No Disgust in Tunbridge Wells

Today it was an honour and a pleasure, after several years of correspondence, finally to meet up with my friend, the Irish writer Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, author of the blog Irish Papist (irishpapist.blogspot.com) and of the book ‘Inspiration from the Saints’.  This historic and auspicious meeting took place in Tunbridge Wells, of all places, in weather that we both declared to be our favourite — cold and crisp, with the far sun throwing slanted light goldenly against façades, deep down the lengths of streets, and delicately through the last leaves of tangled trees, touching even cobwebs on the ground to brilliance.  First in a coffee-shop, over cups of hot chocolate that were things of beauty, then in a pub over a hearty sandwich, and finally out in the clear Wealden air — right up to the moment we began an unwonted dash to the railway station when I found it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and Maolsheachlann’s train was due in five minutes — we discussed the things that matter: poetry, music, railways, archives, libraries, Chesterton, Belloc, the state of Britain, the state of Ireland, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Middle Ages, the way of the world, the times we live in, the strange and unlovely religion of secular progressivism, the strange and wondrous religion of Christianity, and (by way of Kent and Kentish oast-houses) beer.  Yeats was recited on Tunbridge Wells High Street this afternoon, as was R. S. Thomas, in an act of resistance against banality, and of victory for poetry!  And I even managed to get Maolsheachlann onto his train, by a margin of about fifteen seconds…

Maolsheachlann’s blog is essential reading.  You do not have to be Irish, or a Papist, or even to agree with anything he says, to enjoy his writing.