MAGAN'S WORLD:WHAT DO I DO with the fact that my chicken- and-rice meal on the Aer Lingus flight to Chicago had a best-before date of October 2010, or that ice-cream sellers in Dubrovnik who like to charm tourists by speaking a few words of the tourist's language often find they have more Irish than the Irish themselves, or that Freud suffered from siderodromophobia – a fear of railway travel – sparked by seeing from a train window, as a child, gas jets that looked like souls burning in hell?
To me at least, these are all intriguing snippets but hardly worth devoting an entire column to. Yet in this newly frugal age, when innovative chefs create gnocchi from leftover roast potatoes and gardeners make rich humus from manure, I’d hate to see them go to waste. It ought to be possible to whip up a nourishing column from these meagre trimmings. They are all united, after all, by one thing: fear – a phantom one in most cases.
In later life Freud realised that the burning souls he associated with trains were sparked by a fear of an unknown force moving rapidly through the night, and over time it developed into a full-on obsession with being on time for trains.
He would arrive hours early at the station, to militate against the almost infinite variables that might prevent his boarding the train.
He didn’t have the luxury of up-to-the-minute oracles such as www.seat61.com, which outlines timetables and connections for trains throughout the world. An excess of time was his only protection against the unknown.
Likewise, I think a similar rationale lies behind Aer Lingus’s decision to produce a chicken dinner with a 15-month lifespan. I like to think the company doesn’t actually intend to keep the dishes for that long, but it just somehow reassures it to have a vast temporal safety cushion on hand – possibly for use in the event of a Lost-type scenario, where the aircraft crashes, passengers fall into 15-month comas and are then very glad, upon awakening, to find appetising chicken, rice and vegetable meals ready for them, fresh and tasty in their cellophane packs.
Of course, for all I know my dinner might have had a far longer lifespan than 15 months. It could have been prepared years before and have a life expectancy better measured in half-lives, but it suited me while chewing my way through it to imagine it being lovingly prepared earlier that morning in some catering kitchen near the airport and only at the last minute being subjected to a miraculous process that would make it live 200 times longer than some butterflies.
I wish we could preserve our language in the same way. This isn’t the place to discuss the fears that lie behind our abandonment of it, but suffice to say that the ice-cream sellers of Dubrovnik – who proudly insist on making their ice cream fresh every few days – are sensitive to the cultural richness of others, having suffered the bombing of most of their own cultural assets in 1991.
They go to great pains to learn a smattering of the languages of most tourists, and it always mystifies them that we can’t speak Irish back to them. If you do find yourself in Dubrovnik, it’s worth remembering that a cone costs €2 and that the Irish for two, as Des Bishop has already gone to great lengths to teach us, is dhá, dó or beirt, depending on the circumstances.
So just remember: dhá euro is what the ice-cream seller will ask for. Give him the money and say: “Go raibh maith agat.” Don’t be afraid.
manchan@ireland.com