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The wedding is to be in the town of Toome, county Antrim, Northern Ireland. Both the bride and groom, Eavan Totten and Paul Dunlop, are Catholic and both hail from old, established families, some so large that the children of a single family could not be counted on the fingers of two hands. The members of Eavan and Pauls’ families have outlived the troubles, as the war is being referred to euphemistically. The Totten-Dunlop wedding on a Saturday in February, 2007, will be a celebration of love ánd life.

Hiring a suit at Parsons & Parsons, Belfast

Outside Toome on a green hill stands the Sacred Heart Church. The guests are preparing to enter for the ceremony, cigarettes are stubbed-out, last banter goes flying. It ís English that you hear, yet the tongue shapes the words distinctly different from the way it would in England. There are other words as well. You need to listen.

From the porch of the church you have a clear view of the road running past, flanked by stone walls on either side. Beyond, neat paddocks fenced off since time immemorial with hawthorn hedge or more stone wall. Suddenly, from the grass green as glass a mob of crows lifts and scatters across the sky. They caw and swerve towards the cemetery on the right, an exceptionally shiny bird lands on a Celtic cross.

Slightly cloudy, but nice and dry: ‘it’s a quare day for a wedding, so it is,’ someone remarks as we enter the church. Each syllable is pronounced and at the end an affirmation is imported just to tidy up. And the use of quare comes spontaneously.

The greyish-blue sky, brighter than the sky above the continent; the green fields, the mossy stone walls and the pitch black crows, the disgrace of the Great Hunger followed by the massive migration to America and the sorrows caused by the troubles; and further back to when the brazen Vikings approached in their longships: all of this is folded into the Irish language. Not only did they store words which belonged to the fabulous invaders, as Seamus Heaney likes to call the Vikings; they also moulded and churned what they already had for the talking, they flexed their tongues and had fun - made fun - until their language became an appetizing, intelligent, stew. The comical, mostly ironical, disposition specific to this nation nestles in their language. ‘We’re a language-based society. You can get away with practically anything in this country if you give a good account of it, ‘ the Irish writer John Banville has said. And Heaney further urges in his own rich version of Hiberno-English:

‘Lie down
in the word-hord, burrow
The coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.’

The reception for the wedding takes place in an oxblood red and buttermilk yellow hotel on the main street of Toome. As we enter, Frank Dunlop, father of the groom, takes me by the arm. There you can see Lough Neagh, he points southwards with his Embassy cigarette, it’s Europe’s largest lake. From the North, from the Atlantic, thousands upon thousands of eels make their way along the River Bann during mating season to lay their eggs in the lake.

Creepy, I think to myself. A deep, watery kingdom filled with writhing sea snakes battling it out for a mate.

As if Frank Dunlop can guess where my thoughts are taking me, the Irish never shy away from anything creepy or gothic, he sweeps me along to the days of his great aunt’s kitchen on a small, mixed farm, to her fireplace alive with the smell of burning peat, to her favourite recipe for eel. Cut your eel in rounds and fry in a heavy pan with a halfin of butter and a halfin of whiskey. Serve up with floury potatoes, ripe cheese and Guinness.

The reception is an extended affair, some speeches are long, the bestman’s a one liner. And the food fails to appear. An aunt from County Cavan leans over: ‘have you a mouth on you?’ And everyone at our table, some in tails, some in taffeta, but all in their Sunday best, scream with laughter. Another tray loaded with pints of Guinness arrives. And a rush sweeps through the guests. The talk accelerates, you’re forever interrupted, the Irish brain, whetted, produces stories fast and always in the plural.

This is how James Joyce writes up a similar scene in Ulysses: ‘… and then he lifted in his rude great brawny strenghty hands the medhar of dark strong foamy ale, uttering his tribal slogan.’ Unrivalled is Joyce’s report of his tribe, and of the human condition, his language shot through with Irish.

When eventually the food arrives it turns out not to be great at all. You don’t come to Ireland for its food, definitely not for its weather. You come for the craic, the mood, the Gemütlichkeit as the Germans, who dote on the Irish, call it.

And never get impatient at receptions for the craic. Often guests wake up long after midnight, only then do they start remembering, then they’re able to hold the tune, a cappella, mostly. If you want to catch the craic, you must stay up, listen and join in, let Guiness after Guinness take you like a black sea. Only then will you experience the rising spirit, the enthusiasm for life, for one another, for the flash of wit, the jest and counter- jest, and the pure, uninhibited madness.

*

Story was originally written in Afrikaans for the travel magazine, Wegbreek, June 2007. The directive was to write an essay around a book of my choice. My choice was: Dolan, T.P. A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. Dublin: Gill & McMallin. 1998.

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