De Profundis

When I was in Paris in April I took a guided tour of Père-Lachaise cemetery, so of course I visited the imposing resting place of Oscar Wilde.

Our tour guide quoted Oscar, "je n'ai rien d'autre à déclarer que mon génie", which baffled some people on the tour who only came for Jim Morrison.

I hadn't thought about Wilde for many a year, though I'm very familiar with most of his work: Salomé, An Ideal Husband, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and especially The Importance of Being Earnest which I studied for my Leaving Cert and can still quote at length. The one work I'd never engaged with was De Profundis, the long letter he wrote in prison.

A few days later I visited the Pantheon, just out of general interest as I'd never been. There was an exhibition there about the life of Robert Badinter, the French politician who removed the death penalty from the French penal code and decriminalised homosexuality. I learned that Badinter was a fan of Wilde, and that he wrote a play based on De Profundis, decrying the injustice of Wilde's imprisonment. 

Back home, I caught up with my favourite literary podcast Backlisted, re-running one of their old episodes. Stephen Fry joined Andy Miller and John Mitchinson to discuss...De Profundis. It was a brilliant discussion. Fry can sometimes get on my wick with his incessant hamming up, but here he was erudite and even humble as he discussed Wilde, his literary hero.

It was clear what I had to do next. Andy recommended the audio book of De Profundis, read by Simon Russell Beale, and I thoroughly enjoyed it and wondered at its insightfulness. Like this:

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going.  They can’t know.  In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge.  But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.  The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?  

Sadly, Wilde's insights didn't lead him to any kind of salvation, but his pathetic destitution in Paris doesn't take anything away from the truths he told through his art.

When I was in Dublin a few weeks later I paid my respects at his statue in Merrion Square, a few footsteps from the house where he was born.

Am I an award-winning writer?

Well a few months ago I wondered here if I should call myself a writer at all. Then I found out that I was an award-winning writer: I won the 2025 Cúirt New Writing Fiction Prize.

www.cuirt.ie

When I first began writing short stories just four years ago I devoured many collections in order to understand the form and appreciate its subtleties. One of the collections I most enjoyed was Dance Move by the outstanding Belfast writer Wendy Erskine, so I was completely gobsmacked when in her capacity as the prize's judge she wrote this about my winning story Deconstruction:

Complex relationship with a lightness of touch, I loved this story with its brilliantly judged dialogue. Who knew that an IKEA furniture forum could be mined for such gold?

I was floating on air after reading that and receiving her congratulations on BlueSky.

So there I was in Galway last week, reading my story at the Cúirt festival in the company of six brilliant writers. 

I'm still floating on air.

Nerfed

It's almost five years since the first lockdown of the pandemic. Five years!

I was lucky, privileged, and got through it easier than so many, though it was a challenging time for my sons. No school, no organized sports, no interaction with their friends, and too much time in front of phones and gaming consoles. The youngest had just turned twelve and I struggled for ideas to get him out of the house and moving. 

One part of the solution was Pokémon Go.

The tables were turned: he was the master, me the student. We walked on every blade of grass in Girouard park and along every boulevard, chemin, and ruelle of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, hunting the little critters. The game design was brilliant: the more you walked, the better the Pokémon you found, walk further and the Pokémon you'd caught became stronger (known in the lingo of the app as 'training').

Over time I became even more absorbed by the game than he did (I'm now a level 40 Pokémon trainer, just sayin'), but it's still "one of our things" that we share. Back in the day, the strongest Pokémon for battling other trainers was a Galarian Stunfish and I caught a beautiful three-star example in 2021. I walked 1250 kilometers with it, most of them with my son beside me.

Last week my Stunfish finally powered up to its maximum value, a CP of 2474, and I was proud to show it to him. But strangely, it kept getting defeated easily in trainer battles. He did a quick check on a fan webpage.

'It's been nerfed,' he said, laughing. 

'What does that mean?'

'It was too strong in battles, so they weakened it. It used to rank 5 out of 5, but now, you won't believe it Dad, it's 0 out of 5.' He laughed again. This was clearly hilarious for anyone who hadn't walked his Stunfish for 1250 kilometers. 

'That was a lot of bloody walking for nothing,' I said.

'Those were good times Dad,' he said, smiling. 'Besides, you'll probably get a blog post out if it.'

A nerfed Galarian Stunfisk

Am I a writer?

In the Canada Writes Facebook group there was a debate recently about the definition of a writer, and there were opposing views. 'Anyone who writes,' said one group. 'Au contraire,' said the second group. 'That's an "aspiring writer". A writer is someone whose writing has appeared in a publication that has an editor, selection criteria, and other quality controls.' (i.e. self-publishing doesn't count).

Why do I care?  

Well, I'm not a software development leader anymore (so I no longer have much use for my LinkedIn account).

But I've had five stories published by reputable literary magazines, with a sixth one on the way. And I've been paid real money for some of this writing (though if I divided the fee by the time I spent on the piece the hourly rate would be hilariously small!)

So today, this nineteenth of November in the year twenty twenty-four, I'm putting a stake in the ground: I am a writer.

You can find my writing at my new website, LaurenceWrites.com. I'll continue to use this blog for occasional musings and diary entries.

The Truth and The Reckoning

In Isabelle Picard's podcast series L'autre motié de l'histoire, she interviews the Algonquin Elder and University of Ottawa professor Claudette Commanda, who has problems with the word reconciliation in the phrase Truth and Reconciliation that is used ad nauseum by the Canadian government. Firstly, she says, we skip over the first part, the truth, far too easily. Secondly, the idea of reconciliation as a kind of forgiveness is alien to the cultures of the First Nations. They recognise reparation, not reconciliation. She suggests a hybrid word: reconcili-Action.

In Camille Rankine's poetry podcast series The Glimpse there's an interview with the poet John Murillo who describes how he loves the word 'reckoning' in its sense of evaluation and final judgement. This strikes me as apt for the situation of the First Nations in Canada. We, the colonialists, must discover and confront the truth, and after that there must be a reckoning for and by us.

It's not going to be easy, and we're not going to like all of it. But that's how it is with justice. 

Courage

In 1980, abortion was a major topic in Ireland. The public debate was not, as you might have expected, about legalizing it, but on whether the existing ban should be reinforced constitutionally, to the point where there could never be a possibility of allowing it, no matter the consequences for women. The rights of women were a non-issue in that country for old men.

I was a teenager then, attending a Dublin school for boys run by the Christian Brothers, and the ethos of the Catholic Church ran deep in me. Unhappily. I was a fervent anti-abortionist, as were the other thirty or so boys in my class.  Our German teacher was a young woman from the west of Ireland, and one morning she brought a newspaper into the class with an article about abortion and proceeded to debate us. For the next hour she held her ground against us, advocating for a woman's right to choose, in the face of thirty holier-than-thou little pricks. When we couldn't win the argument through logic, we resorted to shouting her down. But though she had tears in her eyes she remained calm, explaining why we were wrong. 

In the Ireland of the 1980s her views would have been considered outrageous, and unacceptable for a teacher. If any of us had told the school principal Brother Kenny about this debate, not only would she have been fired instantly, she would never have been allowed to teach anywhere in Ireland again.

The thirty of us acted like young fools that day, but at least I can say that none of us reported her. Now, more than forty years later, I know very well how wrong I was. Her courage in debating us that morning was remarkable. I've tried many times to find her, to say exactly this and to apologise to her, but I've never been able to locate her.

Ireland changed with the repeal of the 8th amendment to the constitution in 2018. In the long run she won the argument, convincingly and courageously.

Coláiste Caoímhín CBS on Parnell Road in Dublin, the Jewish
cemetery on Aughavanagh Road in the upper left background.
(Photo source unknown). The school was demolished in 1995.

Confession

I have a confession to make. On Saint Patrick's Day, of all days. 

(Deep breath.)

I like cricket.

I like its deep pointlessness. 

I like to fall asleep in the dead of winter knowing that The Ashes is being played in searing Australian sunshine, and that the innings will build while I’m asleep. Or there’ll be a batting collapse, and somewhere in England in the dead of night a journalist is sipping coffee, trying not to wake their young child, typing an over-by-over commentary of what they see on their TV to inform people like me around the world with wit and wisdom. 

And then there are articles, like this one by Robert McLiam Wilson, where a writer says something profoundly important about the world by writing about cricket.

Cricket. Bloody hell. 

Published!

It doesn't mean much in the world of literature, but it means a lot to me: two of my pieces, Memento Mori and Homing, have been published in the online magazine Sky Island Journal. 

I've been writing fiction and poetry for two and a half years now, and this is motivation for me to keep on writing and to submit more of my pieces for publication. It feels good.

Talk to the hand

'Is that an Android or an iPhone?'

He was scruffy, short and gap-toothed, walking toward me across the pedestrian crossing, ignoring the forbidding red hand above me. I was waiting to cross, idly looking at my phone.

'Doesn't matter anyway,' he continued without waiting for a reply. 'They're all the same.' He stopped in front of me, standing on the road as the traffic roared past less than a meter behind him.

'Right,' I managed to say, displaying all the fluency I'd developed in two years of creative writing classes.

'What really matters is the number,' he said.

'Oh?'

'Do you know how to use your camera,' he asked.

'Eh…'

'Come on, are you telling me you don't know how to use your camera?'

'Oh, sure I do, yes.'

'Well take a photo of this.'

He held up his phone. There was a scrap of paper taped to its back with a phone number on it, written in black marker in a shaky hand. 'This is the number you want,' he said with a note of pride.

I felt many pairs of eyes on my back, the crowd of pedestrians behind me waiting for my response. I hesitated. The red hand became a white man and we all spilled on to the road in a rush to cross, flowing around the man as a stream does around a rock, overwhelming it. I heard him sigh loudly then saw him no more.

I should have taken his number. 

RIP Sinéad

I wasn't surprised to hear of Sinéad O'Connor's death - she'd seemed so fragile in recent years - but I was shocked. Almost a week later I still have a feeling of great loss.

For many Irish people of her generation, my generation, she wasn't just a brilliant songwriter and singer. She was one of the first to speak and sing the truth about our country: the abusive Catholic chuch and the patriarchy it enabled, the abandonment of children, the lamentable state of mental health services. She sang from anger and hurt, and out of illness, but she sang so that things might change, and she was one of the catalysts behind the wave of changes for the better that have swept across Ireland these past twenty years.

And how she sang. 

The hymn 'Make me a channel of your peace' is known by every Catholic raised in Ireland. But when Sinéad sang it, the prayer of St. Francis, it was like hearing it for the first time. You realised that you'd been saying these lines without thinking about them, whereas she meant every single word. And she wanted us to mean them too.

She sang it on the Late Late Show after having a makeover for charity (in support of refugees from the former Yugoslavia). It was like being visited by an angel.

 

I never had a conversation with her, though I met her a few times. Outside Dún Laoghaire music school, in the passport line at Dublin airport, and most memorably at a birthday party for one of my sons in the Lambert Puppet Theatre.

I've been playing her music in the kitchen these past days and my sons all light up when they hear 'No Man's Woman', a song we used to listen to on the school run. It's how I'd like to remember her: smart and sassy, the woman who was usually right and always right on, and who made a real difference.

Codladh sámh Sinéad.

P.S. This tribute to Sinéad in The Irish Times by Úna Mullally is perfect. And Fintan O'Toole nails it when he writes that her honesty was 'a curse for her but a blessing for us'.

P.P.S. I think Sinéad would have appreciated the candour of this article by Hannah Jane Parkinson in The Guardian: Sinéad O’Connor showed mental illness as it truly is.

The Red Maple at 1

A few weeks after we bought the chalet Martine won a red maple sapling in a 10K run in Magog. We planted it carefully in a sunlit clearing in the front of the chalet, watered it, put stones and a protective cage around it, and spent the rest of 2022 watching it do absolutely nothing. The snow covered it, and by the time winter finally departed, I thought it was dead. 

But now, suddenly, leaves!

We've had a wonderful first year in Saint-Étienne-de-Bolton and our red maple sapling has made it to its first birthday.

My French is pretty good, but...

Sometimes the order of words in French just wrecks my head. 

After chatting about it with Martine I now understand why it's 'ne me le' and not 'ne le me', but getting this right at conversation speed is still beyond me. Harder even than the subjunctive case!

 Learning a language is a project for life.

The man at Esposito

Grey-bearded and smiling, he was also awkward and gangly, as though his limbs had been transplanted from a taller donor. He was buying two cans of something, soup perhaps, and he asked the cashier for a paper bag. 

She passed it to him. He unfolded it carefully, turned it upside down, and lowered it over his head.

'Oh no, not again,' he cried, with hands as big as dinner plates waving around in mock alarm.

We all looked elsewhere, until he took the bag off his head, packed his two items, and left. Still smiling.

He was a mystery. Our non-reaction felt like a missed opportunity, a minor tragedy.

Montreal life and music

We were at the symphony orchestra last night. 

On our way in the metro, we sat in the seats reserved for non-able-bodied passengers. That always makes me feel uneasy, even when the carriage is half-empty and no-one needs them. Two teenagers in high spirits stood beside us. When we arrived at Place-des-Arts one of them shouted at Martine as we got off the train. 

'Madame!' 

We were startled. He pointed at the floor under the seat where we'd been sitting. 

'Vous avez oublié quelque chose.' 

There was a grubby sweater on the floor, like something a homeless person might wear. 

'Ce n'est pas à moi' said Martine. We turned away, relieved. 'Merci,' added Martine, just as the doors closed behind us. 

In the Place-des-Arts metro station a figure wearing a white animal mask (a white wolf? a husky?) played Beethoven on a violin. Was it someone well known? I once saw a video of Joshua Bell playing in the New York metro, maybe it was him?  People were hurrying to the concert, no-one had time to stop and listen to the free music, though the figure played really well.

The first piece at the concert inside the Maison Symphonique was atonal and strange. 'Il n'y a pas de mélodie' said the elderly woman beside me under her breath. The last part of it was moving, the violins making a sound like water trickling from melting ice, the violinists bowing rapidly while sliding their fretting fingers up and down the neck of their violins. The second piece was a symphony by Sibelius, which flipped the normal sequence by rushing to a huge crescendo at the end of the third movement, while the final movement slipped away as the violins made a sound like a final breath. The third piece was a Chopin concerto played beautifully by a Chinese-Canadian pianist from Montreal, Bruce Liu. 

Returning to the Place-des-Arts metro station we passed a homeless man sitting on the floor by the metro's ticket booth. He had a wide smile for everyone, and an elderly lady dropped a toony in his paper cup.

Exiting the metro At Villa Maria station we passed an elderly man sitting on the floor at the bottom of the escalator. A young guy passing handed him a small Tim Horton's bag and he took out a chocolate donut. 'Thanks man,' he shouted, beaming toothlessly. 'No problem,' replied the young guy. 

Outside it was chilly, normal for mid-April, but it had been unseasonably warm over the weekend and we'd thought that summer had arrived. It hadn't.

P.S. (May 24th) I've seen the masked violinist several times since and gave him five dollars after taking this photo. I don't think it's Johsua Bell...

Hidden amongst trees

He flew across the road in front of me on huge silent wings. I peered into the forest and, for a moment, I couldn't see him. I gave a low whistle and then he looked right at me.

Saint-Étienne-de-Bolton, March 22nd 2023

Irish songs we learned at school

Well I learned them at school in Dublin, but my sons learned them in the car on the way to their French school in Montreal, thanks to the album by John Spillane. I re-discovered the CD last month as I cleared out the car before selling it, and the boys were filled with nostalgia. They still know lots of the words, pronouncing them almost perfectly in imitation of Spillane's Kerry Gaelic, though they've no idea what they mean. They were stunned to learn that 'An Poc ar Buile' was about an angry goat!

Turn up the volume!

They're young men now, no longer boys. And the VW has left us after sixteen Montreal winters of ice salt and potholes.

My new VW GTi in September 2007

When I sold it in January 2023

I feel those sixteen years too.

The leaf's last dance...

 

Bernie Lumsden (née Hendrick), 1929 - 2022

 My mother Bernie died on March 11th. My sister gave me the long dreaded 'get on a flight home now' message the day before, and thankfully I made it to the hospital in Dublin to hold her hand for a few hours before she left us.

This is the eulogy I delivered at the end of her funeral mass on March 19th. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.

--

Good morning everyone. It's wonderful that we can all be here today to remember Bernie together, now that the worst of the pandemic restrictions are over. All of her family is here too with a couple of big exceptions: her sister Patty who is in a nursing home and too unwell to be here, and my daughter Emily who was unable to come over from Sweden but I know she's watching on the webcam. (Hi Emily! Hi to everyone who is watching online!).

 

At a Lumsden family moment like this we also remember my cousin, Father Dave Lumsden, who died in the first year of the pandemic when there were very tight restrictions on funeral attendance. He was our guide in these moments and we feel his absence today.

 

I'd like to tell you some things about my Mam and, given that she was energetic and sharp as a tack for her entire 92 and a half years, there are an awful lot of things to choose from.

 

I’ll start with the swimming lessons. Mam taught literally hundreds of people to swim, kids and adults. She believed that everyone should know how to swim, that it was an essential life skill. So, when the pool was built for the boys school on Parnell Road she was disappointed that there were no public lessons. She made an arrangement with the Christian Brothers and booked four hours a week to run lessons for everyone, charging just enough to cover the cost of the rental. She put a lot of work into it for no financial reward for more than 15 years, and long after she'd stopped she'd have people coming up to her in SuperValu to say 'you're Mrs Lumsden aren't you? You taught me to swim when I was a kid!'

 

Mam was a fluent Irish speaker. Not from school of course - she left school at 14 - but with the support of Dad she enrolled in adult education in her late 40's and worked painstakingly to learn vocabulary and master the complicated grammar. When Ita and I were in our rooms doing our homework, Mam would be at the dining room table working on an modh coinníollach or an tuiseal ginideach, words to bring back terrifying memories of Irish grammar lessons at school to many of us! She became completely fluent, she and Dad holidaying every year in the Gaeltacht in County Kerry. At 90 years old she was still toddling off down by the canal on Parnell Road every Monday morning to take the Luas to Dundrum to participate in an Irish conversation group. Mam, born and bred in Dublin with little education, was a proud gaeilgeoir.

 

She was also a published poet, in both English and in Irish. She took part in creative writing classes, and had poems published in the three volumes of the 'Women's Work' collections. Here's a poem about my Dad that was published in the third volume. It's entitled 'Scéal Grá' or 'A Love Story' - I'll read it and then summarise it afterwards for all of us whose Irish is not at Mam's level.

Scéal Grá

Is gnáthduine mé
Coitianta a bhí mo shaol.
Tháinig tú chugam-sa

Thóg tú mo chroi
Thug tú ghrá dom

Gan cheist gan chúis

Uaitse a fuair mé

Saibhreas saoil

Is gnáthduine mé

D'aithrigh tú mo shaol.

 

In the poem Mam says she is a 'gnáthdhuine' - an ordinary person - and that Dad loved her and changed her life. It's true, he did, but I think you'll agree that Bernie Lumsden was far from an ordinary woman.

 

She was an avid traveller. Not just to Tunisia on packaged holidays, though she did that several time with Dad, but ready to venture out and explore different cultures. As a young woman she travelled extensively across post-war Europe with her sister Patty. (In the light of the recent events of Ukraine I should probably call it inter-war Europe, unfortunately.) At almost 80 years old she travelled to Vietnam to visit Ita and her family. Aged 90, her last trip was with me just before the pandemic to see her grand-daughter and two great-granddaughters in Sweden.

 

The pandemic put an end to a lot of her activities of course, but throughout she remained independent, living alone in her house on Parnell Road, keeping up with the news and, of course, with the Formula One. She was a big fan, I took her to the Canadian GP a few times. No doubt this weekend she would have been insisting to me again that Vettel was a better driver than Hamilton. I realise now that she got the last word on that topic!

 

I've been living in Canada for almost fifteen years now, and so my sister Ita and her family did a huge amount for Mam these past few years to help her maintain her independence. So too did her friends, especially Tricia and Tommy, and Sister Ailish and Sister Imelda.

 

The last two months were tough for Mam, moving back and forwards between the hospital and the convalescent home, but given her strength and her willpower Ita and I were sure she would be home again. When I spoke to her last week she was still up-to-date on what all of her grandchildren were doing. The end of her life came too soon, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say about a woman who was almost 93 years old.

There’s a lot more to say about Mam. After the burial in Sutton it'd be great if as many of you as possible came with us to the White Sands Hotel in Portmarnock where we'll remember Mam in the way she'd have loved, with a chat over something to eat and a cup of tea. Thank you.

Mam in her element,
windblown on Inch beach in Kerry, August 2018

 

Wise words of a 13-year-old

‘Winter is the only season that we experience twice in the same year’

    - said Philou as we tramped through the slush this morning

Appreciating Paul Robeson

 A few weeks ago we went for dinner at Damas. the celebrated Syrian restaurant on Rue Van Horne. All five of us together, which took some advanced planning by my partner-in-life as the tables at Damas have to be reserved months in advance and the boys like to keep their weekends open. But it all worked out. The food was fabulous and the dishes kept coming until we were beyond stuffed. And the conversation around the table was lively of course.

In the minivan on the way home a discussion (in French) broke out amongst the boys about which of them had the deepest voice. The two older ones said that the music teacher at Stanislas had said they were both baritones, but they thought that P's voice would end up deeper than theirs, though we don't think his has fully broken yet. I asked had they ever heard a real bass singing voice and they said they hadn't. So I had my chance to introduce a little culture in to the proceedings.

My Dad's favourite singer was Paul Robeson. Not that he ever put on a record or anything, but if a song came on the radio he'd say 'ah that's glorious'. So through the wonders of the internet I played this song over the van's speakers, and the boys all loved it. It was the perfect end to a great Sunday evening.