Fragments of an Analytic Pub Crawl

By Hugh Vaughan

Fragments of a Pub Crawl traces the journey of my life, its memories, the events and the places, where I have been and lived, Ireland, Australia and Spain but also what I have read that powered my imagination. The book title is not to be confused with the traditional drinking pub crawl, it is a way of describing the psychogeographical nature of this book. Patrick ffrench, the writer, described psychogeography as “an analytic pub crawl”, a lived experience – one drifts from one place to the next; observing, noting, reacting. We may drift through a city, or a life and absorb. This is the “dérive”. Charles Baudelaire named this person, the flâneur. Just as the past left traces in today’s built environment, so have we, and so have I. This book traces those memories, it’s part memoir, part history, and part essay, The subjects reflect a variety of interests: growing up in Northern Ireland, the Troubles, my life in IT education, Irish humour, life-skills, reading, writing, music, emigration, family, urban liveability, a pandemic journal and much much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugh Vaughan
• Release date: Aug 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005317249

Hugh Vaughan

Hugh Vaughan was born in Ireland and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He lectured and worked in Information Technology in Northern Ireland, Wellington, New Zealand and Sydney & Melbourne, Australia

Book preview

Foreword

Drilling down into my interests and everything else in between, going on a literary dérive, a wander, a drift, doing the research for this book was the most enjoyable part. So this is the result of writing, reading, researching and thinking for four or five hours a day, mostly in the afternoon, overlooking the Mediterranean, specifically the Playa del Postiguet in Alicante. I was in no hurry and neither was the pandemic. It raged throughout the world as I wrote it. I had collected loads of articles over the years and stored them on disc. They were from various sources: academic papers, book reviews, essays, newspapers, and more contemporary sources, like The Conversation and the Irish Times. Fragments of an Analytic Pub Crawl, merges reportage, history, memoir and essay. I have lived during historical events, the pandemic, the Northern Irish Troubles, the IT revolution, and Brexit, so I explore the traces, the intersection of my life and these events. About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgement, Josh Billings, American humorist.

I would have liked Fragments of an Analytic Pub Crawl to be funny in the mould of; the anarchic humour of Spike Milligan, the absurd, black humour of Kurt Vonnegut, and something of Tom Sharp’s satirical character, Wilt, a college lecturer who sets off a train of events in everything he does and always ends up in a pile of do-do. In Ben Elton’s Identity Crisis, a similar but more contemporary character, a detective can’t say a word without landing in a midden of political in-correctness. After writing my first two books, A Bump on the Road, a creative memoir of some childhood experiences, mostly set in Strabane, in Northern Ireland, and Cillefoyle Park, a fictional account of the Contact, a true story of a Derry mediator between the IRA and the UK government, I knew I had to write a third book but what? So many ideas rattling around my head. The memoir kept popping into my head but I didn’t want to write another creative memoir, like the first two. And the pandemic came along so with lockdown and restrictions I had the time. The book kinda wrote itself.

Childhood experience of Northern Ireland is so potent for me, it cannot be left out, and that experience permeates throughout. The picture on the book cover represents my journey from the Irish roads, escaping the Northern Irish Troubles in Donegal, and then as an adult, emigrating Down Under. The concept of psychogeography, looking at traces of the past in an urban landscape is a terrific metaphor for a life’s journey, and I have used it as a hook, the narrative arc. The walking and reading have been done. The title, Fragments of an Analytic Pub Crawl reflects this journey of a life lived through the prism of psychogeographic walks, my dérives, literally and metaphorically. One writer describes such an activity as an analytic pub crawl.

If you are going to write, you had better come from somewhere, I read somewhere. I did come from somewhere, Ireland, birthplace of myths and literary giants but also a colonised country that had many violent and distressing periods in its history. Toxic contemporary issues: the pandemic, Brexit, Irish politics are also part of my focus. Spain is where I wrote the book but I have lived in Ireland, the UK, New Zealand and Australia, and these countries come under the microscope too. The topics include reading interests of mine, like positive psychology and life skills, urban design and liveability. Weaving throughout all of this discourse, like an ambulatory time traveller, is the author, viewing life, reflecting, recording, often from afar, like a flâneur, drifting, but absorbing and emotionally reacting. Seamus Heaney in his essay, the Emigrant and Inner Exile, suggests the writer involves the unpredictable path of intuition rather than the direct and earnest path of logic, I guess that is what I have followed.

There are many who have helped me at different times with this book but most thanks needs to go to Rosemary, my wife, who stayed the course, and Ron West, who put in a sterling effort as friend, mentor and editor, often confused by my Northern Irish ways. Elma, my sister, who read the first draft and gave helpful nuggets on our childhood.

Table of Contents

Introduction……………….……………………..…....8

The richest well to draw from is childhood……….…23

In 1967 I was sent to the Brow.………………..….76

Time to leave my security blanket……………….....152

On Writing……………………………………….....210

Liveability…………………………………………..231

Life is an obstacle course…………………………..268

The UK has left the EU………………………….....304

A Journal of the Pandemic………………………....315

Sure, it’s only a bit of craic………………………...371

Reflections of an Analytic Pub Craw……………....382

The measure of a writer isn’t success, but how hard he tried to do what he knew he couldn’t do, William Faulkner, American writer.

In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe, Samuel Beckett, Irish writer.

Fallor ergo sum, St Augustine, 5th Century

Introduction

Are the memories, figments of my imagination? What is truth? What are real memories in a memoir? Who knows what tricks the memory plays? Most first novels are disguised autobiographies, to paraphrase Clive James, writer and poet. My first two certainly were and well, so is this one, to a degree. Childhood is such a powerful pull, it deserves its place here. This book is more factual, more historical and also contemporary than the creative memoirs of previous ones. It grew from fragments of writings, readings and memories and the pandemic presented itself. As Clive James, the poet and TV presenter, said, do not underestimate the power of forgetting. Some things one will want to forget. So these memoirs are an attempt at un-forgetting, and parts of it are unashamedly autobiographical and historical. I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be, and by making it truer is what makes all good books alike, suggests Ernest Hemingway. Robert Frost reminds us, most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favour, so apt for life in any age.

Michael McLaverty, an Irish writer, advises to go for the personal and the local. I understand that. However, the good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has an eye on the thread of the universe which runs through himself and all things, advised Ralph Waldo Emerson. That thread of the universe runs through everything written here. Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer, reflects on the weight of literature, an inward gaze at words, believing inspiration comes when most lonely, hopeless. I am not Orhan with his fear of being too happy, and his worry of not taking literature serious enough, or his authenticity and exploring the wounds deep inside. But he and I agree, we understand that this is the same for all humanity. People start with childish hopeful certainty, but often end up with insecurity and hopelessness. Most are stubborn and endure.

Start with something local, McLaverty advises, something that made one stop and ponder or stuck in one’s imagination, like the shoe maker in the town of Strabane, Northern Ireland, where I was born. As the poet, Patrick Kavanagh says the challenge is to try to make greatness wherever one finds oneself, even in a wee town. Many people, in many countries, praise their potato-patch as the ultimate. How do they know? You have got to do the walking. Again, Kavanagh and others have said we should wallow in the habitual, the banal, and enjoy it. I will attempt to forge my experiences of the local, in the cities and places I have been but also in my imaginings that reading can conjure. The power of the imagination is not to be underestimated; James Joyce, William Blake, JG Ballard, Seamus Heaney and even Einstein speak of its importance. With creative imagination, we have a magical world in the local and beyond the local.

An analytic pub crawl.

An analytic pub crawl, is how Patrick ffrench, professor at King’s College, London, described psychogeography. It is a lived experience - one drifts from one place to the next; observing, noting, reacting. We may drift aimlessly through a city, or drift through life and absorb, sometimes. Therefore the book title is not to be confused with the traditional drinking pub crawl, it is taken from the concept of psychogeography. This is the dérive or drift. It is a feature of psychogeography, where the participant wanders through cities, observing and reacting to their attractions and encounters. The urban topography is one of fragmentation and dispersal, a separation of objects and their functionality. Charles Baudelaire named this person, the flâneur, a figure conceived in 19th century France and popularised in academia by Walter Benjamin in the 20th century. A romantic stroller, the flâneur wandered about the streets, with no clear purpose other than to wander in a fragment of the urban landscape. The flâneur was generally a dandy, i.e. someone who prided himself on dressing in the highest fashion, but he kept a distance from the scenes around him. The latter part I can identify with, certainly not the first. I am happiest in shorts and tee-shirt. In this busy world, perhaps the flâneur is due for a revival. Just as the past left traces in today’s built environment, so have I, we all have. This book traces the journeys through my life, but it’s only a snapshot. These are my observations, my reactions, my analysis, on life’s pub crawl. The title is a way of describing the psychogeographical nature of my journey, my interests, books and articles I have read, its memories, events and places.

Actual pubs have been a feature in my life where the music and conviviality promoted by a dedicated publican is one of life’s joy. Most recently, my favourites have been The Drunken Poet in Melbourne, voted one of the best Irish pubs outside of Ireland, run by the delicious, Siobhan, and the Brothers pub in Fitzroy, run by brothers McKernan, balladeers extraordinaire, with the occasional heartfelt singer, Deccy, from Drumshanbo, and then the Robins pub in Alicante, run by the ever welcoming Persian, Reza. Good music, good fellowship, good craic and good Guinness feature in all these pubs.

Traces of the past have fascinated me.

Traces of the past have fascinated me. Old signs or advertisements, ghost signs as they are known. Old shops in darkened lane ways. A shadow of the past, into the past. One of the most exciting was a first-century Roman column outside our apartment, that was a converted medieval grain store, in the town of Castelnaudary, near Toulouse, France. I touched it every day. Cities and towns have multiple layers of history, often easy to spot but even if they are not, if we look, we can sense the past, not just on the physical buildings. Lives have multiple layers too, just as cities, and some of the layers of my life and interests are discussed. So what is psychogeography? Psycho is a prefix, comes from Greek, where it has the meaning of soul or mind. Soul, for me, is an important element here. This meaning is found in such words as: parapsychology, psychedelic, psychiatry, psychic, psychological, and psychology. The word geography can be broken into the two basic elements of geo and graphy. Geo comes from the Greek word for earth. The graphy part comes from the Greek word graphy in which is literally to write about something. So I am writing about the soul of a street or ghost sign or building or a reading or anything really.

Where psychology and geography intersect is a good starting point for a brief definition of psychogeography, where the psychological experiences of the city and the soul of a place illuminate aspects of that environment. Psychogeography is therefore useful in understanding the connections between the histories, the myths and the contemporary landscapes. Or it could be about a part of the journey, reflecting on people and their present or past experiences. How do different places or pieces of writing make us feel and behave? It is usually focused on the past, but it could be contemporary observations, and one’s emotional response to it, how one is changed by it.

Psychogeography can integrate the now, the place, the memory and the history. We question the here and now, and check our response to it. I visit graveyards on my travels, when I can, the local graveyard is a good source of gauging the fabric of a community around it. Reading the headstones gives a sense of community history, allegiances and shared tragedy. There’s something called graveyard meditation, in which people afraid of death meditate in graveyards. The psychogeographical allure of graves, the famous, of course, the Père Lachaise in Paris for Balzac, Chopin, Collette, Moliere, Piaf, Bizet, Oscar Wilde, Modigliani and too many others to name. Our visit to a Prague cemetery one time coincided with an Australian school visit, Wesley College with their choir and band, participating in a commemoration for buried Australian servicemen during the Second World War. It was a moving but sweet experience, chatting to the kids and teachers. The Waverley graveyard in Sydney, near to where I once lived told me of the early immigrants, how young some of them died, and with gravestones inscriptions indicating where many came from, the UK and Ireland, their birth towns, proudly featured on many. Of interest, is a substantial memorial to the 1798 Irish Rebellion made of white Carrara marble, with sculptures, plaques, inscriptions, medallions and mosaic, topped with a 30-foot carved Celtic cross. The memorial contains the interred remains of the leader of the revolutionary movement, Michael Dwyer who died in 1825 and his wife Mary who died later.

We lived near the picturesque walk, along the coast from the Waverley graveyard to Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach. The beauty of the place masks a brutal chapter of the area, murders of gay men. A history unnoticed by tourists, and forgotten by locals. It is more famous today for the Sculptures by the Sea exhibition along the pathway. This transition of a space from the past to the present is very much part of psychogeography’s preoccupation.

There is a truth in William Faulkner’s maxim: the past is not dead. It isn’t even past. This is the idea of a palimpsest - an object or piece of writing with new material superimposed over earlier writings - is part of the journey, a physical place can be overwritten too. This discourse is my palimpsest, my attempt of overwriting what has gone before. Nothing is new. As Yeats says we just enumerate old themes.

Psychogeography treats the city as an exploded museum or gallery. Often it is just a dilapidated building, or a shadow of a century-old advertisement on a wall, the discarded elements of a past gone age. An exploration of what went before, an expedition through my landscape, the exploded museum of my life, a gallery of word pictures. My psychogeographical landscape: experiences, books, history, cities, ideas, and travel. So, something caught my eye. It could be a banal event, wallow in it, says poet Patrick Kavanagh. Someone pumping air into a tyre, or the owner of the cafe climbing onto his motorbike, or a shoemaker tapping away inside a tiny shop. Or it could be two bronze cannons lying in tanks of water from the Spanish armada, or a photograph of the surrender of German U-boats at the end of the Second World War. It could be a building or piece of art or a few sentences that made me linger and ponder. Sometimes this event or sight evokes an emotional or physical or mental response. The smell of sawdust and leather emanating from Baxter’s saddlery, in Strabane, going home after primary school. Because of this childhood emotional response, it is still almost tangible today.

Geography is also about the way a space is remembered, recorded, mapped and navigated. In Melbourne, many of the city’s service lanes have never been named. And new names are embraced. Thus, Blender Lane has now been officially designated by the City of Melbourne, complete with a street sign. This is years after Adrian Doyle gave it that name because it was the lane next to Blender Studios. ACDC lane, named after the band. In Bendigo, Dimples Lane is officially named after the street artist, Mr Dimples, who works there.

Many streets in Melbourne were named after the colonists, indeed Melbourne itself was taken from the Prime Minister of the UK, Spencer Street, after his chancellor, typical of colonialists. Derry-born Seamus Deane, academic and writer, calls a process of radical dispossession. …. the naming or renaming of a place, the naming of renaming of a race, a region, a person, is, like all acts of primordial nomination, an act of possession, referring to colonisation. There are also current moves to replace colonial place names and remove statues of colonialists. A statue in Bristol, in the UK of a slave trader, Edward Colston was thrown into a harbour by anti-racism protesters. It was retrieved by the council and taken to a secure location to be hosed down before becoming a museum exhibit.

We navigate the city by different means: routine, parks, cycle lanes, or memories. Inner city suburbs could be navigated by landmarks, the corner shop, the pub, the lane, the railway station or tram stop. Google maps sees the city as a network of roads, train, and tram lines. Others, landlords, bureaucrats, and lawyers, see it as a ‘laws-cape’ of regulations and title deeds. Dogs navigate by smell and sight, possums by the trees, telephone lines and eves of buildings, and the pigeons, crows, magpies and seagulls see it all from above.

Geographer and explorer Dan Raven-Ellison created Guerrilla Geography to challenge children and adults to experience every aspect of the world around them in a more meaningful way, challenge preconceptions about places; to engage in social and environmental justice; and form deeper, more active community connections.

Guerrilla geography is a learning strategy that uses play, exploration, and engaging the senses to facilitate meaningful connections to the built and natural environments. It can be used as a pedagogy for imaginative education that encourages learners to use their own creativity for exploration, and imagination in a mission-based, place-based series of activities that challenges students to interact with the cultural and environmental landscapes around them, including the local community. Guerrilla geography maps paths, giving names to them, making them places. It is creative, as well as investigative. Officially, a place might be called something that is a matter of politics and language rather than how people relate to it.

Slow Ways was developed by Dan Raven-Ellison during a pandemic lockdown in the UK. The idea is to get people walking between locations they might otherwise drive to or take public transport to - via existing off-road paths and bridleways - and to promote slower types of travel. Walking is important for so many reasons. There’s a climate, ecological, health and financial emergency, and walking can help reduce personal emissions, save money and bring joy. Life has slowed down in lockdown. Now people are reconnecting with their surroundings and discovering new things about their country. I hope Slow Ways will help them to continue to do this, he explains.

Slow travel, slow ways, slow food is about having a slow mindset, an approach to travel or food or simply a walk around the neighbourhood. It emphasises connection: to local people, cultures, food and music. It relies on the idea that a trip is meant to educate and have an emotional impact, similar to psychogeography, to be in the present moment. Our activities should be sustainable for local communities and the environment. The slow food and slow travel movement tries to use local services, stimulating local economies by using traditional, family-owned restaurants, touting the benefits of using regionally-sourced ingredients rather than eating in chain-based restaurants. A challenge for coeliac-me to purchase local food at a reasonable price.‍

A slow mindset urges travellers to embrace what the local community has to offer, instead of making a bucket-list or the tourist spots, focus on things that locals do every day, things that usually excite them and give them joy. This is part of the enjoyment of me being a house sitter. It is not to deny the tourist their photo opportunity, as time and money is scarce but the impact that these connections may have, will last a lot longer than the photos taken while racing from tourist attraction to tourist attraction. Spending almost three years in Alicante is perhaps taking the slow travel to extremes! Sheltering in the pandemic is the reason to stay in this pleasant sunny spot. We haven’t had a real winter since Melbourne 2017! Although we did have a couple of weeks in Manchester during the month of March, and more recently a few weeks in London and Cork.

French theorist Guy Debord named the term psychogeography. It is based on the French Situationist International movement, dating from 1955. The Situationists saw their project both as a critique of modern capitalism and its alienating social processes, and as a set of solutions that the dead language of classical French Marxism was unable to provide. Despite their revolutionary beginning, the Situationists saw the city as a future battleground for the conflict over the meaning of modernity. It is this battle for urban space, in a literal and metaphorical sense, which in many ways defines the Situationist adventure. That space, the city is discussed later, with a view to its liveability. They were inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur - an urban wanderer - navigating the urban environment or local life in general, and what life-skills are needed to navigate life?

An insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveller is how Will Self, the writer, describes the practitioner of psychogeography. It has evolved from these positions with notable contemporaries, like Ian Sinclair. The practitioner is simply not a walker, but known as a dérive nor is it, just the act of walking, an exercise of the physical movement of muscle and sinew, but about culture, and lived lives in lived buildings. Create a building and they create us, said Churchill. It is more than the buildings, it’s the homes, the community, the society, the city, the people or a discovery, the soul of a place or it could be a literary extract, or simply an aphorism. The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours, Alan Bennett in The History Boys.

It’s an exploration of life, local life, yes, it's pottering about on a dérive, walking the streets and reading an old advertisement on a wall, where the physical and mental exercise is a bonus but add a drop of interest, a park, or a piece of graffiti. Is it a form of art, of modern youthful expressionism? Melbourne’s Hosier Lane, a graffiti haven, has become a tourist attraction. My drifts, looking at a plant in a garden, a tree in a park, a bird in a tree, a classical porch on a Melbourne 1930’s cottage, or a weathered tea advertisement from the 1950s on a converted corner shop, anything that causes one to linger longer. That drift may include a sentence or a word, and cause one to linger or ponder its meaning. Sights seen wandering the streets of Northern Melbourne’s inner suburbs or in Alicante on the Mediterranean. Some of these drifts take place in Melbourne’s suburbs, reminds me of the Australian Ugliness, a book written in 1960 by Robin Boyd, an Australian architect and social commentator, it was a critique on Australian architecture. My fragmented explorations that flow like a film, a reflection or a bird’s-eye view of one’s existence.

One of my favourite TV series, Life on Mars, where a detective returns to the 1970’s Manchester to do some detecting is an example of hauntology, telling a story that nearly always invokes ghosts, bringing back something from the past. At its most basic level, hauntology ties in with the popularity of faux-vintage photography, abandoned spaces, ghost signs and There is a notion of posterity here, a way to live on, simply part of the whole western literary tradition.

Write the story of a contemporary.

Write the story of a contemporary, cured of his heartbreaks solely by long contemplation of a landscape, wrote Camus in his Notebooks. Or having a long contemplation, or a moment’s meditation, while sitting on Virgen del Socorro, Alicante, overlooking the Mediterranean. Or when I walk through Alicante, I notice the lack of green spaces, compared to Melbourne or Granada.

Vague but observant wanderings, a drift, probably started in my childhood town of Strabane but more so in Derry after the secondary school day ended at the Christian Brothers, while waiting for my father to drive my brother and I home. I had time to wander its streets. Today, because of the pandemic, my planned wandering through the cities and places of Europe have been, hopefully, just postponed. Only by walking the cities themselves, will they tell me what I am looking for. The walking has to be done. Virginia Woolf, in her essay Street Haunting: A London Adventure wrote that she needed the pretext of buying a pencil to justify her urban explorations, a pretext to fire her imagination. To step out of the usual habit, the normal, and take a more random course. We may open the door or window to surprises, which might be pleasant or unpleasant. The point is to be attentive to them. To be mindful in the current parlance. In the Zen tradition, it’s only when you give yourself over to the unknowing, the unthinking, that something interesting might happen.

Utter shite.

Utter shite, declared a man beside me. I was viewing the display of Frank Mc Court’s Angela’s Ashes in a Galway city bookshop window. It was a publishing success about an Irish American growing up in Limerick. Some Limerick locals had been in disagreement on how McCourt dramatised the hardships of his childhood in Limerick. Whether this was the Irish in denial of their history or McCourt exaggerating, or a bit of both but this Irish misery memoir annoyed the man outside the bookshop. My books are not like that. Yes, they are a memoir of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Northern Ireland. There are endless books claiming that their lives have been scarred by childhood abuse and neglect, normally at the hands of their parents or church or some institution. Now there’s a new, misery mum-oir, a book by a successful middle class mother claiming that her life has been ruined by her abusive and unappreciative child!

McCourt wrote a third book that concentrated on his time as a teacher in the New York City public school system. Teacherman (2005), some of which was written while he was writer-in-residence at the Savoy Hotel, London, where I spent a summer as a porter in 1976. During that time I met many Irish expats who dreamed of returning to Ireland but never did. It’s the emigrant’s curse. At a Melbourne Writers Festival, which I attended, McCourt took charge of the chairperson’s role with his wit and natural storytelling. If only I had Frank Mc Court’s or George Bernard Shaw’s talent, as the latter said about writing, take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

Galway was always a city apart, a student city, with a Mediterranean influence borne by the sea trade over the centuries. Galway impressed me, the medieval heart, the port, but it is a west-coast city battered by the Atlantic winds and rain. We thought about relocating there and had conversations with an old school friend Martin McTiernan, who lived there but sadly died too early. Lovely pubs and craic, and my daughter Jill based herself in the city while researching her PhD, the use of the Irish language in the Irish diaspora. Nowadays, Galway is a global destination for food and culture, an arty enclave where bonhomie and erudition are prized, suggests CNN. It was generally off the beaten track for years, on the edge of cosmopolitan Europe, yet it was different with its Mediterranean influence. Kinsale, in County Cork has similar links with the Mediterranean, especially the Spanish who were allies with the Irish Earls and the English built two substantial forts to prevent any threat from the French and Spanish.

My upbringing in Northern Ireland permeates everything written here, could be just a trace, a fragment, as I peel away the layers. Trying to capture the atmosphere of growing up in Northern Ireland is one of the reasons I wrote my previous two books. Creative memoirs, based on fact. The 1960s of Strabane and Derry and then the 1970s about the Troubles. The Troubles in simple terms refers to the three-decade conflict (1968-1998), between nationalists (mainly self-identified as Irish or Roman Catholic) and unionists (mainly self-identified as British or Protestant), a cultural clash, but that is too simplistic. They exploded when civil rights demands by the nationalists were being denied by a sectarian state. The violent insurgency was led mainly by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), with the aim of creating a United Ireland but it was a complex situation with many other violent participants, including collusion by the forces of law and order.

Fragments of an Analytic Pub Crawl merges: reportage - the pandemic and contemporary Irish politics, history - the Ulster Plantation, and where I have lived, memoir - growing up in Northern Ireland and the Troubles, it includes a few essays - Irish humour, urban development, liveability and life skills are some of the main topics. Psychogeography is a variety of activities, artistic and practical, the fragments, the spectacular organisation of the city or a life lived. Its focus is mainly in the cities, where I have lived. The walking and reading has been done, the layers revealed.

This introduction outlines the concept of psychogeography and how that arcs throughout the book, primarily it is for urban environments but I weave it into my topics. I have lived during historical events, the pandemic, the Northern Irish Troubles, the IT revolution, and Brexit, so the journey traces the intersection of my life and these events. I consider the topics as sections rather than chapters because they cover a certain period or topic but they overlap.

The first section is memoir, covering my early childhood which basically covers the 1960s. It is mostly from a child’s point of view, whereas in the 1970s when I became a teenager, the Troubles were part of life and I was becoming aware of society and its issues. Importantly, I left home to become a teacher in Manchester, a major period of growing up and then getting married.

In 1980, I got married, when real life started and one had to pay one’s way, with paid work. Most of my working life was in education, almost 40 years teaching in Higher Education, most of it in universities, with a five-year sojourn in the IT industry and some years of chronic ill-health. The section of employment covers IT and educational developments over the years, emigration and the slow drip toward retirement.

On writing, could have on reading, as part of the title because the writing bit comes after the reading, the reading powers the imagination, based on my life’s experience. The walking and the reading has to be done. It is not a literary treatise, it is about what prompted me to write, it’s as much about newspapers and magazines, family research as about literary masterpieces. The key takeaway is read anything you like, just read, and write one word at a time, if that takes your fancy.

Over the years, I have been interested in urban development and the idea of liveability. If I had remained a geography teacher that would have been my specialism. This section looks at urban development in Ireland, Australia, the UK and Spain. From the model village of Sion Mills outside Strabane to apartment living in Spain. The research demonstrates the type of cities that residents need, not necessarily what’s being built.

Positive psychology sprang from reading a book in the USA, and I suppose liveability and the life skills are linked because positive psychology provides a framework for living a happy and contented life. I would love to be endowed with linguistic and musical ability, a photographic memory, and be able to tell funny stories but I am not. It is important to know thyself. The research points to what makes people content and maybe happy at times, you just need to provide your own framework.

Contemporary issues feature, in the Brexit section, its consequence are still being played out today, how it affects my birth country, and the pandemic section is presented as a journal, almost month by month, how it affected me in Spain but also discussions on the USA, Australia, UK and Ireland, not just health-wise but economically and how it affects their way of life.

If you haven’t a sense of humour then you have no sense at all! Humour is very important, vital in many relationships. Telling humorous stories is a skill, I, unfortunately do not possess. So there is a discussion on the subject and how it can be used in a power-play. Sure, it’s only a joke, or if you take umbrage, sure, you can’t take a joke! Finally, I conclude with some thoughts on the journey.

The richest well to draw from is childhood.

The richest well to draw from is childhood. Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer, agrees with this statement, as the Turkish saying goes Dig that well with a needle. Childhood memories metamorphose as they become susceptible to time and mood or reality. What was real and concrete? The earliest memories, traces of my past, my roots that spiral to the present. Did it happen? Did it happen like that? Does it really matter? Emotion flows from those early days. Memories and dreams collide in a fusion of unreality, yet were real, ever-present in my memory as if some of them happened recently. Small touchstones. Flashes of tangible embrace - the vibrating metal against my skin of the twin-tub washing machine - a sensual emotion projecting through time, holding me with trance-like immediacy, a meditation that is transient and momentary.

In the North-West of Ireland lie three towns, Derry, Strabane and Lifford, the towns of my childhood. The River Mourne in Strabane itself is formed by two rivers, the River Derg, which rises in Donegal, a county in the Republic of Ireland and the River Strule in Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. The River Finn rises in Lough Finn in County Donegal and meets the River Mourne. It flows between two countries, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Where the Rivers, Mourne and Finn meet, they form the River Foyle. The interconnectedness of the rivers mirrors the complex and overlapping history of these three towns. Strabane, in Irish, an Srath Bán, meaning the white river or river valley, the river is noted for fishing, in particular, salmon and trout. I was born in Strabane, my mother in Lifford and my father in Derry.

34 Knockavoe Crescent in Strabane, my first home was in a housing development, built after the Second World War. In the nearby Knockavoe Hill, literally meaning hill of the cows, lived Cecil Frances Alexander, the hill is said to have inspired the poem, There is a Green Hill Far Away and the more famous hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful.

Knockavoe Crescent, a street where most houses had a front door which rarely opened and a back door which rarely shut. It was in these streets I played, kicking a ball, playing Cowboys and Indians, in the fields or simply flicking the dirt at the side of the kerb using a lolly pop stick to do it for me. These are the floating images of chilly idleness and play of my first six years, that gather and fragment.

Mum was the eldest of a family of 13, Auntie Lila was my Mum’s youngest sister and frequent visitor. I had three sisters and three brothers. On Lila’s every visit, she rushed to the bathroom. My wife and kids did a Lila when they came home and went straight to the bathroom, as school children they held onto their call of nature till home time.

I remember everything clean and shining, my mother was very house-proud, especially the good room, the front sitting room, always ready to receive visitors. A private, secluded room from a prying world, even from us, reserved for visitors - priests, relatives, neighbours - the various dignitaries of my childhood. It was a dusky mottled place with a heavily laced window, housing a three-piece sculptured suite, a glass cabinet displaying wedding present china, ornaments of various hues and a dead fireplace, lit only on special occasions. Brass ornaments lined the mantelpiece. Elma said a piano resided there too but I don’t remember that. To the right of the fireplace, 10 wine-coloured volumes of The Children’s Encyclopedia, by Arthur Mee. It was published from 1908 to 1964 and extolled the virtues of Great Britain, its empire, Christianity, and that the Europeans were clearly the most advanced peoples. I looked at