From punches to punchlines
That won’t happen for a long, long time, at least not until all the words in the world have finally run out.
Mind, we exhausted a fair few of them on Wednesday, when Con was given a memorable send-off in Dublin. His great comrade Ray Hennessy set the bar high with a wonderful eulogy, by turns funny and moving, in St Kevin’s Church on Harrington Street, hard by the Houlihan fastness in Portobello.
I particularly loved Con’s quickfire response when Ray once asked him how his “friend-girl” Harriet Duffin was taking an All-Ireland final defeat for her beloved Dubs by Kerry. “House private, no flowers,” said Con.
Later, at the crematorium, Dermot Bolger paid one writer’s tribute to another, recalling how Con had once salvaged a glittering column from a damp squib international between Switzerland and Ireland — a game he described in the Evening Press as a coming together of two teams “with all the force of two pillows colliding” — by writing instead about his delighted discovery of a museum in Berne which housed works by Paul Cezanne.
There was music in Mount Jerome too, including a full-throated rendition of ‘The Parting Glass’ by Jimmy Kelly, brother of Luke, and the playing of a piece on CD chosen by Con’s cousin, Robert ‘Bobby’ Houlihan, who only happens to be an internationally renowned symphony orchestra conductor.
(What is it with these Houlihans?).
Yet, it was at this very special moment I noticed a couple of Con’s closest friends slipping out of their seats and heading for the door. When one of them caught my quizzical eye, he replied with a little boxing mime.
Ah, but of course, Katie Taylor was about to fight in her Olympic semi and even the music of the spheres was going to have play second fiddle to that. Needless, to say, Con Houlihan would not only have understood, he would have approved.
Indeed, as Eoghan Corry, another Burgh Quay exile, put it on the Vincent Browne Show later that night: “If Con had been at his own funeral, he’d have left too”.
In this epic week for Irish sport — and with all due respect to some of the excellent coverage of the Olympics — in this paper and others — I’m sure I’m not the only one wishing that Con was still around to do full justice to it all in his own inimitable style. And had he been in the whole of his health, you can be sure he would have loved to be in London, a place he regarded as one of the three greatest cities on earth. (For the record, the other two were Paris and, of course, Castle Island).
In 1988, he filed an Evening Press piece from what he called “the capital of the world”. His love affair with London, he wrote, had begun a long time ago: “I think of the old city on the Thames as akin to Cleopatra — ‘the infinite variety of her charms’.”
And those included charms of the most earthy variety as when, in the same piece, he wrote about breakfasting on a two rasher sandwiches and a pot of tea in Peter’s Cafe, a modest establishment near his lodgings in the Strand Palace hotel. “I have no idea who Peter is or was,” wrote Con, “but I can tell you one thing: his cafe isn’t the kind of place to which I would invite David Norris or Justin Keating, not to mention Helen Lucy Burke or Sandy O’ Byrne. But at least they couldn’t fault the décor — there isn’t any. In comparison, Mulligan’s pub in Dublin’s Poolbeg Street is like a Florentine palace in the heyday of the Medicis.”
And at the end of a week in which we have all become boxing devotees, Con’s words of a quarter of century ago could have been minted yesterday.
“Peter’s Cafe has a little counter and six scrubbed wooden tables. It is the kind of place where you can be asked for the loan of your spoon – that to me is the essence of democracy. The service was quick and friendly and competent, except for the absence of the spoon. I borrowed one from a man who looked like he had been a professional pugilist – with a shaky defence.”
On meeting Bobby Houlihan for the first time this week, I was delighted to discover that we shared a great regard for one line of Con’s in particular: “One night long ago in Spain, I had an extraordinary moment of communication with a hen.” When Con honoured me with the task of writing the foreward to his 1995 collection ‘Windfalls’, I highlighted that sentence and observed: “I can think of no other writer, anywhere, who could have penned that line — and meant it.”
And the context explains all. As Con wrote by way of explanation: “I was in a bus travelling from Madrid to Segovia about three o’ clock in the morning: the mountain road was almost deserted. We met a lorry on its way to Madrid; it carried a cargo of hens in crates; no doubt they were veterans that, doused with vinegar, would be served as chicken. One hen had her head out through the slats of the crate; our eyes met – two lost souls recognised each other.”
Words fail me.
Fortunately for all of us, they never failed Con Houlihan.
