Leaving on a jet plane

Ok so I'll not stop writing after all, even though to the naked eye it would appear that here I am deserted on this desert island blog. I've had a message in a bottle offline that there's someone out there, really, listening. As Woody Allen says, the heart is a resilient little muscle, and as all I needed was the merest hint that there was someone listening to my drivel to awaken my sleeping giant, to rehydrate my decaying flesh, to dust off my gathering cobwebs, and to make me pull on my bootlaces, I'll get up and start again. So instead of stopping, I'll write this like there's no tomorrow for all those people who enjoy listening to what I have to say ... a select bunch indeed. And I'll include that person I've never met, who thinks I don't know they're reading, and who never leaves a comment - but I know you're there.

It seems I'm always going somewhere or coming back whenever I blog. Tomorrow, I'm off again to Ferrara in Italy to attend my friend Carlo's ordination. I haven't seen him in just under ten years, though we have talked on the phone in the intervening time a little, the story to be found in the archives, but the gist being I wonder what he'll look like now. Then he was a nineteen year old Italian who had the maturity of someone in his mid-twenties and who was distinguished amongst his nationality in that he was quietly reserved, but otherwise typical in that in himself he had passion and poetry. But enough about that. He collects me at the airport tomorrow and I hope his English and my Italian will cope.

I saw a 'Rocky Road to Dublin' last night at the Irish Film Institute which is a documentary from the sixties by Peter Lennon and photographed by Coutard, the French new wave cameraman. It pictures the state of the south of Ireland at that time from a personal point of view and was a real education for me. It depicts Ireland as a country where the real government was the Church and where the amount of censorship was staggering, as one example. This film, the only Irish film to be made in a period of about thirty years, was turned down by most theatres due to its anti-Irish content. It became championed in French universities after it was closed down along with others at the Cannes Film Festival by Godard in 1968 in solidarity with the students' revolution. It was excellent and we still haven't had the chance to see it on Irish tv. It has got some great moments recorded for posterity, which now become valuable, of how the women used to wait in the tennis club disco for the men to arrive once the pubs closed down for the night! If only it was that easy now, eh Liam?! And it is good to see how similar a session then is to one now. There is a great shot of kids running through a housing estate after the quickly tracking camera - on the back of some lorry - where all of the kids were falling over each other to try to make it on to the big screen, probably not having many tvs amongst them all. I don't think that shot would be possible in the same estate today, where a camera would more often mean tv news after some crime or other.

But the appeals censor whom the filmakers interview, while definitely being old school, comes across as one who is watching and presiding over a changing of the guard. A Trinity student made the best comment that walls don't have to go up for people to protect and value what they have. And so from this I can learn that liberalism isn't the end of values as such but simply the result of them due to their origin in the freedom of individuals. So whatever role the Church may have within a society, it should not be one of force or control, but should be one of religious and moral example. And as a curious connection, Carlo would definitely be this second, my kind of priest.