, with enough fine eateries to sate any highly-honed taste-buds.

However, as I sat there in the swanky uber-cool hotel restaurant (apparently one of the guys behind Zig & Zag and the blonde one from B*witched had dined there the previous evening), with belly-filled and hunger-sated, I was suddenly overcome with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, which culminated in a marathon vomiting-sesh in the Philippe Starck-inspired toilets. “Surely that was the 10 pints of organic Irish ale along with half a bottle of Fleurie and three Irish coffees”, you say. Well no, actually, my regular Handi Shandi yoga sessions have toughened up my digestive tract to the point where it can handle just about anything.

Instead, I am convinced that the vomiting came from somewhere deeper, somewhere more primal. There is no doubt in my mind that the consumption of the aforementioned potato-based main course had triggered in me a genetic memory from the great famine. A vile chapter in Irish history, the famine saw my people, without even high-street chain restaurants to fall back on, no matter Michelin star establishments, forced to starve to death due to a double-blow of potato blight and the exportation of any other decent crops they had. Now there I was, my body and my soul raging at their appalling fate.

After my puking had ceased, I bowed my head for a moment, in deep contemplation for all those famine victims, for at least three and a half minutes. Maybe longer. This return to my true home was having a deeper effect on me than I imagined it would. I then vowed to eschew any crisps for the rest of my visit in remembrance of the great hurt my Celtic brothers and sisters had suffered.

The following day, I journeyed home on another delayed Ryanair flight (the only flight I could get, unfortunately). Like a modern day emigrant making his way to America on a coffin ship 200 years ago, there I was, leaving dear Eireann amidst a crowd of lower-class travellers, not sure when I’d be returning (actually probably in the summer for a friend’s wedding).

Now as I sit here back in my trés desirable Hanover pad, at my trés desirable desk, with my trés desirable kids playing in the next room (trés desirable in an innocent way, by the way), and write these wonderful words, I feel a revitalised kinship with my fellow Celts.

And as for you, young Titus, as your new guide father, I promise to guide you through this crazy and oft’ challenging world as best I can. And I hope my gift to you (a cow for a family in Lesotho – there was a three-for-two deal), will make you think about the world around you as much as I do. Which is a lot.