Belated Bloomsday...

Awkward those moments, aren't they, when you suddenly realise a day or two too late that you've forgotten someone's significant anniversary, their special day of remembrance. Their birth or their wedding day perhaps, or fifty years devoted if always slightly under the note service to the Choir, or - not infrequently in my line of work naturally - the hatch, match or despatch of a loved one. The instant sharp pang of guilt that follows the flash of failed memory; the scrambling to consider whether late reparation is better - or worse - than maintaining a thoroughly undignified silence; the puzzlement that one could be such a fool as to forget.

Being a rather rude mechanical, I am not terribly well versed in these modern electronic gadgets that the youthful brigade tend to use to remind them of all that must be remembered - but also much trivia that might not. Curate Cuthbert, for one, spends hours pouring over his flashing little device into which he loads everything, from forthcoming appointment for a smart trim with Derek the demonic barber, to Cousin Betty's nephew's christening, to the next time he is striped down for tea with the Bish.

That last a ghastly affair - how one does so recall them - more or less every Quarter Day, when junior clerics across the piste are perforce drawn together for an afternoon's hugger mugger with His Grace and the spouse - who somewhat confusingly is also a Grace. Not really one for small talk, our Bish Tom, nor yet the occasion for any bigger talking, the two hours or so of stilted convo in the best parlour are - as Dean 'Darling' Charlie would have it - pretty fair proof that the doctrine of purgatory must have legs. All in all, quite how any gizmo that prevents one from pretending to have forgotten to turn up and be bored senseless for no useful purpose whatsoever adds to the gaiety of nations is beyond me.

Did once tackle Cuthbert on this very point - life shortness of, tea with Tom direness of - but blow me down his riposte was a blinder I have to own. For apparently, he can programme - I believe is the word - this very same electronic kit of his to send him a timed and thoroughly faked 'urgent message', allegedly requiring his immediate presence to attend upon an utterly fictitious parish emergency, just as His Grace's Grace is about to pour her perennially too-weak brew. Cunning Cuthbert thence earning double Brownie points for having shown up in the first place and then for dashing away - seemingly to all - to minister to some distressed and gentle soul. Pah and pash, pash and pah, is all I can say to such brilliant if deviant behaviour. Never happened in my day, more's the pity, but then we lacked any such necessary android accomplice successfully to carry off the deception. (Realise now of course why the Curate in the case likes to refer to his Blueberry thingy as his 'Bunbury'.)

But then, do not these cold machines - ever so faultlessly efficient as they may be - fatally detract from the essential human quality of remembrance? A little light aide memoire is one thing, but what is virtually a surgically-implanted memory chip is something else altogether and not, on the whole, one I much fancy.  I Rector - with all my inbuilt lapses and failings - to be preferred to 'I Robot' every time. One hopes of course that H would agree, though perhaps best not to press too closely on the matter.

There are, of course, certain occasions or events one would utterly fail to forget even if one were terribly minded so to do. Don't tell me that you - or I - simply 'forgot' about that appointment for root canal work last Wednesday. The imprint of searing terror on your naked soul is not a thing to be lost sight of in some general fug of oblivion. Psychic cancelling out of a future too hideous to contemplate - hysterical amnesia one believes it to be - may occasionally be allowed, certainly in the case of something so beastly as RCW. (Not tried it? Then go see dear Dustin suffering for his art in 'Marathon Man' and you'll get some sense of the lighter end of the horror of it all.)

Other - perhaps more public - events one is equally unlikely to overlook. Sunday pip emma we shall all trying our best to be beastly to the Germans once more shan't we? Even if we have not the slightest interest in the game of football as such, even if a stiff afternoon walk is our determined pleasure of the moment, the mind will not fail to register that cometh the hour of None cometh the kick-off.

'Bloomsday' is one such unmissable - certainly for the people of Dublin in general and the denizens of Dún Laoghaire or Howth Castle and Environs in particular. Joyceans too the world over will have June 16th striped down as the diurnal orbit within which turns all the action of 'Ulysess'. Simulacra of Molly and Stephen, or dear old fading Bloom himself, parade the streets, a-declaiming and a-re-enacting to their hearts content. You couldn't miss it if you wanted to, which perhaps is the view of not a few modern day Dubliners.

There was a once, precisely five years ago, when I too didn't miss it. With a set and a particular purpose I had my twenty-four hours pounding the streets of Dublin in honour of the day, the book, the city and the author. That having been told of at length in some other place, it but serves now to say it was so. Why, though, it was so does merit some relevant mentioning.  Five years to the day before the five years to the day that one was there, came some stern and certain news that the Almighty had most certainly marked me down for an early bath with harp lessons attendant. A most unreasonably aggressive cancer of a most minging kind having been confirmed by an evening telephone call from the infallible Head Vet. "Terribly sorry to have to tell you this, dear boy, but..." and so forth.

All a bit grim and glum as you might imagine. Not really a moment to be setting 'personal goals' - other than perhaps not to break down sobbing in the street the next morning - but it, some five years later, transpiring that by quirk of nature - or of supernature indeed - one might not after all find oneself on the subs bench before half time, as it were, it did seem then - still does - a fair trade to leg it over to Dublin for a pointed, if quirky, fête d'anniversaire.

If then so for a five years marker, how much the more so for the ten year spot just past? Back to Dublin once more might have smacked a bit samey, but surely there would be great thanksgiving for graces received, a decent amount of lip-chewing reflection on the oddness of it all; not least much partaking of Irish whiskey and Guinness porter?

You'll of course have caught the drift of the piece that none of this came to pass; one totally indeed blanked the day. A goodly - in truth a ghastly - week passed before one even noticed one hadn't noticed. Some might say all to the good, look forward not back - that sort of thing. Don't on the whole buy that one it must be and is said. Very much with Eliot on the time eternally present time unredeemable angle of course, what sensible fellow isn't? That though not here the case in point.

Did read somewhere that it's all been worked out by the most scientific method possible - best guess about the unknown based on what we think is already known - that the human mind can only hold seven things in the active memory at any one time. Shove in one end a further item of necessary recall - Deirdre can't do the Church flowers for Saturday's wedding as her Derek's got himself banged up again so she's off once more for a spot of prison visiting that day - and another - must sort road tax before sunset as new constable is strict Chapel and would no doubt most uncharitably relish slapping me a sharp rebuke and fine if he spots the deficit - flies out the other.

Could that be it? Maybe so, given all that piles the plate and duns the pate at present - including of course another bout of previous. (This one they say won't kill me. Joyce might - but I shan't at all - find it funny if they've got that one wrong as well.) General mental decrepitude along the traditional clerical lines could also be the thing. Bit of an occupational hazard that one. Comes in many guises and variants: the seemingly bumbling Vicar who, in reality, could give dear Miss Marple a head start in spotting the villain of the village piece; or the wilfully amnesiac Canon who prefers not to remember all the sad and sinful doings of his parishioners lest it put him off his pie, pint and pipe.

Somewhere in the middle spectrum comes this fellow. Old chestnut of a story, been the rounds in many a diocese, numbers of folk marked down as the bod in question. Goes something like this:

Chap prone to doing his front-garden gardening of a Saturday morning. Cleric of the place prone also to cycling by of a same Saturday morning. Seen though walking by one week. "What's the matter Parson, lost your bike?" says Gardener. "Rightly so, it seems to have vanished," replies Parson. "Been stolen do you think?" "I fear it might be so."

Gardener ponders a spell, then has sharp idea: "Tomorrow morning preach a hell-fire sermon on the Ten Commandments. When you get to the 'Thou shalt not steal' number, fix them all with a hard and a gimlet eye. You'll spot the guilty one right enough." Parson acknowledging that sounded a belter carries on his way.

Saturday following once more passing is Parson upon bicycle and not foot. "Ah," says Gardener, "I see you got your bike back. Did you try my trick?" "Well, up to a point I did," says Parson. "I was doing as you suggested, when lo and behold just as I got to 'Thou shalt not commit adultery' I suddenly remembered where I'd left it!"

It wasn't me all right. I'm sure I wouldn't have forgotten if it were.