SOUL SURMISE

GLENN PATTERSON AT HOME AT 4 CORNERS FESTIVAL 2025

It was a personal thrill that the first name we had booked for 4 Corners Festival 2025 was novelist Glenn Patterson. Over the coffee when we asked Glenn to become involved in the Festival we asked him where he thought of as home. He didn't miss a beat and said, "Belfast city centre". 

Glenn is a Belfast man who loves our city and has spent his life writing about it. He now heads up the Heaney Centre at Queen University, inspiring a generation of writers. 

For the theme of HOME? he's a perfect choice. He will be sharing the stage with poets including the very talented Scott McKendry.

Here's one of my reviews... of Gull in 2016.

 

Today, friends started posting photos of Delorean cars on social media. What gives? Well, it appears that it is the 35th Anniversary of the making of the iconic car and many owners have traveled across the world to celebrate in the city where it was built; Belfast.

When I was a first year at Queen’s University I took the train past the Delorean factory every Friday night and Monday morning. The train track went right past the Dunmurry factory and we always stopped reading the NME to gaze out the windows at these futuristic cars. 

As an nineteen year old from up the country I think I was unaware at the incongruity of this familiar scene. This was the Belfast of bombs and guns and I started University just a month after the last Republican Hunger Striker starved to death. It is really only in my fifties that I have finally come to terms with the abnormal world that I grew up in. The inhumanity that humans showed humans in our Troubles is almost inexpressible. 

That an American maverick entrepreneur would decide to build a factory on the outskirts of Belfast at such a time was more ridiculous than I thought in my wee mind. We did still enjoy the view as we passed for those short number of months before it all went pear shaped - the flighty fickle car salesman that was Dolerean, the iron lady Prime Minister and a world recession all coming down on it at once!

It was the recent novel by Glenn Patterson that opened me up to the story of Delorean, West Belfast, hunger strikes and Margaret Thatcher. I love Patterson’s work which always opens me up to the social, and I would say spiritual world, of my home city. In Gull, named after the shape of the Delorean, he gives us these events through two ordinary people caught up from different sides of the story.

Edmund Randall is Delorean’s puppet, fixer on the ground and Liz is one of the work force. She is an ordinary if tough woman from west Belfast who finds a lifeline of hope in this new factory on her doorstep.

The novel, as Patterson always does, gives this fascinating part of our history and automobile history that was also tied up in movie history, when a car built in Dunmurry became Michael J Fox’s way Back to the Future. Imagine that. Our wee city!

I was particularly drawn to the fact that the Hunger Strikes were happening at the same time. I was interested that people from Republican Twinbrook and Loyalist Seymour Hill worked together but used different gates. I was also amused that Patterson exposed Margaret Thatcher iron will not against the Republican Hunger Strikers but against Delorean, in not funding the factory when the finances went down the plug.

Patterson says that the book is fiction “apart from the bits you couldn’t make up”. I have to say it left me looking for a real history of the Delorean years. If the workers that Liz represents in Gull could write a Memoir that would be one fascinating read and helpful contribution to our recent history.

In the meantime, Patterson has given us another wonderful novel… but I’d love to know what the bits were that he couldn’t make up!

 

BOOK HERE

 

STOCKMAN & FR MARTIN MAGILL ON RTE TV ON SUNDAY

This week is the Week Of Prayer For Christian Unity (Jan 18-25) and on Sunday morning on RTE TV at 11am, Fr Martin Magill and I will be speaking on Sunday Worship. Members of our two congregations in Fitzroy and St. John's are leading worship, praying and reading.

The service is based around the fact that 2025 is the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. This is a creed that almost every denomination still uses. That were both able to stand beside each other around it was a lovely idea in Fr Martin and my friendship. 

Don't take time off your own service on Sunday morning. I won't be. The show is recorded and I will be preaching in Kilmakee. Catch it on RTE Player!

 

DENIS LAW (1940-2025) - A TRIBUTE

Denis Law. I loved Denis Law.

Law will always be known as a Manchester United player - Best, Charlton and Law. There's a statue of the three at Old Trafford. I would like to point out that in their years together they lost more games than they won against Manchester City's equivalent - Bell, Summerbee and Lee. To be fair even I think they were a better trio though had Bell not got injured in that League Cup derby in 1975 I believe he would now be a legend of the game.

Of course the twist to all this is that United let Law go at the end of the 72-73 season and let him go to City! It wasn't Law's first season as a City player. He'd been at City in the 60-61 season before his big move to Torino in Italy. In that 73-74 season Law actually joined Bell, Summerbee and Lee.

It wasn't a great season and those four legends plus Rodney Marsh ended up somehow losing the League Cup Final to Wolves but in the last few minutes of the season a Denis Law back flick gave City a 1-0 win against United that sent United down. Technically other results had already relegated United but Law immediately left the pitch gutted at what he had done.

It was Denis Law's last game in club football but he had one more game. He played for Scotland, his first World Cup Finals' appearance. Scotland beat Zaire 2-0 and then failed to get out of the group stages. 

In that World Cup Law wore squad number 19. I immediately did a job with some sort of masking tape to put 19 on my football shorts. I wore that 19 in the Ballymena qualifying round of ITV Penalty Prize. At that time there was a national competition called Penalty Prize the final of which took place at the League Cup Final at Wembley. 

I scored 9 out of 10 in the Ballymena round run by my friend, and often team coach as a teenager, Jim Bolon. My name went forward and I then got to the Northern Ireland Final televised at Windsor Park against the Linfield goalkeeper at the time, Ken Barclay. I fluffed my first spot kick and never recovered, only scoring 1 out of 6! The Wembley dream was over BUT I was best at keepy ups and featured in the intros for Sportscast for six weeks in a row. The peak of my career! 

I say all that because as I heard the news about Denis Law's death I immediately remembered that number 19. It reminded me of what a hero he was to me in my teens.

For me in that final season he had become a bit of pop star too. There was a Scotland World Cup record released that year that had the squad doing some songs like the England team's big number 1 in 1970. It also had some Scottish stars donate songs. Lulu's Shout, Bay City Rollers' Remember, Middle Of The Road's Chirpy Chirpy Cheap Cheap as well McGuinness Flint and Junior Campbell.

Highlight for me was Rod Stewart's Angel, my favourite song of his at that time. On it he chatted to Denis Law and they seemed to sing a bit together. It was obvious to me. Law would have been Stewart's hero. Rod's hair was more modelled on Denis than the other way about. It reminds us that Denis Law was a pop footballer as much as George Best. Law's move to Torino was a move beyond the normal. 

He was also a great footballer! I probably missed his best years but I remember the flair, the balance, the acrobatics, the back flicks! (HA!). The most tragic thing was his being injured for United's historic European Cup Final win at Wembley in 1968, though an 18 year old Brian Kidd took his opportunity!

Denis Law was the kind of player and human being that the word legend is created for. A gifted player, a wonderful personality and he always came across as the boy next door. 

Love and prayers to his family.

 

RINGO STARR - LOOK UP

When I fell in love with The Beatles in the summer of 1976 Ringo Starr had been as successful as any of the other three in the solo years. Photograph and You’re Sixteen were huge singles and Ringo and Goodnight Vienna were two albums to have. 

I got the latter which I was thrilled with. It had Bernie Taupin/Elton John’s Snookeroo, No No Song, Only You and of course John Lennon wrote the title track. 

Ringo Rotogravure was the next album, released in September of 76, and until this week it was the last Ringo Starr that I genuinely looked forward to.  

At the end of last year the news broke. T-Bone Burnett was writing and producing a record for Ringo. I was so excited. I thought of what Rick Rubin had done for latter years Johnny Cash. Of course reviving careers is not new to Burnett. He gave Roy Orbison’s career a fillip with Black and White Night in 1988.

Back before Ringo and Goodnight Vienna Ringo had gone to Nashville just as The Beatles imploded and made a country record Beaucoup Of Blues. Look Up is its follow up, 54 years later.

T-Bone has fashioned an album that pays homage to the country music of Ringo Starr’s upbringing when Buck Owens was the hero. Ringo’s Act Naturally might have been his finest moment in The Beatles and he and Owens even released a duet of that song in 1989

So, on Look Up,  I Live For Your Love and You Want Some particularly have that Owens sound. We get whistling on Come Back and the close is a genuine song of gratitude Thankful. Maybe best of all is Can You Hear Me Call with a little more of Molly Tuttle is maybe best of all.

As well as Tuttle who sings on four songs, Burnett has brought his usual array of singers and players. Lucius who Burnett used on his own record last year, Larkin Poe, Billy Strings and even Allison Krauss. The quality of the playing as expected with T-Bone production is tastefully immaculate and Burnett has his hand on most of the songwriting.

I am not going to declare that it is up there with the best Beatles’ solo records but this is a very good piece of light country. Ringo’s voice in his 85th year is standing sturdy, hardly flexible but like himself, lovable. 

Look Up has all of the positive vibes of Ringo. Look no further than that title track where T-Bone brings his faith to the party in as close as Ringo or maybe even any Beatles gets to Gospel. If I still had a radio show I’d play it back to back with George’s My Sweet Lord:

 

No matter where you place in the human race

There is mercy, there is grace

Look up

Over the clouds

Look up

Over the crowds

 

Up above your head where the music plays

There's a light that shines in the darkest days

There's a burning fire leading through the haze

Look up

NIALL WILLIAMS - TIME OF THE CHILD

With Time Of The Child Niall Williams has pushed his way through the field to become one of my very favourite novelists. Two men, whose intellect I admire, tipped me off one Sunday morning in the coffee area after Sunday Service to This Is Happiness. Oh how I enjoyed it. 

So, when I caught sight of Time Of The Child in my favourite book shop No Alibis there was no way that I was leaving without it. I gave it to Santa and as soon as we got to the coast after Christmas I was into it.

My favourite writers are Irish. I love the island that I live on. I love the art that it has inspired. I love using that art whether song, poem, play, painting, sculpture or novel to understand my place in the world and the place in the world I have to find that. Williams has opened up some of that understanding. 

This Is Happiness and History Of The Rain before it have gifted us the village of Faha, set on the River Shannon in Country Clare. The geography and the characters are so vivid. I nearly fell like I was there.

 I am delighted to hear that Williams has declared that he going to have us in Faha from the arrival of electricity in 1958 until the arrival of the internet. In this one he has started to hint at what’s to come. An added layer.

As I read Williams’ vivid and utterly beautiful poetic prose, always needing a pen beside me to underline a sharp description here (“like nature’s fresco of the heavens beseeched”), a razor-sharp cultural observation (“the land of the free proved pricey enough”) there or even a spiritual depth charge (“the father’s adage that the central challenge of life was to accept that the world is a place of pain, and yet live.”), I find myself back in our home village of Galgorm, remembering the characters and where “The Doctor’s” was. It’s like this imaginary village can help me reflect on my formative years.

The story line is on the cover. A baby is found in the cemetery during the Christmas Fair, near dead, and brought to Dr Crowe’s. The doctor brings it to life and what happens then is a beautifully gentle drama, at times it is even tense. Was it a help that I read this particular novel at Christmas. Probably but I wouldn’t wait until Advent to start reading. 

Williams has brought a few things together in such a story. A baby born looking for room and indeed born in a scandalous circumstance hints at the New Testament. A baby born in Ireland in the theocracy of 1962 has different threats than Herod. 

As if all of this is not enough Time Of A Child has given me lots of sermon material. 

He gave great wisdom around Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount:

 

“Once it had come to him that the whole history of mankind had failed the Sermon On The Mount, the bitterness of that only resolved by the understanding he came to that maybe the aspiration was more important than the realisation and Jesus knew that… “

 

Even sharper to end my own New Year sermon:

 

“what filled Jack Troy then was the fantastic idea of grace as an actual thing”

 

When the story heats up the curate asks Dr Troy what he’s trying to do. Troy responds, “That’s easy, I’m living to be a Christian, only the Church and the State are in my way.” That leads to more pause for surmise that ends in, for me, the clarity of “My understanding is He (God) sees and knows, and foresaw and foreknew, all our errors, all our wrong turns and catastrophes and still loves us. And still loves us. Not because but despite.” That might be aimed as much at a church’s wrong turns and catastrophes as much as the ordinary people of Faha.

Can you see why I loved it? I loved it this much. I don’t get to read many books so when I am at the coast I want to read fast and get a couple of books done a week. Not long into Time Of The Child I was determined to slow down, to savour, to surmise. Every book coming out this year now has to compete!