The old Columbian marching powder
In Celtic Tiger spring-times I used to say, “I don’t mind the heat but will those damn rock-breakers never stop!” Now, an eerie silence hangs over unfinished housing estates in far-flung villages. All changed, changed utterly since last summer, and a profound slow-down is born.
The thing is, we were never a fast nation until recently — change in Ireland was snail’s pace, sometimes dangerously so. And then, lo, the rush into it! The nation on a rush! And, if the economic blast off wasn’t enough for upwardly mobile 20-somethings and 30-somethings, there was cocaine.
Cocaine, as my readers will know, comes from an 8ft-high, tea-smelling bush that grows in the Andes and elsewhere. The leaves are traditionally chewed, with a dab of ash or lime, by the indigenous peoples to help them carry marathon loads up sheer hillsides despite deprivation, hunger and cold.
However, the product here in Ireland was refined cocaine for surfing the party on, and — like Christie Moore’s miraculous Guinness-ad character — for staying up on the surf-board, no matter how much booze the snorter drank. The old Colombian marching powder, the white-chopped God “C”, would keep him or her sharp and upright although — it turned out — often more than a tad uptight and unpleasant after a while.
For some thirty years up to 1929, coca was a major ingredient of Coca-Cola, the advertising for which said “For headaches and exhaustion, drink Coca-Cola at 5 cents a glass.” By 1929, it was the company’s official position that no cocaine remained in the original formula. It’s ironic that teenage parties in prohibition America were probably wilder than the adult parties where guests consumed hooch from china tea cups.
In the 1940s, the processed product of the Andean peasant again brought the sybaritic world a big buzz. Hitler’s henchman Goering, already a morphine addict, did it in tram-tracks. He was certainly no recommendation either for moral probity or weight loss.
Now that the easy bread dries up and there’s no fresh pasta, use of the big “C” will hopefully slow down too — there’s no cloud without a silver lining. Non-stop party and shop-till-ya-drop energy will be harnessed to better purpose. It’ll be back to the old survival energy — not the wipe-out, burnt-out energy — that made us top honchos on this planet Earth, something we achieved with the help of unscrambled brains and unwasted souls.
What will happen to the economy of the unfortunate Colombian hill-farmers is another question. Surely, now is the ideal time for first world nations to inject big bucks to establish alternative crops. While first world nations will have to tighten the purse strings, the cost, relative to the damage cocaine did to health, productivity and the human spirit — and the sheer murderousness it could engender — would be small.
Primroses have lined the banks of our stream for the last three weeks and a north Cork reader tells me that, for years, primroses have bloomed in January where he lives, a thousand feet above sea level.
On January 16, I came upon a few stands of celandine in flower; the petals weren’t, however, open to the sky like children’s drawings of the sun. These unfortunate flowers may spend their short lives bunched in on themselves because for weeks there’s been no sunshine to tempt them to open.
Meanwhile, bluebells are poking their tender, green snouts through the leaves carpeting the woodland floor and one hardly dares walk off the path for fear of trampling them. Paths after rain, however, have become small rivers and a salt-water fish in a rock pool below the wood must find itself in a bath of fresh water. Alright for a shanny, the most common of these rocky-shore fishes; it can always slither and walk on its front fins to a brine-ier retreat. The limpets in rainwater pools presumably just suck themselves snug on the rocks and let no water in, and periwinkles close their shiny operculums and wait for the salt water to return.
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