AMONG THE accidental casualties of the harsh winter has been a certain Guinness ad. You know the one: with the man in the hat and the dog and the light going out over a country pub and the soft brass music and the voice-over: “Even at the home of the black stuff, they dream of a white one.” Which any other year would be filling us with warm and fuzzy feelings; but not this year.
This year, the dreamy invocation of a white Christmas is going down like a bad pint. By now, no sane person over the age of 10 wants more snow. Even the horse in the ad, snorting over his stable half-door, is probably thinking: “Ah, no. That’ll be Punchestown off again.” Unless he’s one of those leery oul’ buggers Ted Walsh complains about; in which case he’s glad of the excuse.
Leaving current weather conditions aside, the ad is a masterpiece of nostalgia evocation. It lasts only a minute, but in that time presses more buttons – pleasantly – than a duet with Noel Hill and Sharon Shannon: the clock striking midnight, the man checking his vintage watch, the snowy woods, the fox, the tied-up boat, the snow-covered road sign, etc.
Some details you only catch on repeated viewing, like the taxi-light going off, or the glimpse of Cork’s Shandon Steeple in the background of a snowball fight on Patrick’s Hill. And I dare say the director was thinking of Joyce’s The Dead – set in Usher’s Island, after all, around the corner from the brewery – as the scene shifts from Galway back to Dublin, after showing us that snow was general all over Ireland.
But this December, the ad has been stripped of its romance. The reality of a hard winter has been too long with us, and the state of the economy doesn’t help. To paraphrase Joyce, national morale has been falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.
Snow, meanwhile, has lost all novelty value. As a result, the ad has suddenly become a caution against the dangers of nostalgia. Now you can’t look at the snowball fight without wondering how many people will break their legs on the hill before Cork City Council gets the salt out.
That Dublin taxi-driver turning his light off at midnight reminds you of the year, pre-deregulation, when you had to walk home to Blanchardstown after the office party, in minus five degrees. And even the countryside looks grim. The fox clearly hasn’t eaten for days. My guess is that, now desperate, he’s about to break into a poultry house and steal somebody’s Christmas dinner.
SPEAKING OF weather and TV ads, you must have seen the one on Sky News that begins:
“As the fog hangs warily over London . . .” It’s part of a series sponsored by Qatar Airways, which juxtaposes the company’s in-flight catering with various meteorological conditions. But my question is this: how can a fog hang “warily” – over London or anywhere else? Can anything be said to hang warily, for that matter? An old-style public executioner could, I suppose, given how unpopular he would have been among the criminal classes. Executioners often did their work at elevated sites such as Tyburn Hill. So maybe they could even be said to have hanged warily over London, although it’s a bit of a – pardon the pun – stretch.
As for inanimate things, perhaps the only thing that could hang warily over London would be a warning sign (“Danger – Fog!”). But you’d hardly see one of those from a plane.
It would be both truer and semantically more acceptable to say: “As the fog hangs over a wary London.” Especially if it was one of the “pea-soup” fogs for which the city was once infamous. The last one – in 1952 – caused thousands of premature deaths and led to the banning of coal. And it wasn’t only their lungs that Londoners had to be wary about, as anyone who’s read Sherlock Holmes will know.
A Victorian guide to the city cautioned: “It is almost unnecessary to add that the dangers of the streets, great at all times, are immeasurably increased in foggy weather; and that the advantages of being able to dive into the unnatural darkness after successful robbery, are thoroughly appreciated by the predatory classes.” As someone who wrote about the predatory classes, Charles Dickens enjoyed the fogs and missed them when visiting sunnier countries. Perhaps, like certain brewers, he too dreamed of a white one. Which wasn’t the only thing he and Guinness had in common.
In a Christmas Carol, he imagines a fog-bound London as a giant fermentation vat in which "nature was brewing on a large scale". And setting the scene – or obscuring it – for his ghost story, he writes of how "the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links [torches], proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way." No doubt even airline advertisers are entitled to poetic exaggeration. Even so, if you're going to attribute anthropomorphic qualities such as watchfulness to the weather, you need to pick the right conditions. Come to think of it, CCTV cameras are another thing that could be said to hang warily over London. But they wouldn't be much use in a fog.