Out On The Ocean

I went to a secondary school that was colloquially just called "The Convent', thought by the time I started there the convent part had become an annex of a brand new Catholic comprehensive. On the new site were red-brick buildings with doors that had square, futuristic looking doorhandles; a sixth form common room, a study room with cubicles, science labs with gas taps at every bench and sinks and water taps; an art room with a kiln and a brand new sports hall and gym. It was pretty fancy. I remember getting my own locker to keep my stuff in and being like...wow...I don't even have this space at home that is mine and only mine. It was exciting. You felt like a young grownup.

And you could hang out by the stairs that led to the second floor, just by the massive impenetrable and mysterious timetabel that was colour coded on the wall, and watch the girls go by. Every morning we hung out there in various combinations, me, Jim, Eugene, Gary, Scragie Hammill, Martin Keenan, sometimes even girsl would join us. The convent part of this school remained, though, the riotously gorgeous gardens an unreachable paradise behind the high glass windowns of the sixth form corridor.

The old part was linked by two glass sided corridors that descended like portals back in time to the years when the place was an all girls grammar school. It smelt different down there in the older part of the school, the floors not plastic and brightly coloured. Instead, parquet flooring and wooden boards and carpet, the stairs worn smooth and the heavy velvet curtains hanging on the high windows of the assemply hall - they seemed like a throwback not just to grammar school days but to some exotic theatrical past none of us knew about. And down at the farthest end, like wandering deeper and deeper into a dark forest, the place seemed to become more and more lightless, past the hall, through two sets of doors and into the recresses of the place, where there descended a set of stairs to the convent quarters itself. Down there was where they lived, the nuns, in the quiet and the dark where statues of various saints were waiting in shadowy alcoves to pounce on some unsuspecting youngster scurrying past on an errand or to a music lesson. From the bright shiny modernity of the news school to the darkeing, smokey gloom of the old school where dwelt the deepest sins and desires. It was all very Freudian.

All of this came back to me while talking to Sister Peg Murphy, who features in this episode. The nuns we knew, we never really suspected they had a life outside - they seemed like impediemnts or a bit like those statues - waiting for a misstep so they could grab you and punish you in accordance with the high laws of the church, whatever they were. And yet of course they had their lives and their dreams and their loves and thier sorrows. When I met Sisiter Peg, the narrowness of my view of the life of a sister was laid cruelly bare, for here was an Irish sister who was funny, humane, immediately recoignisable to me the way older women of a certain age are to me even today, and politically liberal, even in the teeth of the opposition of a hostile and authoritarian church. Indomitable, a personification of humility, of living the gospel in the truest sense, of kindness and of love.

You can read more about Sisiter Peg Murphy here:

https://www.gaffneyfuneralhome.com/obituaries/SrMargaret-MurphyOP

Recorded in Tacoma, Washington, around 2011.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Dominic

I lived in The Hague for 18 months and loved it for more reasons than I can really put into words. This is Sunday morning.

Just listen to this.

Sean Williams shares her memories of learning from the legendary Joe Heaney. We talk music; ornamentation; Oirishness; messengers from the otherworld; liminality; being visited by Heaney in a dream and corrected on your writing, cleaning up his apartment on Phinney Ridge. We talk the sacred, alluring and dangerous; immigration and emigration; 'you lived away for so long,' thresholds, crossing over. Transgression, and where is home.

What a dream, this conversation turned out to be. Straight after, I drove south to Portland, Oregon and watched a soccer game on a glorious summer's night while drinking an icy cold beer. The glory.

Thanks Sean.

Thanks also to Em Kildea, to Ciaran O'Grady and Aifric Boylan for the chance to share some extracts of this episode with attendees at the annual Comhaltas weekend in Queenscliff, Victoria.

You can find a comprehensive list of Joe Heaney's songs here, at The Joe Heaney Archive:

And here's the Joe Heaney archive (some of it) in the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Archives in Seattle:

Thanks for listeneing, and see you soon I hope...

Dominic

Friday Harbor is as beautiful as you might imagine - a small, saltwater town on San Juan Island on the north west edge of Washington State. If you head out there on the weekend, north from Seattle, up Interstate 5 to the ferry that leaves from the once thriving cannery and oil town of Anacortes, Friday Harbour can feel like a safe haven from the week just gone by. Some folks think it's a bit too cutesy, a chocolate box version of a Pacific NorthWest town - and truth be told it does have a bit of that about it. It's well kept, tidy, there's a little picture house and the timber buildings are all neat and painted. You can buy hemp products and souvernirs and paintings by local artists; small batch ales with names like Weed Whacker that smell of pine and coffee; you can get timber from the hardware store and boating shoes and life vests and corkscrews; and you can fuel up your outboard at the depot a little bit out of town. Out off the high west side of the island you can watch the orcas pass as the lights from BC flicker across the water; even in such a comfortable and cosy place there's a sense of a bigger world beyond.

And even in such a comfortable and cosy place you know that out in the wooded gullies and crannies there's some folks doing it hard. 'The Colonel' lives out there in his airstream that sits up on breeze blocks. He rents off a guy named Clay who comes by once a week to collect the rent, which he mostly forgets, being there more for the talk and the smoke and to check in on the Colonel. Brings him a twelve pack of Pepsi, because the Colonel is sober; and he tells him the news.

The Colonel doesn't go to town any more much, and never goes to Seattle. His Delia got cancer twelve years ago and once a week every week they'd drive out of the woods, onto the ferry, through Anacortes and down I-5 to the city for her treatment. In their Chevy Impala with the bench seat in the front so she could lie down all the way home while steering one handed with the deadly cigarette between his middle finger and forefinger, blowing his smoke out the window, right hand resting ever so softly on the side of her head, stroking her hair. Once on the ferry he'd slide quietly out as they reversed into the deeper water by Anacortes dock and walk the decks. An hour, two hours, walking around and around as they traveled west and her sleeping uneasy down below. Dolphins, cormorants, seals, orcas, gulls. After she'd died - not passed on says the Colonel, not lost - died - he sat in the ferry queue as usual that first Tuesday morning after, and then when the people around him started driving down the ramp he never moved... let them drive around him. Joe tapped on his roof, 'Colonel, you wanna go today?' He just shook his head, drove to the bottom of the lot, took a left and headed back up through town without stopping. Got back home, sat in the car all day outside their shingle house, with the engine off, smoking. And he slept there too. Woke at five the next morning and knew he'd never ride that ferry again in his life if he could help it. Delia's twelve years dead now, he's twenty years sober. Getting ready for the collapse of the government, invasion by the government, drinking his coffee from a Seattle SuperSonics mug in the woods, in the morning mist, droplets of mist forming on his beard.

There's blackberry pickers out that way too, and weed growers, and weed smokers; dodgy attornies and honest ones, beauticians, ancient hippies, bad comedians and half decent hand-to-mouth authors. Soft drink millionaires who fly in by private jet from California to Friday Harbor. And the rest of us who amble in on a Washington State ferry.

This is a podcast about living and this episode has a lot of it: the Fitzroy underground scene; the excesses of youth; being in a band; being in a society sleepwalking towards environmental catastrophe. You know, happy stuff. Doomscrolling, yelling into the chasm; books, crooners and gentrification. AND crackin songs. In this episode Stan plays:

I Fell Over

You can find Skyscraper Stan and the Commission Flats music at bandcamp:

And videos, gig details and other stuff at https://www.skyscraperstan.com.au/

In the almanac of Ireland on RTE the writer Manchán Magan talks about the word magh – a measurement of distance in the old Irish – the distance that a bell or a cock-crow can be heard. Magh. I’ve been thinking of that idea for a couple of years now since I first heard it from my friend Colette Kinsella who produced that show – a fantastic radio producer and like-minded lover of sounds and the way we inhabit a world of sounds, and they – sounds – they inhabit us.

You can find the episode I'm talking about here.

I met Colette when I was living in The Hague in 2023 and we hit it off immediately, not least because we shared a love for a bakery called Kitty’s Kitchen run by a most inspirational woman called Mary Bruton – though that’s another story. So me and Colette would meet in the morning, have scones and coffee, and talk about radio and sound and splashes and history and crack. And in the way of all the most fantastic friendships do, I’d always come away with my heart abuzz and my head ringing with ideas, the freshest of breezes blowing through me, and joy – how’s that for a far north Antrim man – joy at having spent that time with Colette.

I’m going to play you something today – it’s very short. much shorter than this introduction – that I recorded in 2012 or so. It’s a poem by a fella called Phil Sprang, who became a friend very dear to me. I met him when he was 70 or so and he was a still a broad, slightly forbidding figure in an eternal plaid shirt. Who shook hands like a man who’d been on the tools all his life; would greet you with an arched eyebrow and a grim sceptical at eye, then a smile and he’d ask you in. He was a poet, Phil – a storyteller, house-builder, dramatist and writer, a San Francisco beatnik in the 60s, a sufi mystic in England in the 70s, a trekker and bluffer, and a lover of baseball, who’d pour a couple of glugs of Baileys into his morning coffee; a ghost of times past in Seattle’s great once literary boozer The Blue Moon Tavern and a string of other andcient drinking shops in Pioneer Square in the 60s; a student of the great American poet Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, a skier a football player and a drinker of a couple of bottles of starpramoen pilsner each winter afternoon as we would sit talking in the glowering twilight; a man who described his life as a mystery in which he somehow managed to remain upright with no visible means of support. Who told me he didn’t fear death, he was curious to move onto the next stage of the journey and find out what was up ahead, round the bend.

I last saw Phil in 2022 a few months before he died…I visited in him his retirement home, he’d had his beard shaved off and didn’t look like himself. He seemed shorn of more than his beard somehow, lying in a bed with the TV at the foot of the bed on all the time. When I told him I was there he reached out his hand, and called out to his first wife, then already gone, ‘Noni, Dominic’s here.’

I need a word that does for friendships what magh does for that ringing bell…a word for the distance from which friendships can still be felt within us, despite the passing of time and the vast spaces separating us. That they CAN still reach us even after all the seconds minutes hours days weeks months years that have passed, those friendships, seems miraculous, miraculous, and yet we feel them – ringing as they do within us like – well, a bell, what else…out across the water on a clear morning.

This is Phil Sprang, my friend, the poet, Out on the Ocean.

You can hear more of Colette Kinsella's work at Red Hare Media - check it out. A treasure trove of lovely audio pieces.

And so in the end up where did Granny Brown go

Something to do with roving at night

Mum and dad, Bernie and John

Something to do with the kettle not boiled

Something to do with the sycamore tree

Polly and Jeanie and old Billy Greer

Something to do with the river in flood

Something to do with the wheels of the world

Something to do with the rose in the heather

Something to do with the chapel and clay

Maguire's Strand, sun worship and the Barwon Estuary on a transcendent blue morning; biting flies, flights of memory, amazement; pathways to the past and the glory of the present; '78, '79. The last days of summer.

Episode 4 of Out On The Ocean tells the first part of the story of Harold Moss - listen to that first. Thenmeet us back here.

Recorded on March 14th 2016 in Tacoma, Washington, this second recording picks up the story from the early 1960s, and details the formation of the Tacoma Urban League; Harold's work with the NAACP; his route into local politics and the events that led to him being appointed Mayor of Tacoma in 1994.

Harold's own reflections are fascinating and affecting, and he speaks with such a passionate intensity at times - though with a laugh always just around the corner. What this interview also gives us is an insight into the political landscape of the city of Tacoma throughout his time there. And while that might seem, on first listen, like a very particular set of circumstances, what's most striking is how so many of the fractures in American political life that Harold describes seem traceable right up to the prersent day.

There is a treasure trove of material on Tacoman politics at HistoryLink.org - the online encyclopaedia of Washington State history. If you want a fuller account of the recall process that led to Harold first joining Tacoma City Council, check out this essay by Bill Baarsma - himself a former mayor of Tacoma:

The audio interview with Harold Moss was recorded as research for the HistoryLink essay on his life. Special thanks to Jennifer Ott and HistoryLink for granting permission to broadcast this audio. You can find the full essay here:

Harold Moss died on September 21st, 2020.

If you liked this episode, please do share it and give it a review in ye olde podcast styllee fashion.

Dominic

In this, the first of two episodes, Harold Moss describes his childhood in Michigan, his move to the Pacific NorthWest as a National Guardsman, and the reality of how racism played out in his everyday life, from childhood right through to when he and his wife tried to buy their first house.

It's a compelling piece of audio, in part because he is such a great talker, and in part because the issues and ideas he's talking about are even more urgent and even more current than they were when this was first recorded in 2016. When even 2016 seems like a more innocent time, you know things must be bad in 2025.

This audio was recorded as research for the biographical essay on Harold's life in published in HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopaedia of Washington State history. Special thanks to Jennifer Ott and HistoryLink for permission to broadcast this audio. You can find the full essay here:

And you can find more information about housing discrimination in Tacoma here:

If you like the podcast, please share it and give a review (a positive one...heh...) and thank you. See you soon.

Dominic