HICKATHRIFT PRESS

Ian Corns, Head of English at King Edward VII Academy, King’s Lynn, asks whether we appreciate the exact nature of ‘irony’

Does anyone truly understand what irony is? We throw certain phrases around like confetti, as if we wholly appreciate their meaning: ‘Ironically…That’s ironic…The irony of it all…’ But is everything we consider to be ‘ironic’ actually an ironical instance? My suspicion is that we are inhibited in our pursuit of truly understanding its meaning, not because of a lack of will – more because of the fact we live in an increasingly instantaneous world where common parlance affords us no time or right to explain or reflect upon the credibility of what we say; life moves immediately on. A parallel, by way of illustration and transparency, could be drawn with the ingredients of a joke. If you deliver a ‘gag’ and you have to explain it, from the key structures of ‘set-up’ to ‘assumption’ to ‘pay-off’/‘punchline’, then clearly it winds up as being distinctly unfunny. Ironic, really, as jokes are intricate and sophisticated processes of language which deserve due regard and reflection. It’s a great shame because the self-esteem of humans is integrally linked to their relationship with language, and this likewise is heavily synonymous with audience. ‘It makes him and it mars him’, something which the Porter says in the play ‘Macbeth’ when implying that we can use language to create double meanings, a duality which culminates in him acknowledging that we can deceive others on a number of levels but not God, whose final reckoning reflects only the truth. In many ways, Shakespeare’s clown-like construct talks ironically and chaotically about our tendency for self-deception and yet personifies irony, ultimately, in its truest form as his comical stupidity belies the credibility of his theory, something which underpins the meaning of the whole play.

When I talk about irony, both inside and outside the classroom, I couch my expressions in layman’s terms, partly because I need my audience to be happy and receptive, and partly because there’s an agonising, eternal millisecond in which I hesitate over the question: ‘Have I got this right?’

“So, irony is where something unexpected happens, erm, probably even the opposite of what’s expected, and there’s a bit of a twist at the end.” Silence.

“Ok, erm, it’s built on paradox and juxtaposition with a bit more given to you as an outcome.” A sea of blank expressions looking back.

“Like, if a teacher constantly preaches about being on time and is uncompromising about standards, but then turns up late to class, that’s ironic. Even more ironic if their lateness is down to idle chat in the staffroom over breaktime, which went on a little too long.” A couple of kids show lights switching on behind their eyes.

Confidence

I’m gaining in confidence now. Time for an anecdote: “Yeah, just the other day, I stopped by a junk shop. I bought an industrial lampshade. It had either been a fixture in a factory during the Industrial Revolution, shedding light on a skilled worker’s dexterous, precise hand movements as a British-made product took shape in his midst, or it had been part of a gantry of stage lights, bathing the key characters of a London musical in a blaze of recognition and glory, ahead of a resounding encore…Hard to say which version of accolade I’d prefer to lay claim to if I were this particular piece of ironmongery…it now resides in my garden, rammed with compost and choked with weeds, a plant graveyard. Overflowing with lifeless, brown, flaccid stems. Incessantly rained on. How the mighty fall. You’ll no doubt see an irony to how this artefact has ended up, and what it has now become.” Nope. I’ve lost them again.

My angst about irony and its identity stretches even as far as looking at the worldwide hit ‘Isn’t it Ironic’ by Alanis Morissette. My disclaimer, here, is that no, I’m not at all a fan of her work, and – yes – I hold my hands up to having gone down a rabbit hole on this… The song basically cites a range of instances which, according to the songstress, constitute clear cases of irony. In fact, as she warbles reflectively towards its conclusion, she applies the label of extremity through the line: ‘A little too ironic, don’t you think?’ Well, in all honesty, no, I don’t think. Famously, Alanis states via her lyrics that ‘It’s like rain on your wedding day.’ This is more a case of misfortune than irony. Maybe it’s not even unlucky if you happen to like rain. Walking in the rain is supposed to be cleansing and romantic, the two protagonists drawing ever closer to each other in a bid to get under the umbrella and feel the warmth that their partner brings. Even putting this to one side, the British climate means you’re always expecting rain. There’s nothing unexpected about it. The weather, to this end, can change in an instant.

And what about her suggestion that ‘An old man turned 98/He won the lottery and died the next day’? Perhaps this would have credible grounding in irony if we were told that he’d been trying all his life to land the big prize. The devil, here, lies in the contextual detail. Instead, we’re likely to assume that the deceased winner had realised in his latter years, like surely we all do, that money doesn’t mean happiness and that the only thing worth doing with it, just three years from being a centurion, is to leave it to your loved ones, who absolutely do think wealth is money and money is happiness. It’s a blessing, therefore, and feeds the beauty of his legacy. It’s not ironic. Neither is the line: ‘A No Smoking sign on your cigarette break’. Employment law is a product of consultation and notice. The featured sign is hardly going to be an unannounced surprise, and a ‘morning break’ – as far as I know – has only ever been termed a ‘cigarette break’ by those who seek a desperate infusion of nicotine, in the same way that others might call it a tea or coffee break because of their penchant for a specific drink or need for caffeine. My advice, here, is to forget the pretence of irony and either go off-site for a cig, or – better still – give up the filthy habit altogether.

‘So, what is ironic?’ I hear you ask. ‘Rather than be a ‘nay sayer’, tell us what it means.’ Well, with my son now twenty-two years of age and myself approaching retirement after giving my all to teaching for thirty-four years, I understand as clearly as anyone that, despite sweating blood in the ‘moment’ of deadlines, reviews and Ofsteds, and sitting for hours on end interminably marking essays and exam papers, the journey has somehow gone in a flash. There’s a distinct irony to this. We live our lives slowly but, despite the painful pedestrian nature of – for much of each year – going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark, and moving bits of scrimped and saved cash into ‘the joint account’ so a week in Corfu can be had in August, and waking up at 2 am engulfed by a maelstrom of thoughts linked to work, it all actually goes so very quickly.

In 1992, when I first became a Newly Qualified Teacher, I washed up in Skegness like a bit of driftwood, intent on seeing how it went for a while at the local Secondary Modern school, the once notorious and now defunct ‘Earl of Scarbrough High School’ (I stayed for twenty-two years, including battling on through its subsequent confused ‘re-start’ identity of St. Clement’s College and, more latterly, Skegness Academy). As a twenty-two-year-old, I was largely directionless, though I knew – conversely – I’d be expected to give guidance to a generation of seaside kids, signposting their futures and giving them a potential escape, if required, from what I could already sense was a dead-end town.

Back in mid-August of 1992, I couldn’t have known the journey that awaited me. I’d fixed up a ‘long stay’ in a local boarding house, while I somehow got my bearings ahead of the forthcoming Autumn Term. I remember, vividly, standing in a red phone box on a nearby street corner and receiving the horrific words down the crackly line that my relationship of eight years was over. Something about us heading in different directions. Something along the lines of: “It’s run its course” and more specifically, “If you think I’m moving to Skegness, then you must be more stupid than you look.” This was followed by the dialling tone. I walked back to my lodgings, broken like glass, amidst the mocking caws of crows on sun-baked shed roofs – to a room in which the bed needed pulling down from out of the wall, and 50p needed periodically putting into the relentlessly hungry electric meter, without which I couldn’t even put on the light or watch tv. I looked down at the holes in the cigarette-scorched carpet beneath my feet. This was going to be tough.

Once the fog began to clear, I reflected on how the relationship had always shown red-flag warning signs. For one thing, she was from Wigan. In Chorley, Wigan was conspicuous for the fact that absolutely nobody appeared to talk about the town, still less support its football club, Wigan Athletic, which – until the late 1990s – played every home game at a rain-lashed, backstreet monstrosity – a sinister, brooding venue with cowshed stands called Springfield Park. I recalled going there with my mates when I was seventeen one night to support Bolton Wanderers in the cup. The surrounding terrace houses threw long, ghoulish shadows across the claustrophobic, menacing alleyways as the ground’s floodlights punched holes – shifting, fleeting yellow pools of hope – into the despondent North West sky. This, for us, was a rite of passage. We’d gone over to enemy territory. It was something we could tell our mates about the next day. Real kudos – like adventurers or pioneers on a mission to uncover an undiscovered world. No one from Chorley went to Wigan. Even when we were in the fifth year at Parklands High School and the lads would stand on the relevant train platform in their eighties’ designer ‘garms’ to go to the match on a Saturday – Platform One for Preston North End and Blackburn Rovers; Platform 2 for Man United, Man City, Liverpool, Everton and of course first stop, Bolton – no one ever went to Wigan. Ever. I took some small comfort from this. It was obviously never meant to be. The irony of it – I’d found love in Wigan, something which now felt akin to Macbeth, a Tragic Hero, seeking to unsettle the Natural Order and disrupt Divinity. It all made sense at last. It had been fundamentally wrong.

Setbacks

This said, my attempts to settle into Skegness life were full of initial setbacks. The pace of life was slow, with each second hanging in the air for much longer than was bearable. I wasn’t used to it. It was as if time clung to you, hung onto your ‘trackie top’ and draped over you like a smothering cloak, refusing to evolve, push on or renew itself. It was as if it were scared of being consigned to the bin of yesterday’s news. Each tick of the high street clock dragged its feet, stubbornly stalling, outstaying its welcome. My personal thoughts invariably cascaded, rebounded, hurtled and smashed with great velocity against the walls of my head, before somehow emerging – usually unfiltered – crashing out of my mouth, a product of the environment in which I’d been brought up. The locals, by contrast, already had established networks, invariably family-based, often living right on top of each other in neighbouring streets. Their thoughts seemed slow, logical, practical, apathetic, complacent, narrow and superficial. Moreover, I got the distinct feeling that I was an Outsider and that I always would be – I was kept precisely at arm’s length, perhaps as a consequence of their cynicism towards the transient seaside population, an irony in itself as the town’s economy relied heavily on visitors. It was as if, despite trying to reverse the norms, there was ‘nothing much down for me’. I’d become a sidelined viewer, restricted to merely watching a very underwhelming soap opera from an enforced distance.

Whether it was how things were panning out, or the lingering after-effects of having been unceremoniously dumped over the phone, I cannot say, but – for whatever reason – my early performances playing for Skegness Town FC, the Lilywhites, left a lot to be desired. I’d sit there, time and again, in the tiny red and white breezeblock changing room, realising that the lads around me were the best this East Coast resort could offer, which – in turn – afforded them the opportunity to view everyone else from an elevated height of arrogance. It was evident in the way they spoke, trained, played and socialised. We were, at the time, just putting the finishing touches to pre-season. We’d played Stapleford Town from Nottinghamshire and I’d done OK, though I felt there were gears that I needed to find which were somehow eluding me. Sport is as much about psychology as it is physical exertion, and I couldn’t help but shroud myself in the past where – just three or four years earlier – I’d more than held my own in the reserves for Blackburn Rovers and then likewise for Bury FC at Gigg Lane. I’d played against Burnley (twice), Liverpool (a game watched by Kenny Dalglish), Everton, Man United (twice) and Bolton Wanderers, to name just a few. Ironically, I was now struggling – sat in a parochial dressing room, waiting to go out and play beneath a huge, clear sky in which the sun hung blindingly low – a sky from which rain rarely fell. I missed the sideways downpours of Lancashire. As I stood in the little tunnel with the Wombwell Town (Barnsley) players emerging from their own team talk, I began to make plans to return to the place of my youth…

After the match, I sat very much isolated and marginalised on the changing room bench, scrunched up like a piece of wastepaper, beneath my kit peg. “You played well!” the captain said to me, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Why don’t you come over here and say that?” I replied. And, quite unhelpfully, he did.

So, for a number of reasons, I was dropped for the pre-season finale, the visit of a Sheffield United XI, the following Thursday, in front of a bumper crowd, but was recalled to the starting line-up for the first league game of the season away in Boston. By then, I’d resolved to join another club. I could not recall the last time I had laughed either inwardly or out loud. Maybe the onset of the school term would provide me with some purpose.

About four days later, I was walking through the town centre when I heard a random voice: ‘Oi mate.’ It was said in a South Yorkshire accent. There was no Lincolnshire twang. I turned round to see two blokes. “Mate, we saw you play for Skeg,” one of them, a short, heavy-set guy with ginger hair began. His friend nodded. “My name’s Nidge, by the way. I run a Sunday League team. Come and see us sometime at the Welcome Inn on Burgh Road and we’ll sign you up. I’m also the landlord of the pub. You’ll have a good laugh with us. Trust me.” Again, his friend nodded.

Friendship

And so commenced a friendship which lasted the best part of thirty years, put on hold only by the fact that he recently died. Across three decades, my eyes were truly opened to life. The pub hosted a never-ending procession of characters, most of whom lived on the adjacent estate, over the main road, a tangled mess of houses and tenement flats where front gardens hosted three-seater settees for reasons of being neighbourly and ‘community-spirited’ and where, as soon as the sun came out, lads on small mountain bikes had their shirts off, always with a spare bike tyre draped over their left shoulder, and colourfully attired mothers sallied after Mr Whippy’s ice-cream van, their brood of loud, excited kids in tow like raucous ducklings, embroiled in the shrillness of the jingle and all the hope it carried.

Many of my newfound teammates accepted me immediately. Most had rebellious and uncompromising tales to tell of how they’d spectacularly self-destructed in school – and how, against all odds, they’d had to adapt to an uncaring and indifferent world by finding alternative ways of making money. I knew, despite the differences in our lives, and the basic, vehement disagreements to be had over the worthiness of studying Shakespeare, that if I needed it – whether it was through football, humour or chat – each of them would give me the shirt off their back. Over the years, in addition to me playing Saturdays, we won cups, got promoted, got relegated, got fined by the league, played darts, pool, celebrated birthdays, Christmases, christenings and paid our respects at wakes, including that of my own child. In all this time, there was nothing more reassuring than to be eating Sunday lunch and looking up to see a big line of hanging sticky tape, a vertical party streamer festooned with dead flies like buttons down a workman’s overalls. Sometimes, it would sway in tandem with the breeze ghosting through a slightly ajar window so that it looked, to all intents and purposes, as if the place was breathing. Over at the carvery, Big Bill, one of the kitchen staff who’d clearly been out the previous night, sweated off his hangover while cutting the pork. I bought a house thirteen doors up from this establishment based on the very real notion that, as an ever-evolving community of individuals, it made me feel alive. The experience, over many years, taught me how to talk to people without fear or prejudice. I learnt that humans are essentially all different, and all the same, and many of the skills of communication that I adopted, I put into practice – to good effect – in the classroom. It’s about acceptance. Both ways. Thinking on your feet. Matching words to audience. Admiring the quick wit of those who are naturally funny, something which can’t ever be taught. The raconteurs. I mean, who would ever wish to be anywhere else than here? A place where the resident chef, a bloke called Keith, was so imaginatively christened ‘Cornbeef Keith’ by the clientele? In one word: Magical. But everything changes. Nidge died. His heartbroken mrs clearly and understandably wanted a new start somewhere/anywhere else, no doubt the happy memories conspiring now to knife her and haunt her dreams, the epitome of irony, where good turns to malevolence at the drop of a hat.

So what of it? Where do we go from here? Well, if I take you to the Welcome now, it’s surely the very pinnacle of what people would define as ironic. Steel shutters encase the windows and doors, all around the premises. A cold and impenetrable exterior with a sign warning everyone, regardless of who they are, to steer clear, stay away. History counts for nothing – just do one.

 The Welcome Inn. Its name, emblazoned still in huge letters across the front, now attracts derision. There’s arguably nothing welcoming, homely or comforting about it. The grounds, slowly filling up with the fragments and offcuts of dysfunctional people’s lives – old pushchairs, bags of rubbish, an odd shoe, a broken patio chair, a free-standing advertisement for a local plumber, the board smashed in two after a passing drunk put his foot through it. All of this pollutes the picture. Undeniably so. But I realised something as I passed this ramshackle shell of a pub just the other night on my way home from a tasteless bite to eat in town. I noticed that there’s a light on behind the shutters, which are holistically perforated presumably to show a would-be burglar that there’s nothing worth nicking inside. I went up really close and looked in – cautiously at first, setting my feet the way a boxer does in anticipation of a wild swing. At the risk of being shot down as a fantasist or ridiculed, it seems to me its soul was asking for the old times to return. Yes, I’m a romantic, perhaps a dreamer. The bricks radiated a sense of longing after absorbing years of anecdotes, emotions, confrontations, fresh starts and old mistakes. The soft light pushed out, oozing into the cold evening air, tangible like warm felt, seeking to hold, embrace…for old time’s sake, its faint exhalation glancing across the pallor of my face. Where was everyone? What had they all become? When would this purgatory end?

There’s nothing ironic about the Welcome. Maybe iconic, but not ironic. It’s a place that wants to accommodate people’s happiness. I know it is. I’ve never been more sure of anything. It’s as much a victim in this sorry affair as any of us, and I know it yearns to open the glow of its heart once more to the cyclical footfall of flawed folks’ lives.

It’s the Welcome Inn, and this is not its fault.