FROM THE ARCHIVES:AN UNOFFICIAL ESB strike in 1972 practically closed down the country but revived the art of pub talk, as Dick Walsh noted in this piece.PATSY IS fiftyish, greying, and one would have said an accomplished batchelor [sic] who sat in the pub since telly was invented, watched it with eagle vigilance and got solidly and silently drunk. -
JOE JOYCE
On the first night of the strike, he watched the blank screen for 3½ hours or more and went home before drinking time was up. On the second night, he brought a paper but couldn’t read it because the lights went out. Last night he brought a woman, fiftyish, greying and obviously his wife.
Patsy’s conversation was exactly what I had imagined a pub conversation ought to be, private enough to allow those who didn’t want to be included to ignore it, public enough to allow everyone within hailing distance to enjoy his considerable powers of reasoning and imagination.
The wife, for a start, was missing television. And once she was in the pub she was regretting the fact that she hadn’t brought the Sunday Independent cross-word.
“The cross-word,” said Patsy, with conviction, “is just one permutation after another. It could be ‘cat’, it could be ‘rat’, it could be ‘bat’. How do I know what it is? How do you know? And then the next one could be ‘moat’, it could be ‘boat’, it could be . . . well, it’s like the figure nine.”
Patsy had touched the real conversationalist’s chord. “Nine,” he said, “is a kind of religious number. Nine is more permutations than you can think about. Nine is – nine is the number the poet said. Nine beanrows will I have there . . .”
No matter that everyone else knows Yeats mentioned nine beanrows because the word nine sounded better than, say, eight or forty-five. Because Patsy now had the attention of the bar, which had never heard him say so many words together before and, because he had a conversationalist’s licence.
He called in his mathematical genius to bear witness to the fact that three threes made nine, and God alone knew what you could do with threes . . . the mystery of the Trinity and all that . . . and, well the permutations, something like the clues in the Independent cross-word, were endless.
All of which led to someone telling the story of the erudite eccentric pointing out archaeological remains throughout the country until he came to the village in Tipperary that has won more cross-word prizes than anywhere else, and from there the talks took record leaps over five-bar gates, recalled Pat O’Callaghan and O’Callaghan’s Mills until there were calls for the Guinness Book of Records, Dineen’s Irish dictionary and the book of Irish placenames.
After the weekend, maybe, the telly will be back and Patsy will be silent and the wife will be at home with the cross-word and “Partners in Practice” and we’ll be back to the affairs of State instead of the state of affairs and the art of conversation will be back in Murphy’s fridge until a power strike strikes again.
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