How a poor ould fella navigates his health

In this exclusive extract from the new book by Declan Lynch and Arthur Matthews, Notes from a Lost Tribe: The Poor Ould Fellas, we find out how a poor ould fella navigates his health

At any given time, a poor ould fella will be in need of some kind of operation. He will hear it called a ‘procedure’ by the medics but to him it will always be an operation, and it will always take a lot longer to be performed than would be ‘optimal’, as the lads in the white coats might put it.

This is due to a number of factors, chief among them being that nobody gives a damn whether a poor ould fella has his operation or not. On the whole there is a quiet consensus that they would all be better off just dying en masse if possible, thus freeing up the overburdened health service for the treatment of more urgent cases – indeed there is an unspoken ratings system in place, whereby the ingrown toenail of the prosperous country solicitor is prioritised over the late- stage lung cancer of the poor ould fella, and nobody feels too bad about it.

Of course if they had an expensive health insurance plan it might be different, but then they would be rich ould fellas, and we are not interested in them.

So they spend their days waiting and waiting and waiting for the operation. Sometimes the waiting goes on for so long, they’ve actually forgotten what the operation is for, they just know they need to have something taken out of them or at least that they should have had this done maybe a couple of years ago.

They have spent so much time in doctors’ waiting rooms they have memorised most of the messages on the noticeboard — which is quite a thing really when you consider they are no longer able to remember the detail of almost anything that happened to them since, say, 1961. Other than a general sense that it probably wasn’t much good.

When they first saw some information about holistic healing, as they waited for another hour after the two hours they’d already been waiting to see the doctor, they had no idea what holistic healing might be. But they have been looking at the leaflet about it for so long now that they’re starting to form a rough idea of what it is and why it wouldn’t be right for them.

Likewise they are all too familiar with the cards bearing the names of counsellors and psychotherapists who seem to be providing some sort of a service to the rest of the general public but who are quite intimidating to the poor ould fellas. The idea that they would be talking about themselves to a total stranger for the best part of an hour about their feelings — whatever the hell they are — is a somewhat alien one.

The main feeling they have is that they wouldn’t want to do that. In fact the feeling that they really don’t want to talk about their feelings may be one of the strongest feelings they have ever had. In the mind’s eye, the most they could see themselves doing in the way of this ‘therapy’ is sitting down for an hour in total silence, waiting for the counsellor to tell them what is wrong with them and when they’re supposed to be having the operation.

But they suspect that that’s not how it works. They are probably still more comfortable with the older style of confessional healing, whereby you went to Confession, kneeling in a dark booth babbling about your ‘sins’ while a deeply unhappy man sat on the other side of the grille, listening to this shit and imposing some form of penance — the talking therapy that they call ‘prayer’.

It was a system that suited a certain type of person, not least the older male members of the community, who would be far more reluctant to be revealing their sins to someone sitting across a table from them in broad daylight, someone much younger than them who is more than likely not a priest and who wants them to embark on a process of change.

The man on the other side of the grille didn’t want them to change, in fact it suited everyone that they would say the few prayers he gave them for penance, sure in the knowledge that they’d be back again in a few weeks with exactly the same things to ‘confess’, and so the great wheel of life would turn.

Change was not on the menu, because all parties to the process believed that change is bad — all change, all the time, is bad. And while some would dismiss this as a ‘negative’ response, there is quite a compelling reason why the poor ould fellas might regard change as a bad thing, that reason being that it has totally destroyed every aspect of their lives.

And it has done so systematically, relentlessly, comprehensively. It has done so to such an extent there is no therapy that could put it right, except to stop it all, to put an end to all change immediately. And then to reverse all the changes that have already been made.

Anyway, the only ‘therapy’ they need, the only ‘breakthrough’ they’d be looking for, is to turn on the telly one day and see that RTÉ is showing an old episode of The Virginian instead of repeats of the previous night’s episodes of Home and Away, Neighbours, EastEnders, and Fair City which they avoided the first time due to the correct supposition on their part that they are not exactly the demographic the makers of these shows are trying to reach.

Declan Lynch and Arthur Mathews, authors of ‘Notes From a Lost Tribe: The Poor Ould Fella’.

Indeed nobody who makes anything for public consumption is trying to reach them, if truth be told. But it is particularly obvious that they would not be uppermost in the thoughts of the makers of a show such as EastEnders. No, when a poor ould fella tries to settle his poor ould bones into the couch for the evening, we can safely say that he won’t be sitting there in anticipation of the latest doings of various psychotic Londoners with their shouting and their roaring. That he won’t be miming the dramatic drumbeats at the start of each episode or savouring the same music at the end as the credits roll, trying to time his imaginary drumming so that he nails it exactly on the opening beat — no, he won’t be doing any of that.

He has seen people like this before on The Jeremy Kyle Show, which he would sometimes watch by mistake in the mornings on TV3. ‘If I’m not your father then you’re married to your brother!’ might be the topic of the day or ‘You agreed to meet me for sex when you thought I was another woman!’ or maybe ‘My lesbian niece doesn’t know if her gay ex-boyfriend is the father!’ Clearly a poor ould fella might not instantly identify with these themes nor with the, shall we say, uninhibited personalities of the protagonists. So the kind of change he would be looking for in his own life would be to change The Jeremy Kyle Show from one that is made and then shown on the telly to one that is not made and therefore does not exist in any form.

Yes, if the people who thought of such shows could just go back to where they were before they thought of it and change what they did next, so that they didn’t do The Jeremy Kyle Show at all, that is the kind of change the poor ould fellas could get behind — to change whatever changes have been made, that would be ideal.

But that is not the kind of change that the medics and those in the caring professions in general are offering them. So they wait and they wait, in all those waiting rooms, staring at information about reflexology and pilates — the medics are always talking about the pilates, and how it would be great for the ould back, and how, even though they might have to join a class full of women doing physical jerks, it would be worth it, because it strengthens your core.

The poor ould fellas feel that they’d be spoiling the show by explaining that they no longer have a core.

They have become aware of the concept of preventative medicine in their reading of the ‘literature’, though they realise that the only kind of preventative medicine that had a chance of working was for them not to be born at all. And as for aromatherapy, this too would be of limited value to men whose ailments are at an advanced stage — and who have been known themselves to give off aromas that are complex, challenging and even overpowering.

But there is one new finding in the area of diet and nutrition that brings a wintry smile to their lips. Mostly they can ignore the advice about not eating rich food — they don’t have the money for it — and not eating processed food such as Galtee cheese and Knorr soup, because the damage is already done there.

But Guinness has always contained certain nutrients, it is ‘good for you’ as part of a balanced diet — and in Ireland, even as part of an unbalanced diet, it has been proven to sustain human life in the absence of almost any other food or drink. And now there is such a thing as vegan Guinness. Indeed since Diageo removed some sort of dead fish substance from the filtration process, all Guinness products are suitable for vegans. Which means, as the day of the operation finally draws near and the nerves of the poor ould fellas become even more frayed, they can be said to be totally vegan. More vegan than the vegans themselves.

Notes from a Lost Tribe: The Poor Ould Fellas by Declan Lynch and Arthur Mathews is published by Hachette Ireland, £10.99