Tucker has shattered another of my illusions
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Robbie Savage on the money here. 
Mark has it bad. Itâs only a film.
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An ode to celluloid
Fierce bang of insularity off that, âmcdonagh isnât really Irish and doesnât understand Irelandâ.
Well known the missing 30 mins of the watergate tapes recordings were discussions on the jfk assassination
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Heard a bit of that last night sounded good,must listen to it all today
He done a very good podcast on the second captains too a few months ago. Seems a very decent man.
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That was a brilliant segment, heâs a fascinating character to listen to.
What a wonderful article. Worth reading the whole thing.
This is a lovely article if anyone could do the needful
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Hello, Iâm hiding in the loo again at the Oscars, Charlie Mackesy scrawled on a napkin to his 1.7 million Instagram followers. Fifteen minutes later the artist and author won best animated short film with his friend the PR guru Matthew Freud for The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.
âIt was terrifying,â says Mackesy who hadnât been on a plane for 18 years. âThe cameras were on my face, all the nominees were in a line. I thought I heard someone elseâs name announced but Matthew was suddenly grinning. I felt elated but I also just wanted to lie on the floor. I didnât think I could go on stage. My mind went to mush, I felt shocked and emotional and grateful all at once.â
It is rather extraordinary that this self-deprecating man â whose most famous line is ââWhat is the bravest thing youâve ever said?â asked the boy. âHelp,â said the horseâ â has been awarded the two highest accolades in the film world, a Bafta and now an Oscar. His beautiful book of ink drawings and sayings, published just before the pandemic, is already the biggest-selling UK hardback this century, recommended by everyone from the Queen to Oprah Winfrey. His words resonated with many who were feeling fragile in a volatile world, yet he appears easily overwhelmed by life and underwhelmed by the trappings of success.
Forty-eight hours later, Mackesy, 60, is back at his house in Brixton, south London. He greets me in his muddy garden holding a can of dog food, with holes in his jumper. Barney the dachshund is yapping at his feet and the rain is pouring down. We retreat inside and I sit on an ancient sofa under a dusty chandelier. Iâm surrounded by thousands of sketches scattered across the paint-splattered floorboards as Mackesy fails to find any milk or mug for the tea. Itâs easy to overlook the Oscar gleaming on the mantelpiece in the comfortable chaos. Charlie hands it to me and itâs surprisingly heavy. âI brought it back wrapped in an old T-shirt,â he says.
He eventually puts a mug down on a sketch that is probably worth hundreds of pounds. âDonât worry,â he reassures me, âthey fall out from me like rain from clouds, all the time.â
The book began with sketches he would send to cheer up friends. The animation required thousands more drawings. âIt was a huge task. The producer, Cara Speller, steered 120 animators and artists, we did 3,000 hours of Zoom calls, four hours most days, for two years. There were 24 frames per second and all of them were hand-drawn. People told us we were mad but we wanted to keep the handmade element, the accidental splotches of ink. I didnât want it to look sterilised and alienating. For me the book and then the film were all about connection and imperfection.â
Mackesy seems so unassuming and gentle, with his halo of curly hair, itâs hard to see him putting his foot down as co-director with Peter Baynton. âIâd had two years of letters and emails from readers and I knew how the book had affected their lives. Itâs been overwhelming. I met a film producer at the Oscars and she was in tears, she told me my book had saved her life and sheâd bought 1,000 copies. I never engineered a book to do that, it just spilled out and it triggered something at a difficult time. People would tell me they read the book to their mum when she was dying; bus drivers, teachers and nurses shared their grief. It was a unique privilege.â
The book and film may appear naive but they are nurturing, giving advice when, like the boy, you might feel lost or overwhelmed. They are about taking it one step at a time, finding solace in companionship and nature and the value of kindness.
âI wanted people to know it wasnât a failing to show your feelings,â he says. âWe are all brought up to fight on and be strong. We donât have a simple language for frailty.â
Mackesy doesnât know exactly why the four characters resonate with so many people. âThere was a polar bear, a penguin and a koala but I eventually left them out. The four remaining characters represent parts of me. The mole defaults to cake for comfort. Mine is crisps and hot chocolate. Today I went to my local cafĂŠ and I was feeling jet-lagged and jaded and I had three hot chocolates. The boy is the bit in me that still questions himself â why I was even at the Oscars. The fox is the anxious part of me, the bit that goes round and round in survival mode, and is a bit more prickly, less likely to trust. I find the foxes in my garden fascinating; they are wild and untamed and unpredictable. Then there is the horse, which is the deepest part of us, the soul, which hasnât changed since we were tiny. Itâs calm and wise. It quietly stands within us all our lives.â
The book and film feel very much of our time as we struggle to come out of the pandemic. âWe talk about post-pandemic, but we arenât post-anything,â Mackesy says. âThe repercussions are so present, especially in kids. I meet people who had a fantastic lockdown and other friends who were stuck in a tiny flat for two years and are now deeply anxious. We were not all in the same boat, just the same sea, and some boats had holes in them. Yet weâre all supposed to have reached the shore and be getting on with it. It used to make me cry when I realised that NHS acute wards had my drawings as screensavers.â
He understands the desire to âdeleteâ the pandemic but feels âitâs still in usâ and has seeped into our psyche. âThereâs perhaps a collective, national PTSD that is not being addressed. We are all bravely getting on with it, meanwhile we are dragging behind us two years of devastation and disconnect.â Mackesy spent much of the pandemic with his family in Suffolk, including his mother, who has mild dementia. âI gave her my book and she would run her hands over the cover and her fingers over the letters until the pages were worn through.â
This mild-mannered man appears to have become a sage for our anxious age. When he talks about his childhood, itâs clear that these arenât just trivial platitudes to sell posters. They have profound meaning to Mackesy, who has struggled to find life bearable at times. âI had an amazing childhood, brought up in a tiny village in Northumberland. There were geese and cattle and I was always out on the hill with the dogs, chatting to the farmers,â he says. âMy parents were funny and loving. They thought aged seven that boarding school was the best opportunity for me, but it was difficult. I pretended my dog was with me and that I had a kestrel coming through the window at night in my dormitory. My sanctuary was the art room.â
Mackesy felt even more discombobulated as a teenager. âI went to work on my best friendâs farm but then he was killed in a car crash. It affected me deeply, I spiralled inwards and all that comforted me was drawing. So, I went to London to stay with my sister Sara and spent three years sitting on the streets drawing buildings, listening to my Walkman, and eventually people started buying them . . . I just thought if I could make enough I could keep going. Money has never been a thing for me. I like people and friends, understanding and being understood. I dread feeling lonely.â
Although heâs not married, he says he has been in love. âItâs just never worked out because the girl didnât want to marry me or vice versa. Having spent a lot of my life single, my friendships have a profound importance, I want to be there for them and support them. Iâve lost too many brilliant friends and I miss them all painfully. I find life difficult.â
He doesnât allow social media to overwhelm him, however. âI love Instagram but social media can be very shouty, with people flinging accusations at each other. Itâs a pity. I get abuse but I leave them to it. If people donât like my book or ridicule it, thatâs fine. I know some people said they were sick of what one called âthis childish crapâ about the film and preferred another contender, My Year of Dicks, but I didnât mind. We have lost the art of disagreeing well and still being affable.â
So will there be a sequel? âIâm pretty tired. But I donât want to go back to being on my own again. I like what the book and film have done to peopleâs lives, including mine. I was in a restaurant last night and people were stroking the Oscar. But itâs the connections and conversations for which I am grateful. And thatâs what the book and the film are ultimately about, friendship getting you through life.â
Charlie Mackesy
Curriculum vitae
Born December 11, 1962
Educated Radley College; Queen Elizabeth High School, Hexham; dropped out of university twice.
Career Cartoonist for The Spectator, then a book illustrator for Oxford University Press. Worked with Richard Curtis on the set of Love Actually, drawing pictures that were auctioned off for Comic Relief. Also drew images for Nelson Mandelaâs Unity Series. Published The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse in October 2019. Awarded the Maddox Gallery Artist of the Year prize in 2020 and named Illustrator of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2021. Co-directed and co-wrote the animated short film adaptation of his book, for which he won an Oscar.
Family Splits his time between Brixton, south London, and Suffolk with his dog, Barney.
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Decent article here as these things go.
Ireland in the 1980s was a dire place: Organised misogyny, mass unemployment and vicious homophobia
by Fintan OâToole, irishtimes.com
March 28, 2023
Gordon Moore died, at the age of 94, in Hawaii last Friday. If you believe in the afterlife, you might like to imagine him arriving in heaven and taking over St Patrickâs seat as patron saint of Ireland.
Even if they donât know him, most people will have heard of Mooreâs Law â his prediction that the number of transistors that could fit on an integrated circuit would double every two years. It is the heart of the revolution in the power and availability of computers that Moore himself, as co-founder of Intel, helped to drive.
The weird resurgence of the Kerry Babies case last week has prompted reminiscences of what a dire place Ireland was in the 1980s: organised misogyny, mass unemployment, mass emigration, hunger strikes, moving statues, vicious homophobia, mad crusades on abortion and divorce, Charles Haugheyâs kleptocracy â and everywhere the acrid whiff of failure.
If young people were not leaving to find work, they were leaving because they felt like freaks in their own country. And official Irelandâs response was Brian Lenihanâs breezy comment that âAfter all we canât all live on a small islandâ.
Ireland in the 1980s was a dire place: Organised misogyny, mass unemployment and vicious homophobia
GardaĂ investigating Kerry Babies case hope to have DNA test results by end of week
Kerry babies: GardaĂ await results of DNA tests taken from arrested couple
Which is why it was so amazing to get a flyer through my letterbox one day near the end of that grim decade, from a company I had never heard of: âWe are now ready to start building the Intel Ireland Teamâ. It sought job applications from manufacturing engineers, business system managers, test engineering managers.
[ Chipmaker increasingly on outside after decades of âIntel Insideâ ]
I was not any of those things, but the very notion of a high-tech corporation canvassing for recruits to well-paid jobs in Ireland was astounding. It must have been Gordon Mooreâs decision to set up here â he was still Intelâs chief executive in 1987.
It was a nice historical joke that Intel moved into the space occupied by the Catholic hierarchy. It bought Collinstown stud near Leixlip, a 12-minute drive from the bishopsâ headquarters in Maynooth.
Over the next decade, Mooreâs Law would replace Godâs law as the ruling force on the âsmall islandâ. If there is a Ground Zero for the new Ireland, it is surely that stud farm where Intel, having first built an assembly line, decided to create Fab 10, the worldâs first high-volume 200-millimetre semiconductor wafer plant.
If the wafer of the Host was the Churchâs miraculous object, Intelâs wafer was the Pentium chip â the beating pulse of the IT revolution. It made Leixlip ultimately much more potent than Maynooth.
In 1986, Irelandâs entire GDP was, in dollar terms, $28.5 billion. When Intelâs current round of expansion in Leixlip is complete, it will have invested $30 billion here.
Intel was a magnet for reverse emigration. Most of its early recruits were Irish people who had been working for Philips in Eindhoven or Siemens in Munich. Intel gambled on the pull of home, guessing that it could draw them back.
But this was not the Ould Sod. It was Young Ireland. In 1993, the average age of Intelâs workers in Leixlip was 26 â only a handful were over 40. At least on the initial assembly line, 60 per cent of the staff were women.
[ Mooreâs Law, still proving itself true after 50 years ]
More than 60 per cent of Intelâs Irish workers had third-level degrees. In Fab 10, where the Pentium chip was made, it was 90 per cent.
This was Irelandâs Great Leap Forward. In one bound, it went from backwater economy to a place that could sustain one of the most technologically advanced industrial plants ever created anywhere in the world.
And yet â and this is what makes the story of Irish modernity so surreal â all of this was happening in a country that still had Magdalene laundries and Mother and Baby homes and had recently conducted (in the Kerry Babies tribunal) a witch trial.
We had, as almost all portable computers boasted at the time, Pentium Inside. But the outer surface was still coated in Catholic exceptionalism.
More than half of the worldâs microprocessors were being sourced in Ireland, but you couldnât get a divorce. The Pentium prototypes were being developed in Leixlip while Ireland was finally decriminalising homosexuality â but only because the European Court of Human Rights made us do it.
I always thought it rather amusing that both Maynooth and Leixlip were obsessed with the maintenance of purity. For the bishops, it was the supposed moral hygiene that made Ireland, in the title of Derek Scallyâs terrific book, The Best Catholics in the World.
For Intel, it was the hyper-cleanliness demanded by their manufacturing processes, the rituals of extreme decontamination its workers had to undergo every morning before they entered the holy of holies. Over time, one of these ideas of a spotless Ireland would win out over the other.
Thereâs nothing perfect about the globalised Ireland that has emerged from this process. But the answer to âWhat have the American corporate capitalists ever done for usâ? is quite a long one.
If, because of the Kerry Babies story, youâve been reading about 1980s Ireland, you might want to light a candle for Gordon Moore, who did so much to end it. The switch from pent-up to Pentium, the shift of Irelandâs centre of gravity from Maynooth to Leixlip, is a hinge on which so many other possibilities turned.
Whether you agree with McDowell or Mullally itâs good to live in a country where newspapers will still publish competing opinion pieces
Car use is not simply the prerogative of the odious and hysterical middle class
âSince all our planned public transport projects are many, many years from completion, banning all cars, even EVs, in pursuit of climate change goals is neither sustainable nor politically feasible.â File photograph: Colin Keegan/Collins Dublin
There seems to be a vogue for condemning everyone who doesnât share your opinions as being morally reprehensible, selfish, ignorant or a class enemy. Violent language is often used online against people who question the validity of transgender ideology. Owners of rented property are condemned as exploiters of their lessees.
And now an Irish Times that those who defend ownership and use of cars do so in âbad faithâ, engage in âhairsplittingâ, and are exhibiting the âselfish hysteria of middle-class driversâ. Car ownership is radically at odds with tackling climate change and is a threat to the health and wellbeing of everyone, it is suggested.
Letâs examine those charges. The Government plans that 1 million electric vehicles (EVs) will be on our roads by 2030. Eamon Ryan insists this can be done, even if it will be challenging. Cars using fossil fuels will be phased out.
Why would achieving that target not permit car ownership and use, both in cities and rural areas?
Car use is not simply the prerogative of the odious and hysterical middle class. Huge numbers of people from every class depend on having a car. Only the very well-to-do middle class could afford the routine use of taxis for their daily life activities such as bringing children to creches and school, collecting kids from dances and gigs, attending sport events, doing the weekly shop, looking after elderly relatives, and collecting them for family events.
Buses simply canât and never will provide for these needs. Taking two bus trips either way to carry out these tasks would add hours to perfectly normal daily and weekly routines.
A construction worker living in Dublin city centre often needs daily use of a car to get to his or her building site. Carers need the use of a car to get to their clientsâ homes. Living in rural Ireland without a car would be almost impossible for most families.
Any suggestion that public transport in the form of buses, taxis, bikes and e-scooters will suffice to sustain the entire transport needs of a vast number of people is fanciful and unrealistic.
Once electric cars become cheaper and Eamon Ryanâs promised charging infrastructure is in place, families living in a city will be able to own and use a non-polluting car causing few emissions and little noise.
Air pollution in Phibsboro caused by traffic should be massively reduced if we meet the 2030 EV target. But many people driving fossil fuel or electric cars between Phibsboro and the Liffey via Church Street these days might wonder whether the day-long gridlocked traffic congestion on that route created by a new traffic light timing regime imposed by Dublin City Council might not have an awful lot to do with those emission levels.
[ Una Mullally: Cars have to go. People can fight this all they want, but it has to happen ]
Access to cars is a massively liberating and enabling thing for people of all classes in all parts of the country. Car users are not the class enemy of some hypothetical majority in society. Those who have access to public transport or who can cycle to work and leisure and live in a 15-minute urban environment may well wish to dispense with car ownership. That is their choice. But for many people it is simply not a choice.
I doubt that most people would argue against planting more trees to increase shade or encouraging urban dwellers to keep beehives. Nobody is stopping anyone from rewilding their front and rear gardens.
Banning all cars, even EVs, in pursuit of climate change goals is neither sustainable nor politically feasible
They might, however, have reservations about repurposing our streets and roads for vegetable allotments, beekeeping, and communal barbecues and performance spaces. They might reasonably prefer to live in areas where car ownership and use is still facilitated when fossil fuel vehicles are phased out.
They might like to travel in an electric car on a wet evening to a centre city cinema, theatre or music venue and be able to park their car in a convenient multistorey car park and later drop off their friends to their homes.
That doesnât make them selfish. They might not be able to afford âŹ50 or âŹ60 in taxi fares on top of the price of a meal and tickets. Wanting to do that doesnât make them hysterical members of the middle class either.
Since all our planned public transport projects are many, many years from completion, banning all cars, even EVs, in pursuit of climate change goals is neither sustainable nor politically feasible.
Intolerance of others and the dogmatic pursuit of utterly unrealistic goals is building up a head of political steam among the great majority of reasonable people. Their reasonable views cannot and should not be dismissed as the stuff of phoney cynical debate, radio phone-in outrage or populist pushback.
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most people in Dublin city dont own cars yet most space is given to polluting cars, surely they shouldnât be held to ransom by people who want to drive once a month to the theatre
Michael addressed this. Sigh.