Archive News
Hair on your head today Ð in your ears tomorrow
Date Published: 06-Jun-2012
Did you ever wonder just how old our eyebrows were when they decided it was time to shed their perfectly groomed past and grow out like a wild briar at a ninety degree angle to our heads?
Was it the realisation that the hair on the top of our heads was disappearing faster than the icecap – and that the only chance it had of survival was to make a run for it in a new direction? Or did word reach the brows that the ears were suddenly in the game, growing hair like a roadside bush?
You know the sands of time are weighted against you when the barber takes as much care trimming your ears, nose and eyebrows as he does with the area that once was commonly known as your fringe.
And yet so many men refuse to see baldness as the next step along the road – they comb from the back to the front or (a la Bobby Charlton) from way down one side over the top to the other.
That’s all very fine until the wind catches you and you have a sort of poor man’s take on Phil Oakey, the guy from the Human League who deliberately grew his barnet long on one side and short on the other. It isn’t quite as cutting edge when it looks like loose straw in a storm.
Once upon a time, you were told by the teacher to get your hair out of your eyes – now it’s your out-of-control eyebrows that are interfering with what’s left of your ever-fading vision.
You could trim them yourself, of course, but then again you could end up looking like Alan Hanson who appears to have had his tattooed on so that he looks permanently amazed at the smallest of things on Match of the Day.
The problem is that – even if you wanted to take control of your ear, nose and eyebrow hair into your own hands – those trimming devices so commonplace in chemists are about as effective as a spoon.
There’s a bigger danger of tearing the skin from your ears from these trimmers than there is of actually clearing out the gathering fluff. It’s like cutting a high lawn with a stick.
Some Turkish barbers have a way of burning out the ear hair without singeing your ears – although they’d be well advised to tell you what they’re doing before the start because the first time it happened to me, I though the guy had lost the plot and was trying to set fire to my head to save him wasting time on a haircut.
Polite barbers will gently ask you if you’d like to have your eyebrows tended to after the three minutes it took to cut your hair – and you make some joke about it being the only growth area you have left.
Then when they offer to show you the end result of the haircut, you politely decline because you know that the only thing you’ll see in the mirror is your bald spot growing ever more barren around the back.
I’ve found that the biggest problem with increasing baldness is the sun in summer – not that we have much to worry about here on that front – but now when we’re protecting ourselves against carcinogenic rays, we have to put a big blob on the top of the crown. And that invariably leaves you looking like some crack-shot seagull had dumped a huge one right on the top of your head.
More confident men embrace their baldness by shaving off the bits that are left – and indeed many of them look better than ever without a fringe – but most of us agree with Samson; a man without his hair is in danger of losing his strength.
And yet, there are few more ridiculous sights that a bald man with a pony tail – it’s like a shedding dog with some form of mange, and this extension at the back only draws further attention to the absence of any new growth at the front.
But still we don’t want to see the tide go out for good and so we camouflage the crisis, coming up with imaginative ways of trying to hold back time – and really we’d be better off just going out and investing in a big hat.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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