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For Perspective

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, September 6 1906
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Prince Gunarasa Casinader died in December 2018.

Poetry and buggery are twin-born brats.

Most people have no Russian friends.

Elephants chew their nails when they’re nervous.

In Istanbul, iron nails are believed to be the work of the Devil.

Diderot’s smile is a smile of complicity.

Short legs can’t climb tall walls.

Walter Benjamin couldn’t make a cup of tea.

43% of churches face the sunrise on the day of the saint for whom the church was named.

James Joyce’s grandson has died.

Sri Lankans love their exclamation marks!

You have to question a door policy which says no to trainers but a big thumbs-up t0 piss-soaked tramp shoes.

The face book need never be complete.
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—
For The Critic

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, February 18 1907
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The Bombay Harmonium Company are neither from Bombay nor do they manufacture or stock harmoniums.

Thor Heyerdahl was right.

Only 38% of Netflix content is available outside the US.

Penguins can shoot poo over four feet (two their own; two presumably somebody else’s).

Venezuela is named for its resemblance to the Italian city of Venice.

In anthropology, a ‘horde’ can be as small as just five families.

The Ayn Rand Institute has taken out a PPP loan.

Carlsberg is no longer the best beer in the world… probably.

Patrick Harrington is one of the most well-known yogis in Denver.

Young pigeons may be eaten after 22 days.

The London Tea Auction closed its doors forever on June 29 1998.

The history of world literature is twice as long as the history of Hungarian literature.

Sir Richard Starkey MBE is 80 years old.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Wednesday, April 10 1907
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There are 2000 non-functioning satellites in space.

Lord Reith did not want people to enjoy the radio.

New species are discovered every week in jungles.

Friday night is lobster night.

Church people are just shitty to each other.

Aethelred the Unready was merely ill-advised.

Ceylons are usually more mellow in character than Indians.

Townspeople in Kyoto gather to stare at severed heads.

The start of Yr12 is twenty times harder than people think it will be.

A PhD could be done on the word ‘cruxway’.

The Panama Canal runs North to South.

It costs $17,500US to outfit one American soldier.

There’s nothing necessarily reassuring about the order of things.

When it comes to the 6 Nations, in recent years the fixtures guys have done well making sure the final weekend sees the big deciders. Tomorrow’s England-Ireland show-down – on St Patrick’s Day! – should be no exception. The Irish have already won the Championship; but now they hope to win the Triple Crown, and claim the Grand Slam for just the third time since the tournament began.

The English will be out to stop that happening. Ireland thumped the champions last year in the final game, denying them the clean sweep (just as they had in 2001 and again in 2011), and this year England’s quest for a third consecutive 6 Nations championship was brought to an early and embarrassing halt – so a bit of reciprocal spoiling is to be expected. (It’s mutual. An Ulster friend sent round a chart two weeks ago, explaining how the English might yet come last.)

I have a little skin in the game. Or blood, at least. My great-grandfather, James ‘Jim’ Sealy (19 March 1876 – 4 February 1949), played this very fixture back in 1896, and scored a try – on debut.

Reporting on ‘A Splendid and Exciting Game’, the (English) Athletic News lamented how from the off the English ‘had a terribly warm time defending… and the wild, energetic rushes of the Irishmen were too much for the phlegmatic Englishmen.’ Penalties were missed, and Brian Moore would no-doubt be amused to know that ‘scrummaging of a loose and scrambling character was indulged in’. Before half-time, however, ‘the Fates smiled upon their [Irish] efforts… when Lee dashed along to the English line, and handing to Sealy at the right moment, gave that youth the opportunity of scoring a try near the posts.’ The English rallied in the second half, but somehow managed to run their only try into the dead-ball area. And so it was that Ireland won ‘a brilliant victory by the following score: Ireland 2 goals (10 points) – England 1 dropped goal (4 points)’. The ‘Critical Comments’ that followed might be fairly classed as poetry.

Pace yer man at the Athletic News, though, that year the Irish did not crack the Triple Crown. They drew with Scotland, 0-0, two weeks later.

A Dubliner born and bred, and captain of the Dublin University team (1898-99), my father’s granddad on his mother’s side played eight more times for Ireland from 1896 to 1900 (W5, L2, D2), during which time the Irish won outright two of three completed championships (there was some rum business about Welsh ‘professionalism’ in 1897 and ’98…).

As the ‘Grand Slam’ per se did not exist until the French joined, the Triple Crown – for beating all the other Home nations – was the equivalent achievement. Ireland won it, for the second time in five years, in 1899, James Sealy helping to defeat Wales in the last fixture, in front of an uncontrollable 40,000 crowd at Cardiff Arms Park. In the entire course of their tournament the Irish had conceded just a single penalty – the first time one had been awarded for tackling the man without the ball.

In his first year as an international, Sealy also joined the British Lions tour of South Africa (W3, L1), playing alongside eight of his fellow Irishmen, including the ‘psychopathic’ Tom Crean (not the Antarctic explorer) and Robert Johnston, both of whom then chose to remain in the country, as doctors, and both won VCs in the Second Boer War. (Sealy did not stay, but years later sent his daughter Brenda there, to marry my grandfather, Gerald Spence Smyth. And thus, eventually, to me.)

Evidently a man of more than passing sporting talent, aside from prowess on the rugby field (where he’s listed as a ‘forward’, in an era when perhaps they were shaped somewhat differently!), he represented Ireland at hockey, and played golf off a plus-3 handicap. In the summer of 1900 he also played in a 3-day game between Dublin University and ‘Marylebone Cricket Club in Ireland’. (Batting – or not – at No.9, he scored 9* and dnb; no bowling. I like to think he might have been the wicket-keeper.)

Presumably at some point Sealy also did a bit of studying. Hanging up his boots, he went on to be a well-regarded barrister, KC, and judge. In 1930 the London Times contained a nib to the effect that he’d been presented with a pair of white gloves, ‘symbols of the lack of crime in the county’ (or, more accurately, a lack of brutal sentencing). He seems also to have had the standard Irish sense of humour – telling an ex-Legionnaire who had been arrested for pulling a gun on a policeman, ‘I think the air here must be bad for you’ – although the records show at least one counsel ended up in contempt for calling the His (Protestant) Honour ‘the seed and breed of Cromwell’.

Yeats would come round to the family home for tea, as would the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde. When his first wife, Stella, died, Sealy – known throughout the family as ‘the Da’ – married Hyde’s daughter Una. All parties, sooner or later, had their portraits done by Sarah Purser, a middle-distant cousin.

In 1928 ‘Judge Sealy’ was elected President of the Irish Rugby Football Union. In the playroom where the young me watched 5 Nations matches while my father polished shoes, there is a framed touch-judge’s flag embroidered ‘France v Ireland’. A minor masterpiece of cockerels and shamrocks, we have one side of it, our surviving uncle has the other. My aunt in Perth, Australia, has the blackthorn stick that it was waved from.

James Sealy lived just long enough to see Ireland win their first Grand Slam, in 1948. As for his playing days, it is established family lore (passed on by one John Beckett, cousin of Samuel and Guinness underbrewer) that Sealy did not merely ‘score’ a run-in try against the English, but that he “crossed the line, festooned with Saxons!” This may well be apocryphal; but it reflects, I think, on a more eloquent time, when all players were not simply credited with having made ‘the hard yards’.

—
For The Oldie, in a different edit

— The Nelson Evening Mail, September 27 1906

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The French king Louis XIII was known as ‘the Just’ because he was born under the sign of the Libra.

Maxwell Branning is reported to have caused the Walford bus crash.

The original name for Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye estate was to have been ‘Shame Lady’.

An early form of the asterisk was used by Aristarchus to identify lines replicated between the Iliad and Odyssey.

A weekly bulletin of international news is broadcast in Latin by Finland’s Yleisradio Oy, on Friday evenings. Pronunciation is classical.

‘Ananias’, ‘Azarias’ and ‘Misael’ refer to the same Biblical characters as ‘Shadrach’, ‘Meshach’ and ‘Abednego’.

Ceylon tea is now more expensive to produce than it is worth on the international market.

The Quaggy River flows 17 miles through the South-East London boroughs of Bromley, Greenwich, and Lewisham.

A standard-class one-way ticket from Ashford, Kent, to Ashford, Surrey, costs £34.10, off-peak.

The people of the South Sudan believe that the moon is the property of the white man.

Don Quixote was printed in a first edition of 400 copies. Most of them were despatched to the Americas, where they were lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Cuba.

Stephanie Davis says Jeremy McConnell is 100% the father of her son.