John Riseley (Letters, yesterday) takes me to task for referring to the "depth" of a pint's head, as opposed to the "height". But I'm afraid I must stand my ground here, writes Frank McNally
Yes, we would all like to live in a world where our pint-heads soared like the pinnacles in our correspondent's thesaurus. In the meantime, we must deal with the reality.
Being reasonable men, Mr Riseley and I will at least agree that the standard against which a head is measured, vis-a-vis height or depth, is the rim of the glass. This being the case, there was a time when - at least in west of Ireland pubs - one might be served a pint of Guinness, the snowline of which climbed well above the upper limits of the drink's receptacle. But those days are long gone.
Now the most one can hope for is that the pint-head will achieve a convex meniscus, the apex of which will be somewhere just above the rim. Stout drinkers still have a strong sense of entitlement in this regard, and will return a sub-standard measure with the request: "Fill that up, would you?" Even in a refilled pint, however, most of the head will still be in the glass. So depth rather height is its defining quality; or so I would argue.
And of course, the head on a pint of lager is often deeper again. Given that the original issue here was the Irishness of Irish pubs abroad - and my suggestion that an agreed ideal of the genre should be granted World Heritage status - I refer Mr Riseley to the notorious continental practice whereby the head on your beer is considered part of the measure.
Last time I was in Amsterdam, this heretical idea was still widespread. Barmen thought nothing of giving you a half-litre of Heineken, the upper third of which was froth. This started at the rim and worked its way down: so you could hardly say it had "height". Unless, perhaps, your glass was rose-tinted.
NEXT, PEOPLE will be telling me that when that I left my home in Monaghan all those years ago, I went "up" to Dublin; and not "down", as I have always supposed. In my bi-polar worldview, it is the natives of Cork, Kerry, and even Wicklow who go "up" to Dublin and later go "down" home. I'm not sure about people from Galway or Mayo: maybe they go "over" and "back".
Not that these terms would be considered valid by the Irish Institute of Physics, whose Alison Hackett wrote to me recently asking for a mention of the organisation's spring conference: being held this weekend in my home town of Carrickmacross.
The scientists are retracing their steps to the institute's first annual conference: which took place in the same venue in 1972. But then again, that may not be a valid concept either. As Einstein once said, comforting the bereaved widow of a fellow scientist: "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is illusion, however persistent." A much classier line than "I'm sorry for your troubles," I've always thought.
It's not easy for physicists to get the right publicity, Alison explains. For one thing, people often confuse "Institute of Physics" with "Institute of Psychics": which must be a bit like taking the wrong turn at a traffic-lights somewhere and ending up in the bad part of town.
Even worse, she says, "cosmic physics" sometimes finds its way into print as "cosmetic physics": attracting the wrong kind of clientele to the advertised event. Cosmetic physics is also concerned with the effects of gravity, I suppose. But any relationship with Newton, never mind Einstein, ends there.
Happily, public understanding of science is advancing. Only last Monday, the Vatican announced plans to erect a statue of Galileo: completing a U-turn in its relationship with the "Father of Physics" since the days when he was forced to recant his belief that the earth revolved around the sun. So this is a good week for the IOP to be holding its conference.
The Father of Physics is no longer on the lecture circuit, sadly. But demonstrating that the discipline can be fun, the keynote speaker at this weekend's event will be the "Father of the X-Box": the hugely successful computer games designer Séamus Blackley. Other speakers include a "forensic fire explosion analyst" and the co-inventor of the world's smallest TV screen.
The IOP remains, as it was in 1972, an all-Ireland body. Alison Hackett notes that the choice of venue for that inaugural conference was influenced by political sensitivity. The institute required "a location equidistant from Dublin and Belfast".
And, as Alison adds: "Carrickmacross provided the goods, [being] a hundred miles from each." I am very reluctant to correct the Institute of Physics: which will no doubt claim that space is curved and that the shortest distance between two objects is not a straight line, or something equally wacky. Even so, I must point out that Carrickmacross was never 100 miles from either Dublin or Belfast. Yes, it probably seemed it in 1972. But the roads have improved a lot since. Physicists travelling there this weekend will find it 70 miles from Belfast, and a mere 57 from Dublin. That is close enough to being equidistant, however: especially considering that for those coming from the north, the journey will be down all the way. Further information about the conference can be had from www.iopireland.org