Picture post - Frank McNally on Cork nuances, the late Colm Ó Briain, and a photo exhibition in Rathmines

When setting up a Twitter account some years ago and adding a personal profile, I included for a laugh my pronouns of choice, which was all the rage at the time.

The ones I picked were “himself/yer man”: two terms I had always assumed to be interchangeable. So I’m intrigued to see that a supposed difference between them forms a small subplot, also involving Samuel Beckett, in a new book that landed on my desk this week.

The book is entitled Colm Ó Briain: A Coat of Many Colours, and it’s an appreciation by former friends and colleagues of the man named, who was founder of the Project Arts Centre, TV drama director at RTÉ, and the first full-time head of the Arts Council, among other things, before his death in 2020.

Contributors include Gerry Dukes, a Beckett specialist who recalls working with Ó Briain once in the 1980s, when the latter was directing a production of Waiting for Godot in Cork.

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The play features a scene that goes as follows:

Vladimir: Tied?

Estragon: Ti-ed.

Vladimir: How do you mean tied?

Estragon: Down.

Vladimir: But to whom? By whom?

Estragon: To your man.

Vladimir: To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea!

But as Dukes writes: “Colm’s actors convinced him that the phrase ‘your man’ would be heard in Cork as slightly derogatory.” So between them, they changed it to ‘himself’, which, Dukes adds, “is neutral if not slightly respectful”.

I wouldn’t have thought Beckett appreciated such improvements of his carefully crafted work. But he did, in this case: no doubt realising that Corkonians are a mysterious and sometimes dangerous people, and appreciating their guidance through the minefield of local nuance.

According to Dukes, who frequently corresponded with him, Beckett was “delighted” with the change and, on foot of it, praised the production’s “meticulous attention to detail”.

Other contributors to the new book include Garry Hynes, Lelia Doolan, Sean O’Faolain (posthumously, of course, via a letter he wrote to Ó Briain in 1983), and Colm’s widow, Muireann.

It was she who wrote to me from Rathmines with a copy of the book and an interesting story about a portrait of her late husband’s grandfather, William O’Brien, which is included among the pictures.

O’Brien was a Dublin fireman, painted in his uniform by a firefighting colleague, James Conway, who also happened to be an artist and a pupil of the famous Seán Keating.

The picture is a little piece of social history showing, as it does, the American-style uniform, topped with French-style kepi, adopted by the original Dublin Fire Brigade and used until the 1930s.

Family lore has it that William bequeathed the portrait, as a joke, to the one of his 12 children who liked it least. More recently, it was donated to the Dublin Fire Brigade Museum at Marino, where it is a welcome addition to the collection.

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By a pleasant coincidence, only a few hours after Muireann’s picture-themed letter arrived from Rathmines, I visited that suburb for a pictorial exhibition – photographs this time – by a man called Jim O’Callaghan.

No relation to the Fianna Fáil TD of the same name and postal district, Jim has described himself as “probably the oldest street photographer” taking pictures of Dublin daily. His hunting ground for many years was western Graftonia – the streets between Grafton Street and South Great George’s Street – which I prowl myself all the time.

We must have passed each other often. But we had never met until now and I knew of him only through his daughter Katherine, a Joycean academic who teaches in Massachusetts.

I also knew that, at 81, he had recently undergone emergency brain surgery. But he has since made a near Lazarus-like recovery. And there he was on Wednesday night, launching a small but fine exhibition of his Rathmines-based work in the Ernesto cafe.

The venue itself was interesting, presided over by Jonathan Smith, a man with a magnificent white beard the length of which you’d only get if you added Santa Claus, Karl Marx, and a member of ZZ Top together.

The many other pictures on his walls include several of that well-known Irish-Argentinian, Ernesto Che Guevara Lynch.

But that’s not where the cafe got its name. Jonathan and his wife have long been involved with projects to help children in Cuba and noticed that every male you meet there (or so it seems) is called Ernesto.

The tiny cafe – which, by the way, has hosted more celebrity musicians than Shane MacGowan’s funeral – got its name from that; the pictures of Che followed.

A wider selection of Jim O’Callaghan’s street photography is available on his Instagram account (at jimocallaghan24).

But speaking of street life, the opening of his Rathmines exhibition also inspired an accidental reunion of Flanneurs, or Flannoraks, as fans of Flann O’Brien are known. So after the launch, I repaired to the nearby Slattery’s pub in the company of a couple of them: himself and your man, respectively.