 Hello, good evening, everyone. Hi, I'm Molly Rosenberg, I'm the director of the Royal Society of Literature and I am thrilled to welcome you to this very special conversation between Fiona Shaw and Patrick McCabe in partnership with our hosts, the British Library. Hello to everyone watching online as well, wherever you are, and to those of you joining us via our friends Tickets for Good, who provide free tickets to NHS and charity workers. We're really glad that you've joined us here this evening as well. There could be no better way to celebrate World Book Day than with two legends of the page, stage and screen. I have been looking around and I am slightly disappointed not to see more costumes of favourite characters, though my favourite to dress up as is Murphy from Samuel Beckett, so maybe I can see a couple of those here and you shall be forgiven. So now that I've forgiven you all, you're welcome, it's time to turn to our speakers, and it's truly my favourite World Book Day ever being able to introduce Patrick and Fiona. Patrick McCabe was born in 1955 in Clones County, Monaghan. He is the author of The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times, Irish Literature Prize for Fiction, The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto and Others. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into feature films by Neil Jordan. Winterwood was named the 2007 Hughes & Hughes Irish Independent... Irish Independent Novel of the Year. His most recent book is the verse novel Pogmehone, which I'm going to force everybody to buy after this, published by The Wonderful Unbound, who are also soon to release Patrick's next book, which is a black comedy entitled Golden Grove. I was expecting an ooh, an ooh. Woo! Thank you. Patrick's going to be signing copies at the end of the conversation. Fiona Shaw was born in County Cork Island and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She's one of the most recognised actors of her generation. She was awarded a CBE for services to drama in 2001. Fiona and Patrick first met 30 years ago during the making of the film adaptation of The Butcher Boy, in which Fiona plays Mrs Nugent. We will be watching a short clip from the film in just a moment to set the scene, and then they're going to join us on stage to discuss the film Patrick's latest books and the importance of literature in both their lives. There's going to be a chance for you to ask your questions at the end, so please prepare them in the room and please prepare them online as well. So we will be asking questions in here and from our audience online too, and we'll get through as many as we can. So now before we get to hear from Fiona and Patrick, we've got a scene from The Butcher Boy for all of you. Of all the wrong things I don't, I suppose the apples were the first. They started all the trouble, and Francie Braddy didn't need any ow's snake to give him one. He robbed them himself. Francie, come on, Joe, come on. Who bought Sen normally Philip Nugent as head full of amazing facts like the boiling point of water and the number of A's in a flay head? I'm sure it's yourself, Philip, isn't it? Doing a bit of reading now. Comics, Francie. You've got to have them, Joe. Tell you what, Philip. Which one? As Cox's pippins? For all of them comics. It's only fair for... No, Joe, he's really that bad. No, Joe, run! Thanks. And I should have had more sense than to let my fill up near the likes of him. I mean, not that it's the poor child's fault. What do you expect from a house where the father's never in? Lying about him pubs him morning till night. He's no better than a pig. It is small wonder that the buyer is the way he is. What chances he got living in a pigstype if he sees me in my fill up again? My words. Thanks. You're a shadow of our former selves. LAUGHTER It's the best drinker in the town. Look at him now. Look at him now. There was a time, Fiona. There was a time. Can I start? Yeah, please do. I was... Obviously we haven't met since the butcher boy which is just 145 years ago. But I was re-looking at it and re-watching the film today. And also, of course, Pogmehón, which is something else. And I hope we get on to the discomfort and the disquiet that it's... It's sort of... There are lots of things I've forgotten in my life and they're all in Pogmehón. Not that I was in Kiliburn in such a destitute and terrible situation. But the emotional atmosphere I remember completely. But I just want to begin by saying that I had been reading Fintanot Tool's wonderful book about we don't know ourselves which is really a portrait of Ireland since 1958 which is when I was born. And in it he says that by the late 70s you probably read this. In the late 70s, in order to get a condom in Ireland you had to get a prescription from the doctor. And he said because it's the only country in which the condom was a medicine. But also he said what it really means is was not really to do just with Catholicism at the time but it was to do with the fact that the Taoiseach at the time had said it's an Irish solution to an Irish problem which meant that we wouldn't have the same solution as anybody else because we wouldn't have the same problem as anyone else so we'd act on the law when we wanted to and not when we didn't. And it is that surrealism that I think we were all brought up in and the book is full of that, isn't it? An instability of reality that's what it was like that all the time. Well certainly in Pogmehón and maybe to some extent in the butcher boy that kind of sort of superficial social realist analysis of not any great interest to me, you know what I mean? Because in a way it is an Irish solution to an Irish problem and we're not going to go back to the dissolution of the monasteries and the rise of the British middle class and various other things and the famine and so on but after 1847 shall we say a kind of a what you might call theological project with the building of Catholic churches as a means of giving dignity back to a destroyed people so when I hear those stories I understand the whimsie of them and I understand how it's different to England and everything else but now that the horse is well and truly flogged, you know and that the churches are pretty much empty anyway and now that we have a completely and utterly secularised country I think maybe we should start to perhaps look back at these things with a little bit more intelligence if you don't mind me saying so I don't mean what you've just said but generally speaking the result a rather embarrassing tendency to embrace you know the consumer capitalist neoliberalist world as if we have entered upon some wonderful era of enlightenment when young boys seem to be hanging themselves right left and centre on the heels for you know abusing themselves on Instagram and live streams and you could argue well the poor old lady in the front pew of a small Irish country church with her missile was I suppose I'm experiencing the same kind of mysticism in her own way through the medieval stained glass and her private little missile and her medallion as we now are congratulating ourselves just different and in Pogmehón I would really insist upon if someone has a miraculous medallary scapular as they have in Italy and they have in Mexico and many other places it isn't something that we should be laughing at it's something that we should be investigating because it is the inheritance of an awful lot of people so Pogmehón whatever else it is looks at this kind of post famine world in collision with this narcissistic self congratulatory neoliberalist shambles that we seem to have far as I can see so count me out on that the funny little Irish one funny enough I did think about that post a famine there was a terrible vacuum in Ireland because the Irish for understandable reasons had begun to distrust the British and the church just swept in and filled that vacuum and and I think you know in Pogmehón there is that sort of inheritance of the couple that we get to know so well Dan and Oana that their mother is also it just goes ricochain back doesn't it to something that was never really steady for the previous maybe hundred years well I remember thinking along those lines you know particularly during that period of kind of social upheaval of epidome and drug taking and everything else and almost being embarrassed by this inheritance meeting an old lady who is the mother of an artist of some distinction at the time a modernist artist and she was one of the finest artists in Ireland actually who kind of was influenced by Laurie Rivers and Rosenberg and various other people like that and she almost like was a standard looking Irish lady she had a shawl and a long grey hair and I think I was stoned or something and I was saying about this absurd architecture you know of these huge cathedrals you know how gross they were and she said what do you mean they were gross and it was the first time I'd actually be hearing anyone challenge any of this and I said oh my god a great big Palladian derivative she said did you ever stop to think that the pennies that paid for that cathedral were a means of saying after the Catholic Emancipation Act we can't be as big as you it was an act of defiance she said and maybe young man you should learn some lessons and start to read your history books and I shut up pretty quick after it a newvo enthusiasm in Cove in County Cork there's a Cove Cathedral it's a Pugin design but it's much bigger than the town the church is bigger than the town but there was a period where they also began to put up Virgin Mary statues of course Virgin Mary appears in the butcher boy very powerfully but instead of getting local sculptors to sculptors to make these statues they bought them all off the peg from Italy so I think there was a kind of a rabid enthusiasm so all those pennies went to Italy rather than to our and every parish was in competition to see the best Virgin Mary statue like when I'm coming across Syria it doesn't mean that I don't see the fund of this thing and you know as long as we take it as seriously as we do we can have the foundation of that but I want the circus on top of that as well because the story of Blessed Virgin in the butcher boy actually comes from the story that my wife's father told me it was about a guy in the west of Ireland as you know they had nicknames probably still do in many places but mostly it belongs to that period and his name was the dummy costilaw and he used to sit down in this bar and it was the marion year I think in 1958 whatever it was and apparently the news went out that the Blessed Virgin Mary was coming to appear personally to the dummy costilaw don't know how this happened but anyway he got the word through his prayers and intercession that the mother of God was going to arrive you know what a turlock is it's a big lake that disappears but she was going to appear over this turlock and it was called the swallihole and at 6 o'clock apparently already was to make her appearance and he was down in the bar and people were coming in buying him whiskeys and it was a great day for everybody isn't it and of course as often happens in Ireland all of this is a load of bollocks and everybody knows it I'm sure you get the same in the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez when it was feted in the UK and in Europe as magic realism it was a big vogue in the 80s and Marquez said I don't know what everybody's going on about like magic realism when I said that the room filled up with butterflies or the duck said how are you doing that's just what my grandmother told me and I wrote it down like what's everybody going on about magic realism and I wrote it down like what's everybody going on about magic realism for but of course everybody in the UK and Ireland then started writing magic realism you know and I think it was a I forget Ben Oakley said now you can't go down the street but somebody there are told sing in madness but anyway to get back to the Tommy Costlow the time was coming anyway and they all trooped down to the a bit of a 5 to 6 movie near time now for the Blessed Virgin everybody please hail Mary Hall and Mary Hall and all those rhythms and they waited and waited and waited didn't show and the blame all descended on the Tommy Costlow and when you couldn't blame the Blessed Virgin for being left obviously some other metaphysical reason for it so the Tommy Costlow didn't get any more drink well it's actually he did because when my father-in-law was going home on the clock in the mooring they were driving back across the midlands and they saw this figure clambering out in the ditch and it was the Tommy Costlow as drunk as any human being could ever be and they were driving them back to his little house up the land his wealth no sign of the Blessed Virgin anyway Tommy he's alive and you know that's how deep all that went you know what I mean except on the other respect it does go deep you know what I mean but you can have all things cohabiting in my head anyway the same with Pope Mahonus there are things in it that gave me the shivers fellas wearing cheesecloth shirts you remember cheesecloth shirts going up Kilburn but that kind of people being cool but not being cool and people having histories I mean there's much less religion in that actually isn't there because Troy the lover he's not so religious he's more of a God on his own right the people you're moving out of but the central character carries a version of history I was wondering I haven't figured it out myself in the whole irish catholic sort of view but then again there are the same kind of perplexities and complexities in London and I came across a quote from George Orwell and I was wondering what the audience might think of it because it is germane to what we're saying it's a very famous essay actually but I've been reading this essay all my life and I found it really really interesting and I was just wondering not vis-a-vis Brexit or anything to do with that but just generally what people think is the notion of history and it said England is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays smoky towns and winding roads green fields and red pillar boxes it has a flavour of its own moreover it is continuous it stretches into the future and the past there is something in it that persists as in a living creature now I want to apply this to Ireland as well what can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840 I'll just repeat that because it's a phrase that I keep going back to what can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840 but then what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece what can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840 your mother keeps on the mantelpiece nothing except that you happen to be the same person it's very good isn't it it's very good it's interesting isn't it very very, yeah yeah so that doesn't come out of nowhere it was when I was trying to dig deep into the subconscious of what it was I was trying to say that that eventually came out as a sort of an epic narrative poem well I wouldn't call it a poem it's not a poem it's something else I don't know what it is big long stream of vomit is what Bob Dylan would call it it's just what he called like a rolling stone he wasn't being deris if he was just trying to be honest or something like that but when you're digging into the subconscious it's actually a matter that you're going to be going into the minds of your parents and your grandparents and beyond you don't know sometimes you go further than you think maybe even pre-natal you know I don't know but that's why that phrase I think it is so resonant for everyone really at photograph or any culture really I think the poetry in the book allows it to be you often repeat things and I love the repetitions you go is that the case and somehow rhythm allows you to do that which may be proved it has the beat of a baron that repeats all the time so I don't know how other novelists work but how I find it is you're trying all different keys you're trying out even different instruments and when I began to realise it went from the most banal piece of nauseating social realism of a young hippie in London that you wouldn't show to anyone when you get the rhythm going and musicians will tell you when it kicks in Dylan talks about when he got down to Nashville and what he was looking for was that high mercury sound that he got on Blonde on Blonde before that he didn't have it it comes out of collaboration it comes out of coincidence but in my case it was an overheard snatch of a a 68 rhythm and after that it was okay except that whenever I showed it nobody's ever going to publish this fortunately John Mitchinson his wife Rachel published it and they're here tonight so I thank them for that but it's very highly constructed as well you've constructed them doesn't matter it's a very difficult time for writers and I don't say that I know plenty of people who are faced with this that the whole notion of perception of what we call high literature is flattened out and it's the world of entertainment and people have no problem saying yeah it's brilliant or whatever it is but we don't know what to do with it that's a common thing now sometimes they don't even bother responding to people I don't know I'm sure it's not enough a lot different in the movie world I don't know it's a curious time because maybe in the digital age literature of this kind maybe fighting for its life I don't know but it's value I don't know about the economics of it or the the patterns of people's reading habits but the value of that book is that we find it's so hard to write recent history somebody writes fiction and is so totally immersed in the subconscious of it as you are it's incredibly valuable because I mean I'm slightly I can't kind of quote the book because it's very hard to quote I mean if you have sort of Margaret Rutherford coming out of one door and I said to you behind her that Peter Scarce is going to go where do you go to my lovely I think oh my god I can't remember I don't even want to remember that song when you're alone and how good it was these fragments of memory of a dusty London that I think I came about I came in the early 80s so the book has kind of done its story by then but I was very disappointed in London because it was much shabbier than I thought it was going to be and then this book absolutely captures that kind of meaningless northwest London hopeless kind of long hot summers of oh god there was a kind of an old god about it and I thought that it you know that is and of course there's much more texture than that and it's much more full of feeling than that but that uncomfortableness is just nabbed in the book and I don't think a history of London would get that it depends on really what your background is because I had a couple of different versions of it like I remember the first time I came the troubles really were really pretty heavy and I suppose I was following in the footsteps of one of these kind of would-be flanners, I thought that I just wander into a West End theatre and say that I was really interested in the theatre of cruelty and or UNESCO or someone and yeah that's really interesting come on, it's only a matter of days maybe doing your exercises this had come from the one experience that I had of acting which was in boarding school we had a great teacher a visionary teacher there's always a visionary teacher isn't there but here he was in this kind of seminarian boarding school and he was very well versed in the theatre of the royal court at that time but he said I want to put on this play which was called America Hurrah and it was by a guy called Jean Claude Von Italy now nobody remembers it now but it's a big thing on Broadway at that time around 1966 I think it's but this was pure theatre of the absurd and he said you know like when you're a young star somebody trusts you to do something but you better do it because if you don't you've lowered yourself and that's good teaching he said I want you to write in this style and produce it and bring it back to me and the various aspects of this America Hurrah split in three it was a triptych kind of thing somebody was like pinter somebody was like do it in that style so myself and this fella he said I don't want to do any act I said you have to do it I never did it before I said all it is is that we're in some unnamed state and I am the prosecutor and I'm going to walk around here and you have to look really frightened we want to do it do it well it turned out to be really and he got really it can I do the prosecutor now I go so we wrote this thing out and I really was fascinated by this because like a lot of young people that are very troubled there was a strange time in Ireland the place was falling to bits, trouble wise and I thought anyway go to England after this boarding school was over and I just thought like first of all met two police men and said I've got any identification I thought this is like a parody Irish man who arrived in England immediately locked up for 40 years this is a little bit much gentlemen you know this is a parody can you not do better and they said have you got any identification and of course again inevitably what do you have an old stained letter you know all smudged with the rain Patrick Patrick said well where are you staying so so some shit or other oh yes some shit or other I guess now you begin to realise very well you better smarten up my young man you could wind up in a lot of very serious trouble and then you begin to realise that you're carrying the whole burden of history on you and the Birmingham bombings happened a couple of weeks so that was one version and then the second where you come later it's like a wonderland so everything is perception isn't it it's a circumstance so on but there's no doubt about it that anyone who's experienced you can never forget it it's an astounding place it's a palimpsest of and you know when I eventually started writing Pogma I realised allow all this in because it's so much a part of you see how can you say you're anything you're Irish you're English because everything you experience becomes part of your identity and accretion of various identities yes and I mean the fact that the house that they all stay in is also a temple temple of a but also the Troy who is not an Irish character but a Scottish character there's a marvellous people he's always telling some story and he's always saying I spoke to the not the people the who not the hoople that were called but he knew these people and it brought back to me I knew people who do that who pretended to know people they didn't know and that's something to do with the big city that they say oh yeah I know him yeah I just say yeah I know him and you know he said that to me yeah and it was that sort of casual opportunities about what is true and not true and that's about potential and also despair the two things are kind of you know there and the nature of fiction and reality because what nobody really mentions is that the narrator of the book isn't part of this the narrator of the book is someone unborn oh well that's a tip you might talk a bit more about that that's terrible but that's the only thing that's important to me because the rest of it is a lot of sort of social realist kind of flimflam well he says he's not born well that's again the nature of reality so that's built into it as well he says he's sort of born he says I was sort of born but I'm not really born and he tortures his poor sister about it saying I wasn't really born you were born but I'm not really born and that's because he's poor mother spoiler alert spoiler alert that doesn't matter don't you think even in the politics of art the kind of impertinence of sitting down to write anybody's story has to be questioned so there's all those kind of political things being asked it's what you're reading the truth who is to say what the truth is anyway all those things and ultimately when it concludes and the kind of people were saying oh Pog Mahone is that like some kind of reference to the Pogs but also it's a snarling kind of diabolic paradise lost a front you know when Satan confronts the Godhead well that's what you're dealing with at the end of it it's a more Milton-esque than it is or at least that's the intention I'm not saying this was achieved in any way but really I suppose I wrote 6,000 handwritten pages trying to find out what this was about and to think that all I would have to do is my time is right about a couple of hippies in a would-be temple in North London I could do that far better than me I mean for example one of the influences on it was Ian McEwen's last day of summer now if you want to read about an England that's changing an England that's coming to terms with this past and so on he's the man to read it's an extraordinary story it's a bit like MR James in places like who else would you say I don't know Hardy sometimes he's such an extraordinary writer that in terms of the social realism come hippie commun he does more than four pages than I ever would do with that particular milieu but I was doing something else at least I thought I was but you're also kind of dealing with a kind of metaphysical creature with this well Mr Eshu is the character in the Nigerian culture who has different manifestations and Sir Hanan in that Sir Mamoose book has a yaka but there are so many of them but all the writers are using them now it's very interesting there's something and even Lincoln and the Bardot that somehow staying on this planet doesn't seem to be quite enough that you always have to go to this this book is by Marina Warner is probably one of the finest minds on this kind of subject it's called once upon a time but just a quote from it I was hoping this might come up because it kind of explains it to me sometimes you finish a book you know whether you've got it right or not on your own terms but you don't know really what it's about you're still trying to figure it out but she writes this in a book called once upon a time which is a history of fairy tale and it also deals an awful lot with song to the butcher boy which we've just shown which is a ballad which is not Irish it's English it's nowhere it's like a bird that travels across all frontiers like she mentions in this book you don't apply nationality to song you know really but anyway the poet W.H. Auden discussing these imaginary zones adopted the term secondary world which had been used by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and declared every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds the primary everyday world which he knows or she knows through their senses and the secondary world are worlds which he not only can create in his or her imagination but also cannot stop themselves creating he knows this constant like he's about to the Catholic thing you know why I think sometimes the Whimsies a little bit well it's unsatisfactory but it's also somewhat disrespectful and lazy maybe but people like an Ireland were always doing this when they were also everywhere you never see those two things now and like what I always found about this and you get in Mexico you get in Italy it was always an acknowledgement that the supernatural and the other world lived side by side with this one now we can create all sorts of different versions of this now but that's all there are different versions because I think Marina Warner is right about that talk about reading and being under threat and everything but everybody reads their child's story at night still and the child still wants to know what happens at the end you know and that to me was the poem and the butcher boy say Martin McDonough was saying the great movie he's just done he didn't know up until the last two pages how it was going to end but I don't know how you would feel we talked enough about me but I'd like to ask your question with your wealth of experience but Arthur Miller has written I know what he's saying about it used to be a thing like play right didn't there like ship right that's kind of changed a little bit now as the world changes but Arthur Miller used to say that you could feel the audience moving as one towards a sort of almost religious experience with a great play one of the great classical players you've done Medea that there can't be any other ending that the audience are going without even saying of course and that's almost a kind of a religious kind of mutual obligation kind of thing which I think has changed to some extent as the world diversifies maybe trying to reconfigure itself and why I find myself belonging very much to the Orwell world you know who is talking about this England which could equally be Ireland where this thing had been the same for so long but the digital explosion fragments these things and perhaps you could argue even further maybe God is dead for a lot of things and does that change things do the Greeks say Aeschylus or Sophocles or Homer or Shakespeare when the audience sometimes to 10,000 people were operating as a unit would you feel a kinship with that or is it nonsense or are we moving into some other area where it could be even more exciting because the world is diversifying in such a furious way and the digital explosion has come where would that leave the world of Homer or Shakespeare or how would it affect it do you think I think I'll need about 10 years to but I see the point you're making which is that I think the theatre has suffered terribly because of that I think part of the diversification is that there's more film, more fragments more theories more so the theatre but when you talked about that moment of course in Medea the genius of Medea is that the audience through the chorus agree with everything that Medea says they go you're right, you're right you're right and then they think what so when she kills the children they have to go you're right so the very darkness of the human mind is experienced by the audience but one of the moments that I remember feeling this sort of religious feeling which is rare is not in any of that but in Brech's mother courage and there's a moment halfway through mother courage where Swiss cheese whose mother courage's son has been captured and they drag the body in and the soldiers say is this your son and the audience have gone through the whole duplicitousness of mother courage with her or her little dealings and they put the body then they say is this your son and if she says yes her daughter will be killed and if she says no she'll have betrayed herself and the audience so know that that at the national we did it many something about ten years ago and I remember this moment there was no acting involved well all the acting happens from everybody up to that point so every thought has to be agreed by the group i.e. the thousand people in the auditorium and then they say is this your son and the place goes silent and I could make it silent for as long as I liked but I didn't enjoy the silence I mean it was absolutely phenomenal is that this prescient silence has everybody experienced the choice and that is almost really I remember thinking this is unbelievable writing and anybody who said the Brecht was cold or to do with keeping feeling out the opposite was true there was a kind of the audience was full of feeling they've nothing else but feeling thrilling and the reason I ask is a personal one because I was an avid theatre gore and I found my desire to go to theatre winning for this reason I mean some of the most transformative experiences I've ever undergone were in the theatre say crucible you know Tom Murphy's the Geely concert and there always seems to have been an element of the ritualistic sacrifice and that concept is gone I think now from the collective imagination you know Philip Larkin talks a lot about the collective subconscious you know and if that's gone is that affecting I mean I used to literally haunt it and now I won't go I mean I don't know what it is I came across this thing in Arthur Millory I don't know if this is old fashioned or not I mean this is from the Paris review but this is what he said anyway let's be written about 1966 say when the world for him was changing dramatically like he always regarded himself as a kind of a playwright of the 50s you know he woke up one morning and all these hippies on the move and the Vietnam War and he said he felt isolated you know but this is what he had written in 66 yes it's got so we've lost the technique of grappling with the world that Homer had that Aeschylus had that Euripides had and Shakespeare also how amazing it is that the people who adore the Greek drama failed to see that these great works are works of someone confronting their society the illusions of the society the faiths of society and this is the key line for me well the faiths of society like let's say since Regan and Thatcher's time when it became fashionable to say everyone's on their own from that period it seems to me something happened something like that but anyway let's say he was predicting that the faiths of society and he's talking about plays there are social documents these plays not piddling private conversations and I found myself going so obviously it's a piddling private conversation I'm not interested and I don't think you deserve my time we just got educated into thinking this is all a story for its own sake it's not or at least it wasn't to me when various things happened in the theatre part of it was that rehearsal periods got shorter and shorter because it got too expensive to rehearse things so people like Peter Brook insisted on having long rehearsal periods and sometimes early on in the national we had 8 or 10 weeks and things were so much better when they had that time so you're time to go wrong and time to go right so you're time to discover the thing if you're just putting something on you're only going to get the surface of it but when you talk about that Greek audience thing I once played Beckett's happy days at Epidavros in Greece and you know normally our theatre is here the biggest theatre you have would be about a thousand people but in Greece there was 8,000 people in the audience microphones and buried up to my neck but it was the most thrilling thing was to be in that silence and have 7 or 8,000 people and I had a sort of Pogmehoan moment in that while I was doing it I began to think of the people not just in their jeans and t-shirts but in togas I thought I could see them all in kind of togas and it's part of the joy that 7,000 people a town of people is that they've all travelled from somewhere to get to that space to listen to that argument of story and of course it can't be a story for a story it's something about them and it's a whole community meeting well you know we're all doing that and our city was now watching TV series but we're not in a community at all the cinema's still in theory is that a little bit I like that Martin Mcdonald's film The Banshees of Innocheur was quite extraordinary following on from what you were saying like you don't often hear that gasp in cinema any longer when I was at it and this is in the world you know of you know wild digital imagery video games and here's the story what's it about I don't like you anymore that's what it's about and I thought where is he going to go with this and we are not going to spoil any of this but it's an extraordinary film it's one of the best movies I think I've ever made actually that's a wonderful thing to say about it I really do think so and I think time will tell that because it ends cyclical moment this is the end this is just the start I think it's Gogol, The Squabble you know what these two guys are arguing on to infinity I think it's Hans Christian Anders and John I thought just when you're lamenting the death of something there it goes something comes up which is the magic and this is not a dirage I'm just trying to figure out something but I definitely think that one thing you can say for sure there's nothing without the right I mean the performance is astonishing but it's a lyrical poem really oh yeah you want to read the there's one section where somebody says well that's not very nice what do you mean it's not nice but it's not nice and the fact that the word nice which would be normally a writer's bombshell wouldn't it and there's a whole scene about people using the word nice but it's masterly in that way and you're again getting back to the the bowron or the hand drum for anyone who doesn't know what a bowron might be he has a lyrical beat into everything the repetitions are what given and you because once you get it isn't it once the first five minutes you get the key that you're in that's the magical zone and I genuinely think when the author speaks that he didn't know himself then you're in the realm of magic like when children get into his own like I remember when our daughter was very young I was vamping on the piano and she had her back turned to me and I had a sort of a country in western beat going and she went I know you from a distant planet aliens coming around oh there they're coming oh don't you come and steal me I thought my god that's brilliant and I turned around and said see and she stopped the magic was broken and I think it's as simple as that and the author is really young I think the childlike kind of magic of that what do you mean you don't like me anymore you liked me yesterday or did you yes well let your boys put it out the way you say you're my friend and you're not my friend but there's also you have it in Pokemon too you have these repetitions of words like drip drip drop drip drop but it made me think of the wasteland that did well I was thinking of the wasteland also and the wasteland has a huge influence now if Mr Elliott was here tonight said God bless you sir you're a great man for giving me all them 9s but a lot of them were subconscious and it ended up in Margate because of TS Elliott where he wrote in the bus shelter so you'd hardly know a bit of that would you I would but I want you to be by the drips I read this drip bit and because every now and then a character says something like well like in the wasteland there's a lot of showing off by the wasteland in the book by Troy Maney but there and there's this very arid bit in the wasteland it's the most arid bit it's the most on the social bit there's lots of social bits you know but there's you know my nerves are bad tonight and all that but there's this bit here is no water but only rock rock and no water the sandy road the road winding above among the mountains which are mountains of rock without water if there were water we would stop and drink without water we can't stop or think sweat is dry and feet are in the sand if there was only water amongst the rock dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit here one can either stand nor lie nor sit but there is no water sorry I've gone back too far sorry if there were water and no rock if there were rock and only water and water a spring a pool among the rock if there was a sound of water only not the cicada and dry grass singing but sound of water over a rock where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees drip drop drip drop drop drop drop but there is no water have you got the book in the book there is a bit where he has I have a book but it's not my book I've got your book you know I'm not a great one for promotion or any of these things are reading from your books but I do like reading from works that mean an awful lot to me like the Westland does and I won't go into any detail but I had a bit of bad health there recently and I know that people sometimes say things old poetry will help you through and so on and I didn't really believe it but a friend gave me this book by Clive James and I carry it everywhere with me now I can't quote it or speak it as magnificently as Fiona but I only quote it because we're here to talk about art and what it means and I found this poem called Landfall to be the equal of Philip Larkin and I don't say that lightly and I don't think Clive James needs any introduction really you know he was highly regarded figure for many years and God rest his soul now but this is called Landfall anyway hard to believe now that this was free from pills and heaps blood tests x-rays and scans no pipes or tubes at perfect liberty I stand in my diary with travel plans the ticket paid for at the other end I packed a hold all and went anywhere they asked me one on whom you could depend to show up I would cross the world by air and come down neatly in some crowded hall I stood for a full hour to give my spiel here I might talk back to a nuisance call and that's my flight of eloquence unreal but those years in the clear how real were they when all the sirens in the signing queue who'd clutch their hearts at what I had to say were just dreams even when the dream came through I called it health but never stopped to think it might have been a kind of weightlessness that footloose feeling always on the brink of breakdown the false freedom of excess rarely at home in those days I'm home now where few will look at me with shining eyes perhaps none ever did and that was how the fantasy of young strength that now dies expressed itself the face that smiled at mine out of the glooking glass was seeing things today I am restored by my decline and by the harsh awakening it brings I was born weak and always have been weak I came home and was taken into care a cut case but at long last I can speak I am here now who was hardly even there it's weird we saw no Clive James from the television isn't it we got to know him on being so witty and funny and that's how he saw himself until the real writer came through wouldn't you agree because I used to enjoy it but I thought probably in today's world it's a little bit so spiked anyway you know you're looking at various cultures and the world isn't this funny I mean once upon a time that was the Irish and it's not very nice really a lot of that and um he just said what did all that mean all these people lining up to get their book signed it's pretty harrowing but unlike Larkin who actually kept saying oh when I get sick and never get sick you know come on Larkin get sick I said well you're just going get into the ambulance then you may have something different to say there with Jesus Clive James comes along with this I mean it's good to have them both I think he wrote that late it's called sentence to life he was terminal with leukemia and he kept on not dying too didn't he he kept on saying I'm not dying come on guys that goes back to your Margate your Margate thing where the Pokemon takes place in a kind of a home in Margate though it doesn't matter that it is but it is Margate and you keep mentioning Margate but in the Wasteland and Elliot you know I don't know how many lines the Wasteland is but the middle line of the whole thing is on Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing the broken fingernails of dirty hands my people humble people who expect nothing to cartage then I came burning burning burning and that's that isn't it it absolutely is and they all connect I hope because what you're saying about the Catholicism and then the absurd drama like in a way it's a bit like Henry James said if a writer is worth anything someone on whom nothing is lost so everything that your experience gives you whether it's the kind of long traditional kind of vista of Irish Catholicism or any Catholicism or Anglicism whatever it is all these things have meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people so you kind of take it and then when the absurd drama and modernism and Joyce and Elliot I mean it gets very exciting then when you have come through those various and now we're into something else but I find that the speed with which it's moving you know but we're fortunate to have three grandchildren and already you can see ahead into what this there are jobs and kind of questions that they have like one of our grandchildren like he's doing stop motion on the YouTube right and I said well I'll show you Ray Harryhausen he and who's he dad right I said he invented stop motion okay so I'll show it to him so there's Jason in the Argonaut and the guy's going off and I said no Christopher he invented it and then he goes to his own machine and then he goes to his own machine the multiverses right and you just don't know how to do about that because I kind of educated him on Marvel comics you know and he used to kind of say okay we do Spider-Man J. John A. Jemison and Batman and I used to get very excited about it you know the fantastic four and so on he was very interested for a while but one day I could see he was a little bit anxious a little bit agitated and I could see him trying to figure out what it was he was going to say and he slowly edged his way kind of obliquely around he arrived at the edge of the sofa and said granda I said yeah but don't really know I tell you this but don't really want to do that all stupid fantastic four stuff anymore and I said why he said it's a different fantastic four and so he was it was too static it was a bit like the sort of banshees event of Sharon moment for me a little bit of me died but now that he's educated me in the multiverse it's equally fascinating but I just don't have the agility of mine to cope with it really but it's very exciting I think Paul Mahone is full of that kind of thing but your book maybe a sort of a kinetic energy of some description when you think of Queens Park at the whole area that you write about in Paul Mahone that isn't nostalgia it's almost like ancient history being encapsulated nostalgia is no use no because your grandson won't have will read that and go what is this but if your writing is worth anything I spend a lot of time making sure that the butcher boy such as it was would not fall into that trap of retrospective nostalgia for this it had to inhabit a mythic space and when it concludes it should be like a Greek conclusion that the inmates are like a siren chorus I've always been interested in that for the reasons that I've been trying to elucidate with Elliot and the Greeks it is no use writing what it was like when the troubles were on in the 70s or when people wore condoms in Ireland ha ha ha or didn't wear them or whatever the hell it was that's why I just find it so interesting what Arthur Miller has to say and how right he is or how wrong he is because this is a bit that must continue and it's a very invigorating exciting time this but it's just it's so hard it's like a moving object really the great thing in the butcher boy which I was reminded of as we were meeting is that at the very moment that the chorus who are the people of the town think they're going to see God or the Virgin Mary instead they see the pitilessness of seeing a person dead that's marvelous they meet themselves in their ugliness running to a house thinking it's the virgin in fact it's a dead body and that's a very good coup because it means that both stories are going together all the way through that happened to an ordinary life people, church going people would have a contemplativeness that's not often acknowledged it seems again to get back don't want to be unkind about it it's as if this is only being discovered in the current era whether it's mindfulness some you know figure but built into the remember a lot of these people would have attended the Latin mass and remember as a child being fascinated by the idea one old lady said to me that the most harrowing moment for the human being is when God turns his face away I had this image but a bit like X man or something mixed up with all that a huge kind of Mount Rushmore figure slowly and that is a metaphor for the pain you would be feeling that turns up in the Banshees of Indonesia the moment when the space becomes unbridgeable and that's in the theatre of all these things none of them are new let's face it to whether it's the eternal inverities or whatever it might be and I think you know it's very difficult to get a space to where these things can be discussed because the notion of morality or how you teach morality hmm whatever you know okay that's fine I get that but Jesus come on you know just once could we have a serious conversation about these things speaking of spaces for things to be discussed I hate to break up a happy party but we will be continuing it but just with questions from all of you at home and in the room before we do not to break up the conversation but thank you so much already for this extraordinary conversation we have some microphones coming round to you so please please put your hands up if you've got a question we're looking for questions comments famously questions not comments we've got a question just here Fiona you touched on theatre just now and you was implying I think that something is hugely changed but you didn't say what well I don't think I would dare to pronounce on the theatre I think the great thing about the theatre it will always renew itself but the theatre as Pat was talking about about a theatre where you went in order to you know experience those moments like in dancing at Lunisa when they all the women start dancing and somehow the evening is freed of language but is transcendent in what happens that's very hard to get in a world in which we're all at home watching the television that's all and I think I mean all sorts of obvious things of the pandemic and you know people stopped being friendly with the person next to them to watch it and became hostile to the person to watch it and if you are wearing a mask and you're in refusal to the person left and right in you you're miles off what the Greek theatre was I mean you're just not one unit you're separate people so I think there's a lot of challenge for the theatre at the moment and I also the economics of the theatre have become really really agony for a lot of people in it I think you just can't throw plays up and expect them to land they're not going to land you have to really find out what's going on I mean most plays exist because you're matching the period you're in not intellectually but subconsciously I mean that's why some of the best performances are between 28 and 35 it's because somehow you're in tune with your time in those times and the most interesting work is done by they often say directing as a young man's job woman's job whatever but it's so I think it's it's under a lot of pressure and also I mean wonderful things that happen in the theatre I think Black Lives Matter is one of the most wonderful movements to have happened because it means that a whole other group of people whose culture has not been investigated enough by the theatre is being and will be and I think that's a fantastic and then the theatre is a tool that will actually turn history or reshape another look at history or so I think this is a very good thing happening as well I'm going to take a question from our online audience and then we're going to come down to the front Elaine would love to know if you have any tips for how to get modern children to appreciate classic children's literature I think you've answered that don't read Marvel It is a problem that because I have noted that that the text you would have expected children even for the allowance of the fact that people are sentimental about their own childhood I would have expected children even for the allowance of the fact that people are sentimental about their own childhood I would have expected children to know about Alice in Wonderland the Greek the fairy tales and Hans Christian Anders and various and they don't the big question is now are they a bereft in any way it's a bit early to say I don't know but I don't know what the answer is because I've tried giving them to the particular individual with whom they have this practice and banshees of ear this year of relationship and I gave them I don't know what it was something like that so I don't know about that becoming a maybe they don't need to they're also exposed to Asian literature and African literature and characters from all over the world that we weren't I mean when you say Alice in Wonderland it would be a sort of absolute thumbprint for many people well I never really figured out how colour she was it wasn't really that interesting but the nature of fear isn't it the particular kind of fear you see a white rabbit I'm always seeing white rabbits a white rabbit and you know something's up and that's a complete cultural trope I think we're ready for our next question wasn't there a guy called Percy something who wrote adventure stories with the Greeks my nephew was full of Percy Jackson my nephew you're all about Percy Jackson I think we're going to our next question well we didn't answer that one very well just beat them and make them read them just say read that make them read everything I'm wanting to draw together just a couple of strands so this is a question not a statement but nostalgia and myth the difference between the two I happen to be Welsh and I'm afraid that we haven't got that right at all and I'm thinking about time and Hilary Mantel's comment about the what's past is ever with us but also irretrievable and what I wanted Fiona you mentioned when was anything ever steady well at least that's my question because you said that I think that was what you actually said when was anything ever steady I'm wondering if anything ever has been in terms of time and the unconscious and how we write and what comes through us is it always flow or is anything ever steady just the small questions this evening then I'm sure Pasha will say about this but I mean I might be wrong because you self mythologise yourself but I've always thought that I came from somewhere so boringly steady that I was interested in exploring a world which was less steady but that's partially because I was brought up in the 70s in court where nothing happened at all for ten years just nothing happened nothing of any kind happened ever nothing happened Pat was in a much more volatile part of the country no I don't agree with that I think that I think that a small town of 2,000 people on the southern side of the border where nothing happened either nothing happened either it would be a mistake to think that I somehow survived kind of a terrifying war zone you know a three-legged dog run past the house was a pretty big event but where I would to link the two things the question of what you're saying to quote Larkin again Larkin always insisted that Hull was his place and he loved the dullness of Hull he kept saying he used it as a weapon almost but philosophically he was right though that he said that something like nothing can happen anywhere you know and I mean I don't want banshees but what happens on that island two guys fall out you know that's all I don't like you anymore how do you make a play out of that how do you make one of the great pieces of art out of that and nothing much happens you know in so many great works of art except the inner life is changed and you come out a different person and so I think the nature of things is that it's a constant flux you know 100 years means nothing I mean alright in our time nothing much happened but you know the flow has speeded up I think in our last say 40 years there's like the industrial revolution isn't it really things shifted they go at different speeds but it's never steady ever I would think not to me anyway and maybe that's what art is an attempt to just sort of dam up the river and end the chaos for a while and post some kind of order so that you can leave a legacy of some kind behind you like a cave painting for succeeding generations but certainly it's one of fluidity and flux rather than stasis for me and I think also when you come out of something that seems a cocoon and you look above the parapet you see this plenty flux the world is in chaos and people's suffering is endless and meaning and suffering you know rather than trying to find meaning out of suffering and sometimes suffering is self-inflicted and sometimes it really isn't yeah sorry that doesn't answer your question but we need about five years for that can I take another question I'm going to look into the back of the room anybody at the back of the room okay we've just got somebody right at the front of the room I've lied to you all just this person here thank you but back of the room you will get your moment get ready have you read anything lately that you would like to recommend to us tonight well I'd certainly recommend Clive Jam's sentence to life if you're interested in poetry but I don't think there's any problem finding really good literature at the moment there's so much of it I'm not fucking on that just in your opinion that something that moved you seven moons I think that wonderful winning book is a fantastic rombosterous chaotic book about the chaos you know it's set in Colombo and Sri Lanka but actually it's about everything I read Annie Arnau's book the years recently and that seems so much more steady than Po-Mohon is the opposite because it deals with the same period and she says things like Simone de Beauvoir died and we were a bit sad and you think God compare to this I was a bit sad too Sarth won't go on television you know you get you get I mean France was was not the same place as London or Ireland in the 70s well actually she writes brilliantly I think about the fact that you know they were all go on in 1968 and then within five years they were all going to car four filling their cars up with shopping for the weekend and wonder what happened there passions but you know that's maybe everything is in relation to everything else you know if you read that and you read Po-Mohon you think goodness me the world is full of different things next question we've got one just over here so I don't know if you want to throw the microphone over towards a green jumper I'll try not to mess this up I'll try and say it really quickly so it comes out like I was thinking it but not so quick that it just is garbled and nonsense so Pat so I'm laughing out loud a lot during this Po-Mohon thing and I'm reading it really slowly and it's because I'm laughing so much but I actually find the book quite scary it's very frightening actually a lot of the spaces and the rooms and just the the moments I don't know what it is it feels haunted or something but I'm actually laughing about a lot of my friends and this is more sort of London in 90s and 90s and even up until recently enough tipping into the tweens or whatever they call them and that's funny so you're laughing about I'm laughing about real life stuff and all the crack that I've had in London and all the stuff that's probably passed now and I can't go back and thank God for that but whilst reading about this terrifying stuff from the 70s from the temple in Mahara or Vishnu or whatever it is and it's reminded me a little bit about that guy in Stray Sod country the guy who kept coming back to the jukebox and telling stories about London who was lying or maybe not no he was he was nostalgia and that was a good point about mythology just made there from the second row is that what it is it's like you can build up nostalgia for places you weren't in and then you're going to myth mythologise about your own not quite your dreams didn't quite come true there was never that quite exciting or it was really exciting but actually it was terrible so I don't know it is a question a little bit but also is it a repeated cycle well I suppose trying to figure out you know to make sense of the world that you inherited and not just in my case a small town or Ireland or England or anywhere else but the nature of reality and a big thing at the period of Pokemon home of course would have been psychedelic drugs you know and of course it was de rigueur for the young artists that time to partake of lycergic acid diathomide you know and if you apply that to the vision of shall we say the rural inheritance of writing you know shall we say John McGarhorn or William Traver and you're bringing in the absurd theatre then I suppose that's an attempt to create your own style or to make it because there was no point I could feel with the life that I was living and trying to emulate the generation previous to that because as we were saying about the absurd theatre and so things were fragmenting but there was a psychedelia anyway as part of that kind of 50s, 60s generation because I remember this guy said to me out of the blue when we were having a drink in the bar and he looked like a teddy boy you know when people are kind of in their 60s but they carry a little bit of the ghost of the teddy boy that once was with the duck's ass and the winkle pickers but he's working in a meat factory or something now or might be retired and he said out of the blue he said the biggest disappointment of my life really he said was that I didn't get the job but the who What did you say? Yes That's the way it goes he said I said you mean like Pete Townsend in the hood nice fella he said and I thought wow this guy I said he's taken but I want some of this and then he said a problem of what I'm drinking he said did you get talking to him for a long time right while he said you are and and how did it happen he said well I seen the ad in the paper and everything and I thought I'll tip down and see I played with a few show bands and I thought it was as good a chance as anybody else I went down I said Pete what time can I go on at and Pete Townsend said well we have two or three more to see but maybe after 12 o'clock if you want to go and have a drink there in West Hamstead pub Now interesting enough when the West Hamstead aspect came in I thought that's where the who used to rehearse I thought So he he went on to say I went on round anyway and we did a few numbers like summertime blues and come on everybody and he said I beat them good but the fucking thing about it was he said I had the job only that wee moon fella him in and he said Jesus he was good he was good and I said what did he play all of the things were starting to make sense he said he played Jean Vincent he knew it stuffed this guy and he said that Keith Moon got the job and he shook his hand he said good on me Now I went out of there thinking what I had thought was a big cycle a psychedelic kind of fabrication turned out to be actually every word of it was true and he had been working on the buildings you know and gone down and done all this so there's a little town you see this guy a thousand times a day and you'd never believe so I became fascinated up with the butcher point the inner lies of people that you will never know about and if art has any purchase or purpose in the world it's like Joyce said he never met anybody that was uninteresting ever and that's a pretty good principle to live your life by and it's why I kind of have a little bit of a problem this retrospection of the 40s 50s and 60s and art it really is quite lazy although it's not a crusade of any kind of art but it's kind of beneath the dignity of art to be making these assumptions when you don't know the inner lies of people but to get back to the rest of the question statement was a kind of that if there was a kind of an attempt to lasua style it would be that in the words of Vladimir Nabokov when he was talking about Gogol he said the end of the day not only do you afford them the dignity which they merit but they should stand out colossal against the big sky of everything something like that wonderful from an online audience question so William who's been watching at home would like to say how wonderful it's been to hear you both read and recite some poetry this evening and he acknowledges that Pat says he isn't a poet and doesn't write poetry but would like to know Fiona if you have ever tried writing poetry yourself no okay we're moving swiftly on to another question okay we have one question here and then we're going to finish up with a last question from our online audience so submit your final questions if you're watching at home my questions would be for both of you what's your first book that you read and what's your favourite Irish author we might have to stick to one timing wise so we might go what was your the first book that meant something to you when you read it mine was the Dandy book I still read it I think it's the best book I've ever written even better than Eulah says and I'm not being whimsical because every time I look at it I see a sort of a psychedelic post war Britain's just after the day and then it's a comic the dandy well it was a dandy annual what's year 1961 1961 get on eBay immediately it's a bit like Eulah says it's very I love that response and the reason I say it's a bit like Eulah says is me what is Eulah says only all these different styles of stories and you know some of them are funny some of them are scary some of them are incomprehensible and if you turn the first couple of pages you know in the dandy book 1964 you will see the crimson ball and that's a bit like Cersa Cersa episode in Eulah says Dada Esk isn't it really and then you know you go to the next page and that's dirty dick or the smasher and that's a little bit like I suppose the Nausica episode of Eulah says which is kind of fun of fun all these funny little romantic kind of things and there's all sorts of parallels I didn't really mean to say any of this but now that I think of it I think John and Pat you know what the next project after this book is Fiona what was your first I mean if we're going to get to that level we were only allowed in terms of comics we were only allowed to look and learn because you know my parents were aspirational so I would get I would go to a bring and buy and buy a pile of dandies and more for my brother and I would buy bonties you could get big huge rolls of them for maybe a penny or something and then I would go home and suddenly get a really bad pain in my tummy I have to go to bed and I'll be in the bed because we weren't allowed to buy them but I would say probably not really but I think Winnie the Pooh is probably the first thing I can really really remember or the children of Lear that was my favourite I think you know going back to the earlier question about how would you get children to read these because here's the answer to that question apologies for not knowing this earlier on our other grandchild has a thing called a pony a Tony box did you ever hear of this well you get Winnie the Pooh and you put it on top of the Tony box hello the voice comes out through the thing and the music it was a blustery day and she lays back and she is in the digital age wrapped in this thing and she goes to her life and the other day she came to visit us and she said oh how long is this day so I would recommend this Tony box you know it's a popular thing and you can, like if you wanted to get a pony on the Tony box you could put a little hippie up there Electra in there isn't it morning sky canopy above the shadows of night melted today hear me I think that's a winner of that Tony okay we're going to prevail upon you for one final question from our online audience so perhaps following on from that Elizabeth says thank you both for such an inspiring and thought provoking discussion she would love to know when we're engaging with things via the screen more how do we ensure that we are an active aspect of the creative act and not just a passive passenger that's the big question isn't it that we've been trying to parse and analyse that you're always saying about the communal response to the sacrifice of the transcendent moment that is the big question of the consumer age how do you stop being a passive consumer the next Netflix the next 10 parts big tub of angel delight man lined into the body spiritual isn't it so true stop eating angel delight maybe you know I remember years ago Peter Hall saying that very soon people wouldn't be able to read iambic pentameter and then they wouldn't be able to hear iambic pentameter and you know I wonder if people soon won't be able to read they would be so used to watching flickering images on the screen that's exactly true but we still could be active participants couldn't we it's funny what would be under a threat certainly in an Irish context and various other members discussing this about the advent of the digital and consumer or computer age with an African writer and I was talking about I noticed let's say all that jibber jabber that goes on in the butcher boy all that stuff that's a kind of a currency that keeps people together you know and now when I come out with these things like when I was in hospital recently and somebody said I'm like the man that couldn't hang and they said who's he and this woman in her 40s that was a very common thing like how are you doing today Jesus I'm like the man that couldn't hang and everybody understood it so bouncing this stuff around so you're kind of looking at the oral culture and the African writer he knows that in his place as well that the oral culture was being flattened out yes yes I'm not saying this is a tragedy because you can come out with all these funny specs and everything else but you know people being better educated all these things that get rid of they're not about to trade good health care for funny little specs in an Irish village why should that but it's nonetheless important to note these things and see where does language go next and you can be sure it will go somewhere interesting as it always does at a mutates I mean there's plenty of movies that have youth culture kind of argo in them I wouldn't be privy to but that's language you know when young people say that's sick that's really sick we never said things like that so they are using it other so many things you wouldn't have said but that's because we're old timers now I guess well I hate to break up a party and I know that we could all listen to you for hours longer but we've all got homes to go to so before I wrap up for this evening I just want us all to thank Fiona and Patrick so much for this conversation I know that you aren't in for lots of self promotion but I hope you won't mind if I do a bit of RSL promotion and then a bit of you promotion as well I'll be very quick I promise so this is the RSL's first in-person event of a busy spring season and we could have no better advert to encourage you to join us as a member our memberships and passes are open to everyone and start at just £25 a year and you get free tickets to join us in person or online whatever your preference is be sure to sign up online on the RSL website and if you want a particular special discounted well book day rate you can sign up at our membership membership desk tonight with our head of operations Martha's Stenhouse who will be happy to oblige please also join Patrick downstairs now to buy all of his books they're very heavy don't make anybody pack them away again many hands light work and all of that Patrick will be signing shortly so please join us downstairs all that remains is for me to thank Unique Media and Blue Box for managing the live stream and the tech tonight the British Library Unbound and our volunteers and a special thanks to our events and partnerships manager Lily Blacksall for making this evening possible and so now finally finally please join me in a final final thank you to Fiona Shaw and Patrick McCode thank you thank you