With some trepidation at the weekend, I agreed to a mystery group outing arranged by an eccentric friend who would give no hints what it involved.
Ominously, she herself then cried off, citing illness. So there was relief among the rest of us when the event turned out to be nothing more sinister than a “sound bath”.
“A what?” you ask. Well, essentially, it’s just another organised way to relax, like yoga but without the stretching.
After some preliminaries, starting with a brief explanation delivered in the lilting Cork accent of Caroline Flavin, the organiser, we all lay down, closed our eyes, and waited for the magic to happen.
For Whom the Bells Toll – Frank McNally on the ups and downs of “sound baths”
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‘A man of remarkable presence’: The physician and poet who gave his name to the Sigerson Cup
The Real McCabe - Frank McNally on a great (and much-married) American newspaper columnist
The sounds were mostly soft bell-ringing, on a wide range of notes. Instruments included “Tibetan singing bowls”: inverted metal bells that can be played by striking or by rotating something around the rim.
There were also more modern, silica-based bowls. As you might expect, those are popular among the meditators of Silicon Valley and other parts of California. And so durable is the material that, as Flavin mentioned in an aside, they were among the few things to survive undamaged the recent Los Angeles fires.
Anyway, the sound bath was indeed deeply relaxing. So much so that our Italian friend – we’ll call him “Paolo” to spare any embarrassment – fell asleep within three minutes of the start, his gentle snoring thereafter undisturbed by all the ringing.
Not everyone was as transported as him. Of the 10 or so in the class, nine of us faced the front of the room, which seemed logical. One young woman, however, faced the back.
She may have had distraction issues generally. But the result was that her head was just behind mine. And when, with the class at peak-meditation, I opened my eyes briefly to take a look around at what was happening, a small screen loomed in the peripheral vision above my head.
Sure enough, unmoved by ancient Tibetan wisdom, the woman behind was scrolling on her iPhone.
***
Life in Dublin is a constant sound bath, of course. From the clanging of ancient empty beer kegs on footpaths early in the morning to the squawking of seagulls late at night, there is never a moment’s silence.
Alas, this doesn’t usually lend itself to meditation. The rare occasions when you might be on the brink of mindfulness are likely to be punctuated by a bunch of passing tourists on an amphibious vehicle giving you the “Viking roar”.
Dublin pubs, meanwhile, seem to be noisier that ever, at least to me. In fact, on a subject that has been dominating our Letters page this past week, I have of late had an unwelcome revelation about the effects of age on hearing.
I always assumed that the onset of partial deafness would be general. Now, thanks to pubs, I realise that not only is hearing loss highly selective, but that the selection is all wrong.
The irrelevant background noise – including that eejit in the corner with the machine-gun laugh – gets louder every year. It’s the foreground noise, like the friend beside you telling a long, important story about his or her relationship crisis – on which you may be asked questions later – that grows ever less audible.
***
“Where the places have no name” someone commented on social media the other day over a link to RTÉ's report on Ireland’s latest Michelin Star awards. The poster was satirising the website’s vague reference to a newly starred Galway restaurant, Lignum, being “in the rural east of the county”.
As this newspaper pointed out, Lignum is in a townland called Bullaun, north of Loughrea. Which means it’s also not far from Athenry, of low-lying fields and Famine fame. Nowhere in Ireland is now safe from Michelin-starred food, it seems.
This reminded me of a bigger social media controversy a couple years ago when a hotel in Athenry decided to call its restaurant “Trevelyan’s”.
Maybe it was deliberate irony or maybe, in the spirit with which Ronald Reagan once adopted Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA as a patriotic campaign song, someone just hadn’t listened to the lyrics.
Either way, the Connacht Tribune quoted former Galway politician Máire Geoghegan Quinn as finding it a “shocking” choice.
Speaking of irony, and Connacht, I’m told by a friend in Alicante there is an Irish pub in that city called “Cromwell’s”. Maybe something got lost in translation. Or maybe it just sounds better in Spanish.
***
Still with irony, the London Times reported Tuesday about a survey of TV viewing habits in mainland Europe, under the headline: “In TV comedy, Britain rules the airwaves”.
The study highlighted the success of “British humour” in particular, and credited the “irony, blackness and irreverence” of same as making it more popular with continental Europeans than domestic or American productions. Among the prime examples, it added, was Derry Girls. Now I’m not one of those people who get triggered by, for example, the description of a certain local archipelago as the “British Isles”.
But this was a step too far. Calling the humour of Derry Girls “British” seems a bit tin-eared, if only considering that the series went to such lengths to have an English character – the unfortunate Cousin James – whose cultural misunderstandings it could mock at every turn.
