Lamb’s tale still lives on two centuries later

Country Living with Francis Farragher

One of the little regrets I have with working in Galway city is the fact that I can never really ‘take holidays’ in a place that’s associated with the daily grind of what we call work. These days there’s a throb about the city that’s hard to replicate anywhere else but that ‘damn nuisance’ of work prevents us from savouring its delights apart from maybe a half hour around lunchtime.

There’s some kind of psychological barrier present that prevents a man from facing back into a city from ‘the sticks’ in the evening after escaping from the peak hour traffic logjams. Shows, films and plays, that all look so seductive on coloured brochures, seem to lose their lure when the evening snack has been consumed and a rustic wander lust takes over.

Fields, bogs, cattle and dogs always seem to win that internal battle of wills over great shows, plays and strange dancers, while after-work invitations to partake in a few beverages have been jettisoned by a late middle aged fear of blue flashing lights in hot pursuit around Claregalway.

There’s a real envy there too during our lunchtime breakouts from the asylum to witness people with time on their hands, leisurely consuming ‘pints of plain’, outside places like Garavans, the King’s Head and Tí Coiligh’s as a smorgasbord of street musicians, singers and performers earn their daily bread.

Here and there, the big effort will be made to take in a show during the arts festival or a day at The Races, but the effort to escape from the clutches of everyday chores, just seems to take far too much energy and planning.

At times like that, my mind wanders back to a Spartan desk in a classroom at Tuam CBS four decades back where we read the Charles Lamb essay about The Superannuated Man and his forlorn struggle to sample more frequently the pleasures of life to be enjoyed in time-off during the late 1700s and the early 1800s in London town.

In those days, Lamb worked as an office clerk from early ‘til late, Monday through to Saturday, with Sunday his only day of the week to switch off from the world of figures and ledgers. During those more puritan times though, Sundays in London were days of worship and rest where all the normal buzz of the city went into a kind of weekly hibernation, prompting Lamb to observe:

“In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers – the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me.

“The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful – are shut out.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.