The Congo is not a country nor a continent but the second mightiest river on the earth. The Amazon is given first place but this may not be justified. The Congo has a length of over 3,000 miles and far exceeds in majesty the other two mighty African rivers, the Zambesi and the Nile, but Africa is a ma.s.s of great rivers, hundreds of which are tributaries of the Congo. Those who take pride in the Shannon as a considerable waterway might note that in parts the Congo is eight miles wide and has many islands. One island is 50 miles long and five miles at its widest part.

The mouth of the Congo was discovered by a Portuguese in 1482 and he erected a pillar there to denote Portuguese dominion, but in the succeeding three centuries scarcely anything was done by way of further exploration or inquiry. In 1816 the British sent a mission under Capt. Tuckey, RN, who found the river and pushed some distance up but some African sickness struck the ship. Tuckey and 16 of his men died and the expedition had to go home.

The Congo basin or drainage area is estimated to be 1,425,000 square miles in area and its possibilities were perceived following Livingstone's discoveries by a man of unique imperial ambitions, King Leopold II of Belgium. His intrusions in Africa began in 1878 and that, so to speak, is where we came in.

The Wonderful Doctor.

Dr David Livingstone was a truly incredible person whose feats of travel, endurance and recorded exploration appear to be far outside the capacity of any one man. He was a person of iron const.i.tution and of simple and kindly mind. He was daunted by nothing.

He was born in Lanarkshire in 1813 of poor parents and entered a cotton mill at the age of ten but persisted in a plan of self-education, got eventually to Glasgow and then London where he took a medical degree. His sole ambition was to spread the Gospel in heathen lands and in 1838 he joined the London Missionary Society; he was sent to Africa and went to Bechua.n.a.land where another missionary had set up a station 20 years before. From this centre he started explorations for the seat of another and chose a place 200 miles away, where he built a shack. Here he was attacked by a lion and had his left arm badly injured and so it was to remain for the rest of his life. Here, in a savage land where the natives had never seen a white face and where wild beasts roamed, he sent for his wife.

After two years' missionary work here, he moved with some companions on considerable journeys, his idea being to do pioneering work for missionaries who would follow, recording likely places for new stations and keeping journals which were to be the first real geographic and hydrographic deposit knowledge of Africa. One journey on which he followed the Zambesi to its mouth took two and a half years and enabled the filling in of large tracts of Africa which on the map up till then had been a blank. In 1856 he returned to England very emaciated after his first African stint of 16 years.

On Good Terms.

He parted on very good terms with the Missionary Society, for he had now decided that his first duty was to do something about the appalling Arab slave-trading activities he had seen. He took office as Her Majesty's honorary consul in Africa and led an expedition to the Zambesi on HMS Pearl, and was joined by his wife and lady missionaries. The geographical fruits of the expedition were enormous, for the intrepid Livingstone penetrated to regions never before seen by a white man. A third expedition, begun in 1865, began with a formidable outfit of sepoys, men, boys, camels, buffaloes, mules and donkeys but the indomitable doctor's urge to keep going forward meant that this retinue had soon dwindled to four boys. He lost his milch goats and his medical chest was stolen so that when fever struck, he was helpless. But he still kept going, staggering or being carried, and at one point received help from Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald through H. M. Stanley.

On May 1, 1873, his boys found 'the great master' kneeling at his bed, dead. He was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

The question of black.

A theme that continues to excite me (and incite me) is the hostility, in certain parts of the world, to coloured people. That phrase 'coloured people' does not make sense apart from denoting that the people are of skin not white. What is the virtue of being white, aside from the well-known judgement that accidents of climate have made for white dominance, and that an ascendancy in technological matters makes it easy for the white man to be boss of the black man?

Would the black man, if populationally ascendent, take steps to make white citizens outcasts? Personally, I don't think so. White people have too many skills to make that sort of segregation possible in a mixed modern community, and those skills seem to be matters, not of personal attainment, but of traditional achievement through trial and error. I have never heard of a negro designing or making a workable motor car but this is not to say that he is incapable of the feat; I feel it means that his interests are elsewhere. Could Henry Ford produce the Book of Kells? Certainly not. He would quarrel initially with the advisability of such a project and then prove it was impossible. Yet it wasn't.

But Those Shoes?.

Intrinsically there is nothing wrong with a pair of shoes, properly cared for. They distinguish the gentleman or at least the person who wants to be listed in that cla.s.s. They carry, however, no guarantees at all. All accomplished crooks are well-dressed and there is a certain risk in being impeccable.

Some people, usually of literary leanings, prefer dirty shoes and suits, unspeakable shirts, and hats that intrude into the area of legend. Perhaps I am wrong but I doubt whether a portrait or paragraph of praise ever appeared in Vogue about the late James Joyce. (Now that I think of it, that magazine has never praised myself, perhaps a more serious offence against justice.) This bad temper on my part was induced by a piece which appeared recently in a Dublin paper, sent to it from London. Read it yourself: One of the features of London is the army, or so it seems to be, of boot-blacks who ply their trades outside and in such places as Leicester Square. For a shilling, these men will bring the dullest shoes to gleaming perfection. Today in the Hay market, a tall gentleman, complete with pinstripe suit, bowler hat and umbrella, strolled up to a boot-black to have his shoes cleaned. In a moment he was surrounded by a party of at least 100 German tourists, who, never having seen anything like it before, proceeded to take pictures from all angles. The boot-black was pleased, but the elegant gentleman seemed completely oblivious to the goings-on around him.

I hope you do not think it funny. For my own part I feel that it is deeply scandalous; it is also incorrect, tendentious and liable to inflame the pa.s.sions of people who like to look well in the street or those who just have to. n.o.body is going to hand 1,000 to a shabby tramp. Yet who are those people who in London, accoutred with bowler hat and umbrella, dare leave their houses or hotels wearing clean shirts but filthy foot-wear? I think that is a fair question. If they are married men, it seems that their wives refuse to undertake an elementary household ch.o.r.e. If they are visitors in some hotel, it suggests that they have been too lazy or drunk to put their shoes outside the bedroom door on the preceding evening. Any way you look at it, they seem to be thoroughly worthless people.

Cleaning and polishing a pair of male shoes is perhaps the simplest job man can undertake, yet he won't do it, though he thinks nothing at all about uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g eight plugs from his car, cleaning them and adjusting the points. He is quite unconcerned about his own spawgs, though they are far more visible and conspicuous than plugs under a bonnet.

In Dublin I remember the day it was surely 25 years ago when about a dozen boot-blacks pursued their trade in College Green in Dublin and under the portico of the Bank of Ireland facing College Street. I was too young and too poor at the time to give them my custom and in any case I think I wore slippers just then. But I could not help noticing them and their uniformly villainous appearance. Men of that type, I concluded, could not possibly be engaged in cleaning other people's shoes. Clearly they were spies German, British, Irish; some looked bad enough to be serving all those three world powers simultaneously. According to the cutting I have quoted, they have moved to Leicester Square, London, and are now spying for the Russians.

Versatility has always been an Irish virtue.

Let me admit in conclusion that on this whole subject I may be deeply prejudiced. You see, I wear brown shoes and have, in practice, no use at all for boot-blacks. In any case, Sarah cleans my shoes every night. Sarah is my landlady. She knows her duties.

Consequences of having a cigarette I was standing in the shadow of a great cathedral wall in the days of my youth in company with another cub reporter. Why were we called cubs? My dictionary, in its very rare attempts at cracking jokes, follows up the word CUB with this, in brackets: '(Etymology unknown)'.

But that doesn't matter. More wide-awake than myself, the other cub nudged me and said: 'Better dowse that cigarette. Here's the bishop.'

We were covering a Confirmation ceremony and there is not much to write about concerning that, for the Church is immutable and is ignored by the Daily Express.

The bishop completely ignored both of us.

'How well,' I said savagely, 'that thing at my feet looks. It's not a b.u.t.t but half a cigarette. For all the attention His Lordship paid, we might as well have been smoking cigars. Or long hookah pipes.'

'Aw shut up. Smoking is very bad for you, anyway.'

Are You a Dowser?

Yet out of an ill thing good comes. That phrase 'Dowse that cigarette' stayed in my mind. I thought the verb was incorrectly used and consulted my books of reference, my main idea being, I think, to tell off this unmannerly companion. But I forgot that little grudge when a new world opened before my eyes. True dowsing is nearly supernatural. If you dowse you are beside the gates of heaven, and the word has nothing to do with cigarettes or the equally poisonous activity of working for newspapers.

Dowse is a word I have overlooked, perhaps because it has an enormous number of local slang equivalents. If one used some of them in mixed company, one might be accused of using bad language and told to leave. If only for that reason, I will forbear giving here a list of the equivalent words. But in usage the word dowse is largely misunderstood, or at least adequately ununderstood. Those who know the word think it is the cunning art of discovering water under the ground by some system of intuition that borders on witchcraft (for which gift decent women used to be roasted alive). My own dictionary, an expensive but notoriously infirm compilation, tells me that a 'dowsing rod' is 'a name for the divining rod' but is starkly silent as to what dowsing is or, indeed, divining. I suppose that so long as there are people in the world, they will publish dictionaries defining what is unknown in terms of something equally unknown. I am personally convinced that Einstein's sums were wrong and that his atom bomb is a myth. Who will blast me out of my complacency? The British needed 100,000 tons of German bombs to blast them out of theirs.

But let us get back to this strange word dowse.

The Great Gift Dowsing takes its place with soothsaying, curing sick cows by looking at them, and putting a curse on a fellow man. The persons who do that sort of thing and they are mercifully scarce in towns and cities do not know where power comes from, why they are thus endowed, but they do know that what they say, be it good or ill, will happen.

Dowsing has that quality. I once spent a term in the Department of Local Government, inhabited at the time mostly by the sons of peasants. The local authority would write asking for permission to pay a gammy, bent, old man to find water. But they were down-faced by what we call (for want of a better word) Education. 'You ought to be aware,' they were sternly told, 'that the modern method of finding is by a geological survey.' A Consulting Engineer had to be got, given twenty-five guineas plus travelling expenses, and his carefully-typed report explained that there was absolutely no water in the county. The local engineer would splutter: 'That dirty tramp up the road in a condemned cottage would find enough water in ten minutes to flood Lough Erin and they wouldn't let me hire him. I'm afraid there is no future for the hazel twig in the Customs House!'

That Twig One fallacy about dowsing is that the twig or bough must be of hazel. Provided the article is small and flexible, any tree will serve. The important part of it is the man holding it, and about him I can give no description or explanation. The man with this gift of divination is usually very ignorant, occasionally illiterate. Normally he is ignorant of the nature of his trust, and regards it as a bit of a laugh. The ancient Irish attributed great wisdom and insights to the seventh son of a seventh son. Your water-diviner does not bother about genealogy. 'You want to find water?' he says bluntly. 'OK. Give me a few quid and I'll find it within 50 yards of your house.' The terrifying thing is that he does just that.

But my own interest in this theme is broader. The miracle Irishman is narrow-minded and thinks of nothing but water. In fact oil, gold and dead bodies can be discerned.

The word 'dowse' is of Cornish origin, and therefore Celtic. It may seem silly to picture Sherlock Holmes going out for a walk carrying a strange walking stick but if he did so he might solve his mysteries quicker.

A very strange case indeed Here is a curious news item which the reader may have seen but which I reproduce to jolt the memory: The largely Scottish settlement of Invercargill, New Zealand, is up in arms. Some unscrupulous character between Britain and Invercargill, the world's southernmost city, has jeopardised the citizens' supply of life blood.

Ten cases, part of a consignment unloaded from the Sydney Star at the city's Port Bluff, contained bricks instead of whisky.

Somewhere between the distilleries in Scotland and the last port of call Liverpool the whisky bottles had been removed and each case replaced with bricks of an equal weight and neatly packed in straw. New Zealand customs officials are satisfied that the switch did not take place in New Zealand. The bricks are of a type not manufactured in New Zealand.

The switch had the hallmarks of a professional.

I feel several comments are called for here. Did not the agents who received the consignment act rather hastily? How did they know that those bricks were not whiskey? I'm serious. I am sure it is possible to change liquor into a solid form with, of course, a process for reliquifying it if desired ( though, indeed, what's wrong with eating one's booze? A good plate of whiskey and chips might startle our tourists at first but ultimately attract them here in hordes). It is a fact that the fabulous rockets which now traverse s.p.a.ce are powered by solid fuel, and it is pretty certain that domestic alcohol can be solidified also. That apart, I am sure that teetotallars will agree that a genuine brick is far more valuable than a bottle of whiskey. If one had enough of them, one could build a house. Who ever heard of a house being built with whiskey bottles? I have heard of houses being brought to ruinous decay with them.

We Should Experiment In this country we have chemical and physical research bodies, in the universities and elsewhere, and I do think they should be asked to investigate the possibility of converting spirits and even beers into solid concentrates. What is called proof spirit is roughly half pure alcohol and half water. I imagine this water would have to be ignored and the alcohol only changed into cubes of the size, say, of sugar lumps. A person with a whiskey lump could thus, by liquifying it in water just as one melts sugar, have a drink of whatever potency he fancied.

Such factors as bottling, transportation, storage s.p.a.ce, warehousing and breakages add materially to the price of whiskey as we know it. The cube system would practically eliminate them all.

And no doubt the new system would bring about many social changes. Reckless fellows would enter a cafe, order a large black coffee, and quietly drop perhaps half a whiskey cube into it, meditatively stir the cup, and then imbibe. There you would have 'Irish Coffee' with a vengeance! And the cubes could probably be sucked in bed, like sweets.

Also, the whole structure and appearance of pubs would change, becoming perhaps like modest chemist's shops, or beauty parlours. But customers would not be long in getting used to going in and asking for half a pound of whiskey, please. And at festive times it would be seemly to have the cubes on offer in attractive containers, like boxes of chocolates, with a view of the lakes of Killarney or a pretty girl on the lid.

We are too stick-in-the-mud on this subject of liquor. Many drugs can be taken in solid form per os or be injected in liquid form. Our present whiskey can be injected, of course, but we should also have the alternative of whiskey tablets, to be swallowed with a draught of water.

A Strange Thief The pa.s.sage I have quoted above presents another oddity. a.s.suming the bricks were not whiskey bricks despatched experimentally by the distillery and were ordinary bricks subst.i.tuted by the thief for the bottles he stole, why did he bother? It must indeed have been a very troublesome procedure. We are told that the bricks were the same weight as the bottles. This would put the operator to the tedious labour of touring builders' suppliers and construction companies' yards in search of bricks of a specific weight. That alone could be dangerous, even if he was not so foolhardy as to produce a bottle of Scotch and say that he wanted a brick 'of that weight'. My own procedure would be to weigh a bottle carefully and then, quietly at home, make my own concrete block of identical avoirdupois. This method, apart from being safer and trouble-saving, would be far cheaper. Ten cases were filled with bricks instead of whiskey, and that means 120 bricks. I do not know what a good builder's brick costs but if we a.s.sume 6d, we are faced with an initial charge of 3. That's plain extravagance.

'The switch,' the report says, 'had the hallmarks of a professional.' Aye, and a very fastidious one. Note that the bricks were neatly packed in straw. Probably he remembered from his schooldays that you cannot have bricks without straw!

Waiting for the imprimatur Last Friday night I staggered into the machine hall of a Dublin newspaper, clutching a bottle. 'Have a drink, my hearties!' I roared. The men gathered round me holding cups intended for tea and I duly distributed my largesse. Then I began to sing: 'Press the b.u.t.ton and let her hum, Yo Hoe Hoe and a bottle of rum!'

For the benefit of the lay reader, I should explain that Hoe is the name of the makers of practically every rotary printing machine in the country.

Nearly every hardship has its concomitant softship. Even influenza, bleak visitation as it is, enables you to loaf luxuriously in bed with a fire in the grate, savour costly hot drinks (with scalding rum at night) and have friends calling to bring you interesting magazines. The younger members of the family stop pestering you for money.

The recent fortnight-long shutdown of the Dublin newspapers was not an unmitigated curse, though it did lead to some queer complaints. One lady said to me resentfully that she had nothing to light the fire with.

In the Home The stoppage caused certain social changes. One thing it discontinued was the Frigid Breakfast. Here the Husband had the morning paper propped up against the tea cosy, glaring into it in utter silence and completely ignoring the Wife. In the evening occurred Sundown Sulks.

The Husband brings home the evening paper which the Wife is very anxious to see. He reads it at his meal, afterwards collapses into a chair by the fire and continues reading it for three hours. This makes the Wife thoroughly cranky. At the end of three hours when it is nearly time for bed, he flings the paper down in disgust.

'Not a d.a.m.n thing in that paper,' he mutters.

But look at the subject another way. For those accused of breaking the law the non-appearance of the papers was a bonanza. The court on conviction imposes a penalty and takes no account of the often greater penalty involved in having one's name in the papers.

n.o.body has any sympathy with a person found guilty of having been drunk in charge of a car, even possibly killing somebody. Pa.s.sing dud cheques indicates not only a criminal tendency but is proof that the guilty party is a total failure in life, too lazy or incompetent to get a job, and is almost certainly a drunk. One stops asking such a person to the game of cards on Sunday night. Breaking and entering a lock-up shop and stealing cigarettes value 75 and 39412 cash is a truly bad show hardly mitigated by proof that the accused comes from a most respectable family. A bank clerk convicted of stealing 4,662 may get some sympathy (for everybody hates the banks) but it is unlikely that he will get another job.

Yet all that sort of thing was going on every day while the newspaper offices stood dark and mum, and n.o.body was a whit the wiser. The disorderly cla.s.ses felt strangely happy and even on the civil side, unseemly litigation between relatives over a will went on, so to speak, in private.

Have We Too Much?

During the stoppage some people complained that their friends were dying and that they knew nothing about it. Well, I don't know that that is so hurtful. Funerals are miserable affairs and mere attendance at one will not bring the bold segocia back to life.

But one cannot help wondering whether we allow the newspaper to take far too big and dominant a place in our lives. Reading newspapers can be an addiction and a neurosis. No other words can explain the pitiful condition of the man who buys several newspapers every day, or those who condoned by purchase the black market which sprang up immediately in London papers, when the Daily Mail and Daily Express were freely sold out at sixpence per copy.

Let's talk about water A prosaic subject, you say? Dull? Not at all, but fascinating and strange.

Take a look at the map of the world. It is nearly all water. It is literally true that there is water everywhere, whether in liquid, solid or gaseous disguise. Water is essential for the support of all vegetable and animal life. Apart from being thus essential, it is in human affairs most useful as a solvent and a catalyst. One way or another nearly all water comes from the sea.

Leaving the world aside, take a look at the map of Ireland. It is a small country, surrounded by the sea. Moreover, internally it is waterlogged. It contains an enormous number of rivers, great lakes and those quasi-lakes known as bogs. With water so ubiquitous and plentiful, it might be supposed that the Irish people would have fish as their staple diet, possibly more so than the Eskimos. In fact, however, fish consumption in Ireland is among the lowest in the world.

Penny Herrings I have never heard any satisfactory explanation of this queer fact beyond one man's emphatic declaration that the Irish simply don't like fish. I do not find that convincing. In the days of my youth in Dublin, the suburban roads resounded with the banshee shrieks of women selling herrings from door to door every Friday morning. For how much? One penny each. And they were fresh herrings, delightful to eat if properly cooked, except for the nuisance of the bones.

How about freshwater fish? To my surprise I find that there are shops here and there where brown trout may be had. I have tried a few from time to time and can certify that they are not fresh: they bear the unmistakable stigmatum of the 'frig.

I like fresh salmon but did not have any this year so far. As I write, the price is 21/- per lb.

Nature of Water The purest form of water known is snow, and rain the next purest, though rain contains dissolved gases in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, nitrates, sulphates and ammonia. Those who use rainwater for washing or even drinking find it delightfully soft, almost gentle. And so it is.

What is commonly known as hard water contains salts of calcium and magnesium. Those whose business brings them occasionally to London know all about hard water. A man finds it almost impossible to wash himself or shave, yet Londoners themselves seem to be unaware of their permanent sad plight. And to be fair to them, they do seem duly washed and shaved. A great many of them live, of course, in 'suburbs' which can be as far away as 30 miles from the centre and possibly have a decent local supply.

Water Everywhere I read recently somewhere that to sustain life, a man must have a daily minimum water intake of two quarts. Most people ridicule this a.s.sertion and can prove it is wrong by reciting precisely how much water, or near-water, they do actually consume every day. They have three cups of tea in the morning, three more in the evening and perhaps a bottle of stout at lunch time. How could that build up to two quarts?

The facts will indicate that the matter is not so simple. First, man himself is 80 per cent water; second, if he gets absolutely no water for three days, he will die. In fact there is water everywhere, even in the hard black coal one puts in the fire.

Take whole milk straight from the cow. The water content of the milk is 87 per cent. You are very fond, of course, of a good sirloin steak after a long cross-country tramp. 60 per cent of it is water. The water content of an egg is 74 per cent. By its very name the watermelon is suspect. Its water content is 92.4 per cent. Naturally, fruit bulges with water. The percentage contained by a peach is 89.4 The cod fish may seem a sound and solid character but 82.6 per cent of him is water.

Weakness for Whiskey Have you a strong weakness for whiskey? If so, the situation here is quite interesting. You order a gla.s.s and put 4/- on the counter. Exactly what is the beaker of yellow stuff that is placed before you?

What is legally defined as proof spirit is roughly 50/50 alcohol and water. It is in that form that spirits are matured in bond. Most whiskeys are now sold at a strength of 30 under proof, which means that 80 per cent of what you are given in your gla.s.s is water. With the gla.s.s you are given a jug of water. You slosh plenty of this water into the whiskey, bringing the aggregate of water to 90 or even 95 per cent.

True, it is nearly impossible to avoid absorbing water in one form or another. But are you quite sane to be paying four shillings for a modest glasheen of it?

Contemplate the spud!

Discerning readers will be pleased, I hope, that I have not called it 'the humble tuber'.

There is a new word at large, ever oftener to be seen in the newspapers and in the chairman's annual report on the affairs of big and famous companies. It is DIVERSIFICATION. It is not to be confused with, though often allied to, those other disturbing terms TAKE-OVER and MERGER.

In mercantile matters, diversification is a new affirmation of the ancient truth that it is unwise to carry all one's eggs in one basket. The older and more honoured firms, for generations a.s.sociated with one product and now financially prosperous, have decided that there is no good reason why they should not also engage in manufactures quite other.

A Good Example The firm of Guinness is a good example. For nearly two centuries they were world famous for making brown stout. Their first small departure was in marketing Gye, a yeast extract. In recent years they have begun brewing ale and lager in a big way. They have fused with the British brewers Ind Coope, apparently mostly for the reason that Guinness will have access to the thousands of 'tied houses' that concern operates in Britain. All that is within the drink business. But Guinness have also entered into a sort of partnership with a big drug firm. They also make furniture and (believe it or not, for this sounds like whimsy, with the bells of Santa Claus's reindeer sounding faintly in the distance) they own the firm of Callard and Bowser, the famous Scottish makers or inventors? of b.u.t.terscotch. In a less industrial mood, the firm also subsidises the writing of poetry. This type of development is enormously widespread. The Glaxo firm, who began with making a baby food in a small way, is now a giant among the manufacturers of drugs and pharmaceutical products. I am not sure that the people who produce Beechams Pills do not also make motor cars.

The Sugar Daddy The Irish Sugar Company, a quasi-State concern, has taken it into its head that there is more to life than merely making sugar. For some time now they have been engaged in promoting the growing of fruit by farmers for canning, with a special eye on the export market.

The latest announcement has been that the company is installing at Tuam a plant for the manufacture of potato flakes and that it expects to be in a position to process 5,000 tons of potatoes this year. Potato flakes? I had never heard the term and at first took it to be a gentlemanly name for crisps, so widely sold in paper bags over the counters of pubs and other refuges. But no. It is a way with potatoes recently patented in the US and the official announcement says that the process 'results in a product giving high-grade mashed potato by the addition only of hot water, milk and b.u.t.ter'. Not for the first time, I confess that I am a bit mystified by the notions of my betters. Is there something wrong with the century-old fashion of boiling potatoes, mashing them, impregnating the mash with parsley and serving piping hot with b.u.t.ter? Must the most familiar and durable food on earth also be 'processed' and, in Ireland particularly, should it be served with stewed steak marketed in cans?

I cannot repress a strong suspicion that in the whole spectrum of human food, the laboratory technicians are going off their heads, aiming at the day when all eatables will be treated and interfered with in some way and that the ultimate aim is to make the cultivation of the little garden at home illegal. Even the water in the tap in Dublin is not safe; violent controversy rages over a proposal by the Department of Health to compel the Corporation to charge the water with fluorine, a chemical denounced by many world authorities as c.u.mulative in effect and often proved lethal.

Our Staple Food In Ireland for some centuries now the potato has been the fundamental, nonperishable food for man and beast and has become, indeed, an ingredient of Irish history. n.o.body can say when the potato reached Ireland or even Europe; the old Irish records make no mention of it, grains being the basic root crop. The potato as we know it (not the sweet potato) seems to have been indigenous in South America and from there reached North America. Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with having brought the potato to Britain and thus to Ireland from Virginia in 1585, but it was unknown in Virginia until a century later.

Not total shortage of food, for food was being exported at the time, but the failure of the potato crop caused the famine in 1846/7, which in effect means that millions of the Irish people were in fact living on potatoes, and proving to be physically fine and long-lived specimens. In the vitamin-infested paradise of chemistry, this fact tends to be ignored. The disease was a fungoid visitation known as late blight. If one takes a global and serial concept of human destiny, the famine here, despite its horrors, was not an unmixed disaster. It accelerated the growth of the New World and the spread of this country's name and influence everywhere.

The farmer or the modest gardener who grows this most handy food is often quite unaware of the astonishing number of enemies the potato plant has. There are virus diseases (mild, latent and rugose mosaic, leaf roll, spindle tuber and yellow dwarf); fungus diseases (early blight, late blight, scab, fusaria, black scurf, wart); bacterial diseases (blackleg, brown and ring rot) and heavens! insects. Ever hear of the Colorado Beetle? But I am straying into the parish of Colleague Lea.

The written word In this season of thought and recollection I think I will write about writing. It may seem a silly subject but it is far from that. In fact writing is very important. As they say in Latin, the written word remains. Generally this is not true of the spoken word. But if the spoken word is repeated often enough, it is eventually written and thus made permanent or in the photographer's sense, 'fixed' for good. Many a decent man who has written a bad cheque knows the truth of that.

A great many people who perhaps have not given the subject much thought are quite mistaken on this subject of literacy, or the ability to read and write. Nowadays nearly everybody can do that, yet this universal competence is scarcely a century old. And indeed I must withdraw that word 'universal'. The last competent estimate made said that 60 per cent of the world's population (or 820,000,000 persons) were illiterate. A side-detail is that in any illiterate community, far more females than males have that bookless failing. There are still enormous tracts of this earth to which what we call democracy has not penetrated, and where 'equality of the s.e.xes' would be regarded as a painful joke.

Yet that situation is not uniformly glum. Writing, typing, mechanical dictation or even printing does not necessarily confer wisdom on that character who calls himself h.o.m.o sapiens. Sometimes one or other of those arts merely proves that he is an a.s.s. I am sure our venerable Censorship Board will bear me out there. Their point is that it is a pity he never learnt the other art of shutting up.

Does the Press Impress?

This subject is recondite, even mysterious. Before people who can claim to be reasonably civilised learnt to read and write, and certainly long before they had been suborned into taking notice of that chatterbox, the radio set, they had other resources now long fallen into disuse. They had impeccable memories. They could buy or sell a beast at a fair with absolutely nothing in writing. It may be that they could not read or understand a word on the bank notes which changed hands, but anybody who tried to speak decorously and decently, knew their prayers, and had always an acute political sense. Even if they are so backward as to be able to make nothing of the figures on the calendar on the wall, too well they know the day of the week it is, the year and even the century. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is not too far ahead of them at all.

A handy example of this phenomenon is still to be found in Ireland, though the sinister National Schools tend to erode it. I mean the Gaeltacht areas which still tenuously survive here. Far from being an insult, it is a compliment to say that the really older people are illiterate; yet they can speak accurately, frequently with a strange felicity, which is probably the most highly inflected language still spoken in Europe (or anywhere else for that matter) and can recite tales which take a week of nights in the telling. They do not appear to the stranger to be under any disability. Even when they catch some sickness which they rarely do usually they do not have to send for a doctor. They know the cure, too, horrified though the doctor might be if he heard what it was. These utterly self-sufficient mammals are gradually disappearing, even from the ruder and braver parts of our country. Thanks be to goodness, we have still a good way to go before we are in the same shape as the good people of Britain, where it was discovered, on the introduction of socialised medicine, that nearly everybody was sick.

The Print Drug It would be an interesting task for some indefatigable researcher (not me, not today) to try to investigate the effect of the printed word on any given country's political and social norm. In Germany Hitler's initial impact on the people was not with revolvers, machine-guns or nooses but with fountain pen and typewriter. He knew that the mind was a more important target than the body at the beginning, though, as one who at the start, and equipped with doubtful German, gingerly made my way through Mein Kampf, I kept wondering whether he was trying to bulldoze the nation or reform it. He was by no means the first demagogue, however, to be incoherent.

This subject of writing has recently been otherwise in the news. A group of Protestant divines in Britain have issued a 'modern' re-write of the New Testament. I confess I have not read it but have seen several extracts from the text in responsible London papers denouncing it. One witty commentator recalled that Hamlet had not been written by any committee. This remark is more apt than may at first appear, for if the English of the Bible as heretofore accepted is archaic, how about Shakespeare himself? Should Robert Graves, the new Professor of English at Oxford, re-write Hamlet or, as the Americans might say, louse it up? Or why not put Homer's work into the broken-up jargon that is modern Greek?

The foregoing is a rather elaborate way of revealing that I have just written a book myself. That may give the reader some notion of how disoccupied I am. I did this job, on top of sundry other ch.o.r.es, in exactly eight weeks, and I claim that that alone is evidence of considerable industry.

Will it be published? Yes indeed, possibly this year. What is it about? That question is foolish. We modern writers have moved away from the ancient idea that a book must be about something. What do you expect to get for your fifteen bob anyway? A scheme for growing tomatoes in window boxes? How to make your own TV set? Heavens a plot?

Those decent folk my friends Are your friends as good as MY friends? I can discern the nod of a.s.sent but doubt it. My own friends are far better, they are famous people and they are all dead.

Who, you may ask, are those friends of mine, and why are they dead?

It is a fair question. They are dead because, had they lived, they would have been very old and would have died anyway from extreme old age and decrepitude.

One of my friends is Shakespeare.