SOUNDTRACK: NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST
[READ: Summer 2021] Ok, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea
I saw this book at work and loved the title. I actually assumed it was a novel. I’d never heard of Patrick Freyne and had no idea who he was. In fact, by the time I’d read the first few essays I still had no idea who he was. And that didn’t really matter all that much.
I suppose if you know him as a features journalist for The Irish Times, you would have some preconceived notions of what to expect. But I tend to like “memoirs” by unknown-to-me people better than those by celebrities. This is even addressed in the Preface. His best friend says
“If I was going to read a book about someone’s life, it would be someone like Julius Caesar or Napoleon or some famous general”
…
“You know there’s a whole genre of work that’s basically memoir writing,” I say. “People who aren’t particularly famous witting about their lives.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
That made me a little nervous abut going in but I figured if he put that in, it would probably all be pretty funny.
And, like so so so many books with blurbs like “Freyne is a comic genius” and “hilariously, painfully, Freynefully brilliant,” and “full of humour and tenderness,” [I’m looking you, blurbs in George Saunders books] this book proves to be about 50% funny and 50% emotionally, gut wrenchingly not funny at all. If you go into this expecting to laugh your arse off, your arse will be half on by the time you are done. Because some of these essays are personal and tragic and heartbreaking. But some are really funny too.
I said this about another Irish writer whom I didn’t know: if he’d been in America I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed this as much. It’s the unfamiliarity, the novelty of the things he’s talking about that make them far more interesting to me. I suspect that a petrol station in rural Ireland is very different from a gas station in New Jersey or even rural elsewhere, USA. And that’s more interesting for me to read about.
Of course, there’s also a a lot of assumptions in this book–like that I should know who the Rangers are (not the hockey team, an Irish military(?) group(?) organization(?) army(?)).
“It’s the Military Life for Me”
This story is pretty funny from the get go. He talks about his father taking him camping only to discover that the Rangers were looking for an IRA training camp where they were. Turned out his dad was undercover: “I figured the terrorists would have their eyes peeled for guards and soldiers…but if they saw a man and a child, they’d think it was just a father and son on a camping trip.” Then there’s a lot more about how he’s not cut out to be in the military. I was glad to hear that his dad was okay with that, and didn’t force him into it.
“The Thing about Me is, I Hate Drama”
This is a series of short memoires from his childhood. Things he did was he was five or six or so. Amusing stories of trying to fit in and getting petulant when people don’t like him. The longest part is when he was fifteen and tells us “the first three girls I kissed were all going out with the same boy at the time I kissed them.” It’s a crazy story as if Patrick was single-handedly trying to ruin this other boy’s love life. It ends with a list of enemies he’d made by the time he was sixteen.:
My mother
The child that Corncrake paid to pull my tracksuit bottoms down
Corncrake
Our Lord
“Coolmountain”
His family grew up in Coolmountain in West Cork (what a boss name for what sounds like a very remote location). This is a sweet essay about the old days (even days before he was born). Then he starts talking about leaving Cork and moving to County Kildare and having someone shout at him: “You’re always from Cork, boy.” Family is always there to make sure your head doesn’t get too big.
“Gigantic (What I did on my summer holidays, 1995)”
He and his friends went to Bremen, Germany for the summer and absolutely failed to do anything. That doesn’t make this boring. It’s actually funny reading about their continued ability to fail to do anything. There’s a brief bit about them skinny dipping and getting their clothes’ stolen and having to walk through Germany naked. There’s a part about them staying with Cork girls who seemed to pity them. And lines like this from Corncrake “My clothes are dirty.” “Why don’t you wash them?” “They’ll just get dirty again.” The joke that he remembers nothing about Bremen is genuinely very funny
“The Golden Age of Piracy”
This is a cool essay about running a pirate radio station. How does one fall into this? I don’t know, you just have to be friends with his friends I guess. Pirate radio was very big in the 90s in Ireland apparently.
“How to Make Music and Influence Nobody”
He was in a band called National Prayer Breakfast. He talks a lot about the band and playing gigs and how they were just having a ton of fun naming songs after people they liked: Gustav Klimt, Manu Chao, Kim Novak. None of the songs were about the people they were named after. They ended in 2004 but put out three albums of hard to classify music.
“Brain Fever”
This is, as the subtitle says, a catalogue of mental health difficulties. This was the strangest section of the book because none of the things he suffers from are all that strange (loneliness, bereavement, hypochondria, so maybe its just a way of relating to others.
“Care”
This is a remarkably sweet essay about him getting a job as a as a care worker for people with mental and physical disabilities. He is incredibly tender and caring to even some of the most challenging patients. It’s really touching
“Workplace Culture in the Early Nineties”
This one is about he petrol station in rural Ireland. His friend Corncrake worked there and his job was to protect the station from his nemesis–a blond haired eight year old boy who lived across the street and wanted to play with the pneumatic lifts all day (who wouldn’t). While Corncrake was the petrol station, Patrick worked in a kebab shop with a “long kebab-related pun in the title.” It was almost a decade after I left my post before I realized the name was actually a pun. He worked with a very uptight manager and “the most sexually attractive racist I have ever met.” His description of this woman and how it slowly dawned on him that she was a raging racist is pretty funny. He was also a dogsbody on the set for Braveheart. When he left the kebab shop for this gig he thought “I won’t have to work alongside a crazed racist conspiracy theorist anymore. Now I get to work alongside Mel Gibson”
“Gravity Blues”
This essay is about parachuting from a plane. He says he doesn’t know why he agreed to do this but he spent the whole of his time assuming he would die. Most of the instructions included saying what you shouldn’t do or you would die.
“Talking to Strangers”
This essay is where I found out what Freyne does for a living. Although this essay left it very unclear to me exactly what I might read when I was got to his section of the paper. He goes and talks to strangers. Every day? week? He doesn’t seem to have a reason to talk to anyone, he just kind of makes it up and looks for people to talk to? And sometimes celebrities? The essays sounded pretty fascinating.
“Sing a New Song to Drive Sorrows Away”
This is a really lovely essay about singing with your family and loved ones. It starts off touching and gets ever more and more touching as it goes along.
The Story of My Brother’s Birth, Starring Me”
This essay was 100% hilarious from start to end. He broke his arm on the day of his brother’s birth thereby grabbing most of the attention. But the whole essay has funny bits The doctor telling his father that the bone had been set but “it’s not perfect. Did you want it perfect?” He did. And then the hospital lost his brother. He was a few hours old and that had put his mother in the “haven’t had the baby yet” ward. So when she asked to see her baby the nurse said “You haven’t had a baby. None of the women here have had babies yet.”
In 1980s Ireland if a nurse or a nun told you that you didn’t have a baby, it was usually considered better to just go along with it.
When they touched her and realized she HAD had a baby, they moved her into the post natal ward. The smoking post natal ward. The nurse asked “Where is your baby” in an accusing fashion “as though my mother had stashed it somewhere as a hilarious prank.”
“Something Else”
This essay starts out with a fascinatingly dark dream about the world ending and him taking care of an orphan. He talks about how he really wants kids but that he and his wife can’t have children (he is mercifully short on details about that). He love children, but he hates the way parenting seems to turn people into monsters themselves. People who lead with “As a parent… I really feel for the victims of this disaster.” Are these people such psychopaths, that they needed to reproduce before they could feel empathy?
“Stories about Driving”
This essay is bits and pieces from various times in his life. Like when they bought a van in Germany and drove it back to Ireland as a touring vehicle for NPB. And a very funny story about driving with a provisional license and (since the world was low tech) the other country’s border patrol allowing them through with it. Another time of waking up on a highway flying down the road. He was in the passenger seat. The driving was snoring. There’s also the hilarious story of them trying to fill a gas tank when the cap wouldn’t come off–by using a magazine as a funnel.
Dreams about Paul
His friend Paul had died and he had a vivid dream that he came back to life. A sad but cathartic ending.
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