Home alone yesterday morning, I devoted my breakfast exclusively listening to an hour of the Chieftains playlist on Spotify, in honour of the great Paddy Moloney, who died the day before. He showed the world what a boy could do if given the right thing (a tin whistle) at the right age (six), and he never looked back.
Ever since I wandered tentatively round the streets of North Belfast with a yellow card in my pocket and photos of local people who dearly wanted to kill me sellotaped to the right had side of my rifle butt, I have had a strange loving for Irish music. I suppose it articulates in a way that appeals directly to my emotional side, what the collective memory feels like for one group of people who have been done over by another over a long period, be that period in the mists of history. One night, I even got caught by one of my colleagues singing quietly along to ‘A Nation once Again’ against the graffiti-covered outside back wall of a rather unsavoury pub in the Crumlin Road, which was being sung illegally, but cheerfully, inside.
The whole thing made me want to learn to play something, to create music of my own, and the subsequent four decades have seen many attempts. Piano lessons for my thirtieth birthday (Hilary), my fortieth (Ariadne. Yes, really) and my fiftieth (I can’t remember her name, but I sacked her when she told me that I had ‘naughty fingers’). ‘Please,’ I had said to her on Day 1, after hearing her use that term with one of her younger students, ‘do not be tempted to say that to me.’ She did. But I had already sunk a good deal of money into the piano venture, and because I did not want to give it up for lost (hence the phenomenon of the ‘sunk cost fallacy’), I simply went on doing it.
Other things as well. Cricket lessons, tennis lessons, boy scouts, the woodwork classes that my parents paid for when I was young, all expensive failures, all continued simply to help justify the initial cost.
Writing was different, even though I hardly dare think about the cost in hours of what I spent in arriving at it as my third career. Millions upon millions of words lost in space, or at least on the hardware of various computers, that served as the price of my apprenticeship, and allowed me to even dream of being taken seriously in this least forgiving of worlds.
On and on I went. I wrote a novel so manifestly appalling that I still get night sweats thinking about it; poems that I would go on hunger strike to avoid being shared with anyone other than me; a hundred short stories, most of them entered into competitions that never even bothered to acknowledge their safe receipt, let alone critique them. And still I wanted to do it.
Then, vaguely inspired by the Chieftains concert at breakfast, I went this morning and set down the most perfect paragraph that I have ever written. Like a chef with good raw ingredients, I have the advantage of writing in a language that has the most beautiful, most effective words on earth. From that start point, it is then just a case of setting the words you want to use down on the screen, and then playing around with them until, like a jigsaw puzzle, they begin to settle into the natural spaces in which they are most comfortable. There is a beauty in that process, as there is in all art.
And that paragraph is sitting there right now, like a little miniature painting hidden away at the back of gallery. It is only forty-two words long, but it makes me exquisitely happy.
Finally, I got something back for all that sunk cost.
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