Dear Foreign Minister, - This is my letter of resignation from our embassy in Dublin. I have been here six months, and I am afraid I can no longer bear it, writes Kevin Myers.
There must be a vacancy elsewhere. I am told the consulate in Kamchatka is short of a third secretary. The diplomatic post in the old whaling station on Baffin Island has never been filled. And our small passport office on the edges of the Algerian desert, which has been unmanned since our entire delegation there had their throats cut, could surely do with restaffing.
Minister, I had prepared carefully for my trip here. I knew all the Irish writers, both those who wrote as Englishmen - Goldsmith, Sheridan, Farquhar, Stern and Wilde, and those who wrote as Irishmen - O Faolain, O'Connor, Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and the great William Trevor, plus many others. What a land of letters awaited me, I thought as I finished my posting in the export credit bureau in Oooocptl, that hideous one-donkey border town between Peru and Bolivia.
I never provided any credit there, Minister, because we did no business with either country. Moreover, due to the activities of some fundamentalist American missionaries, alcohol was outlawed in the town. The last foreigner who even spoke to a local girl was fed to alligators, in instalments, beginning with his progenerative parts, which were removed using a flint axe-head.
The natives spoke only one language: Txytl. I am fluent in Oxqpl and Pqptl, and passable in Xxtqbtl and Pgstlttl, but I speak not a word of Txytl, which has 11 genders, no regular verbs, only irregular, and employs 75 tenses, with 37 different subjunctive modes. I would be paltering with the truth if I said that time didn't hang heavy on my hands for those two years. But I consoled myself throughout with the thought that ahead of me lay Ireland, and its banquet of literary salons.
Minister, on arrival it took me three hours to get through Dublin Airport, which resembles a collision between Heathrow, Gatwick and Frankfurt. As for my cases, containing all my books, to this day I do not know where they are. My taxi-driver into Dublin was a graduate - or so he told me - of Mountjoy College of Further Education. He charged me €250 for the trip to our embassy in Coolock shopping centre - my entire entertainment budget for the year, gone west.
I was looking forward to wandering into the famous McDaid's, Bailey and Davy Byrne's pubs, where poets gather to discuss metre and assonance in scholarly and mellifluous tones. Minister, I soon learnt that Dublin pubs are like Dublin Airport when there are incoming flights but none outgoing.
And people roar at one another, rather like survivors from a sunken liner shouting for help through the night. This is because Irish pubs have very loud music, and huge television screens so that the staff can endlessly watch English football.
Minister, I am one of the Mjukwu people, renowned for our fearlessness in battle. In my veins runs the blood of King Mbweka, who regularly breakfasted on a lion he had himself killed minutes before with his bare hands, later picking his teeth with the claw of a cheetah he had run to ground. But even I was terrified of the drunken, aggressive crowds surging through Dublin city at around midnight. They do not, I'm afraid, like Africans. Fortunately, I have inherited Mbweka's turn of speed, and I put it to good use. It is, however, a long way back to Coolock: a very long way.
Minister, there are no literary salons in Dublin. None whatever. Indeed, there seems to be little interest in cerebral matters generally. I turned on their television, hoping for panel discussions on the arts, but could find none. Instead, the country is obsessed to the point of dementia with purposeless celebrity. There are programmes and chat-shows of fathomless bathos in which being seen is all: form and content count for nothing. I thought I had witnessed the nadir of banality in what passes for glamour in provincial Peru, but believe me, Minister, that was the Florentine court of the Medicis or Elizabethan London, compared with Irish television.
The strange thing is that even though Ireland has a supposedly vibrant economy, nothing works. Brasilia was built in less time than the Irish are taking to construct a single light urban railway with two just lines. The Dublin Bus timetable is based not on the clock but the calendar. And all day, the traffic is what would you expect if you hosted the World Cup Final and the Super Bowl in the same car-pound in Mexico City.
So I sit in my little embassy bedsit, Minister, night after night, unable to bear the pubs or the streets. I have nothing to read because my books are probably in the Pitcairns, and I wish I were with them. Oh Minister, please consider establishing diplomatic relations with the Kurile Islands or even South Georgia - I have discovered an affinity with penguins, lichen and kelp.
For the most crushing disappointment about Ireland, Minister, has been the weather. I had read so much about Irish mists, and yearned to greet someone with the words, "A soft day, thank God," which would signify that it was, yet again, raining.
Minister, it's a confounded lie. It never rains here, but gets beastly hot, every day, all day, and I can't take the damned heat any more. I'm going mad, Minister, mad. Do you hear me? MAD! Please, please, get me out of here.
- Your faithful servant. . .