MICHAEL HARDINGfinds it hard to locate the spirit of Jonathan Swift in Trim, which held a festival in his name this weekend
IT’S HARD to find Swift in Trim. I came by Laracor, where he once planted a garden with apple and cherry trees; but there’s no sign of his rectory or the church where he was appointed vicar, 300 years ago.
Rachel English was talking to a politician on my jeep radio, about the “breeding bitches” issue. The politician spoke fluently enough, but with rhythms of speech that bore almost no connection to the grammatical constructs of the English language. Swift might have taken him for a native Irish speaker.
I got excited when I saw Trim Castle on the horizon, an imposing mark, and I passed a few cottages drenched with albertine roses, which also lifted my anticipation.
But Trim, as an architectural event, is grim. The garish delights of Heritage Kitchens or the despairing predictability of Apache Pizza on the outskirts don’t prepare one fully for the visual assault of brazen shop fronts, accommodating solicitors, auctioneers, politicians and other champions of the Celtic Tiger.
Then there are beauty parlours offering tattoos, piercings, turbo sun beds, and chemical tans; though I suppose Swift might have approved of waxing, as a delightful way to enhance the smiles of Trim’s young ladies.
He would have certainly relished some linguistic delights over the doors on his old streets; Pure Bliss, Bonkers, and The Venus Shop.
On Friday evening there had been a public dinner party in Knightbrook Hotel, with scintillating banter provided by David Norris, Terry Prone, John Waters and Alistair Campbell.
I sat in the foyer on Saturday morning with my sunglasses over my ordinary glasses, a copy of the New Yorker in one hand and a Tesco shopping bag in the other, hoping that some of them were still lying around, snoring behind a sofa, or bleary-eyed and bilious, in the restaurant, barking for breakfast; but no such luck. Dinner parties are no longer the two-day catharsis they used to be, since bottled water was invented as an alternative to good claret.
The lady at reception told me that there was an academic seminar on Swift, upstairs, in the golf club restaurant, if I wished to join.
I suppose the Tesco bag gave me that intellectual look. I admire intellectuals; people who preserve the fabric of a nation’s memory intact, by dedicating their lives to the exotic details of forgotten centuries. I watched the participants file into the lecture room, with that crazed joy in their faces that can come only from an interior life, but too much thinking frightens me, so I fled down town to the car park outside the castle, where an open-air market was in full swing.
I passed three ladies on a corner, in long period dresses, and white bonnets, standing on a small platform reading sweet sonnets, and excerpts from The Lady of Shallot. I imagined Swift heckling them for their coy verses and demanding they read something more explicit – from The Butcher Boy perhaps!
Trim Castle is massive. The town is worth visiting just for a view of this extraordinary barracks from the 13th century. It’s like something the Americans might put up in Baghdad, with smooth high walls shoved like an empire’s rear end into the faces of the peasants who strut and fret their hours in the town below.
As I arrived at the car park, the inevitable bouncy castle was being blown up, and a giant television was poised to broadcast the Argentina match. The stalls were ready for business, displaying boiled sweets, balloons and fudge.
George Hook got up on the back of a lorry with Colm O’Rourke and other sporting legends and teased the audience in his own inimitable way. He said Sky Plus had a competitor; it was called Kerry Plus. “It records all the programmes you don’t want to watch and shows them when you’re out.”
He did his best, but it’s not easy to generate the kind of politically incorrect outrage that might appropriately emulate the acerbic wit of Jonathan Swift.
Perhaps next year the committee will consider Father Jack, on the back of a lorry, in a glass box, frothing at the mouth. Or maybe artists could be invited to make foetal sculptures and hang them in butcher shop windows.
The market could certainly be livened up with a few more food stalls, with menus inspired by Swift’s imagination; boiled child soup with baby carrots, or roast leg of infant with new potatoes.
But George Hook got it right. As he presented medals to delighted schoolboys in football jerseys, they flocked around him on the back of the lorry, and he embraced the moment with spontaneous kindness, and at last I saw before me the likeness of Jonathan Swift; not the predictable grumpy old satirist, but a kind and benevolent public man.
