Pat McCabe’s surreal stories are the real thing

Hello and Goodbye

IN HIS 1967 book, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, the late Scottish psychiatrist, RD Laing, eloquently expressed the irony of normality.

“‘Normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience... the ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane.