An Irishman's Diary

IF YOU’RE aged over 35 and still in one piece, you should probably pause at least once every day and congratulate yourself on the achievement. Because in light of the number of things that were considered normal during your childhood, and are now banned or controlled for health and safety reasons, your continued existence must be either a statistical blip or a miracle.

I was reminded of this during the week by a now-annual text from my kids’ school, warning that nuts are “strictly prohibited” from the premises. This is the case all year round, of course. But at Halloween, there is a higher than usual risk of the anti-nut security cordon being breached. Hence the move to code yellow, as it were.

And I know there are good reasons for the ban. Even so, I can’t help being nostalgic about those crazy days, pre-regulation, when nuts were still central to the educational experience. If you weren’t eating them, you were using them as weapons: often after subjecting them to chemical hardening processes so, that well-aimed, they could have killed elephants.

Not that the prospect of death by chest-or-monkey-nut was your biggest danger. You had probably come to school that day on a bike, without a helmet. Or even worse, your parents had driven you in a car without seat-belts, or with seat-belts the use of which was still considered optional. Needless to say, the lunatics had never installed a booster seat. And to complete the picture of criminal negligence, they were probably smoking too.

But we must remember that the cost of living – and indeed life – was cheaper then. If you’re over 35 now, you can probably also remember a time when middle-of-the-road was not so a much a musical genre as the place where adults used to drive when they had a few pints on them. Sure, such behaviour wasn’t legal even at that time; but it was less vigorously policed than, for example, modern anti-nut policies.

If you grew up on a farm, like me, your chances of survival were even thinner. Never mind the dangerous machinery and bulls and all the other threats to your external security. Consider instead the horror that was daily consumption, for years on end, of unpasteurised milk! What was my mother – who spent her lifetime worrying about us being knocked down on the road – thinking? We used to have a room called “the dairy”. Naturally, it was where the milk was stored. But it was where lots of other things were stored too, including for a time, an old shotgun. Then, when the Troubles started, there was one of those periodic round-ups of unlicensed firearms, and my father handed the gun in to the barracks. I realise now, looking back, it was the milk he should have decommissioned.

These days, children’s whole lives are pasteurised. Which must be part of the reason for their much higher need of thrills, in everything from computer games to fairground rides. Things that would have scared the bejayzus out of my generation are much too bland for them. Hence the ever-increasing realism of the skeletons and zombies and other ghouls that have become standard decor in shops at this time of year.

It’s a bit of a paradox. Brought up in ultra-safe environments, modern kids can’t get enough of pretended danger. Yet here am I, survivor of the minefield that was a 20th-century childhood. And this weekend, I’m almost afraid to go to the supermarket.

I DON'T KNOWif "Nut-crack Night" is still celebrated anywhere in Ireland or Scotland. It may not have made it even into the early health-and-safety era. But it was a big part of Halloween once, and like many folk traditions, it centred on a process for identifying potential mates. Specifically, people (female people usually) would place nuts – proxies for potential marriage candidates – in the fire and study their behaviour. Here's one old account of the process: "It is a custom in Ireland, when the young women would [wish to] know if their lovers are faithful, to put three nuts upon the bars of the grate, naming the nuts after the lovers. If a nut cracks or jumps, the lover will prove unfaithful; if it begins to blaze or burn, he has a regard for the person making the trial. If the nuts named after the girl and her lover burn together, they will be married".

Robert Burns also described the custom in one of his poems, detailing the excitement that was to be had (in the days before television) from watching the nuts in action: “Some kindle, couthie, side by side/And burn thegither trimly;/Some start awa wi’ saucy pride,/And jump out owre the chimly.” Further on in the poem, he details the (literally) smouldering passion of a young woman called Jean as she watches a pair of nuts, representing herself and “Jock”: “He bleezed owre her, and she owre him,/As they wad never mair part;/Till, fuff! he started up the lum,/And Jean had e’en a sair heart.” It may be a relief to the men of Ireland and Scotland that the whole practice of women ritually burning nuts has gone up the lum (chimney). As for Jean and her “sair heart”, it would be lot sairer if, like increasing numbers of young people today, she had a peanut allergy.