Med Poets Plunder Party

“Shiver me timbers!”

“Have him walk the plank!”

“No, keel haul him!”

“Where’s the rum?”

“Ooooh arrrrrr!’’

What’s all this then? Extracts from a resurrected “Pirates of the Caribbean”? A celebration of the so-called generous vowels, not to mention generous Rs (pronounce with care) of the West Country?

No, these are extracts from entertainment at the Med-Poets’ Society’s annual offbeat get together, an event that somehow combines elements of a varsity comedy club “smoker”, a masquerade ball of the type favoured by long gone European Aristocracy and a good-old fashioned East End “knees up”. More succinctly, it’s an opportunity to dress up and perform a party piece with identity hidden by costume and alcohol, with community singing and dancing to follow.

Many thanks to all those involved in this years’ gathering, billed as a Pirate Plunder Party. All proceeds go to charity, so sponsors were signed up (were they threatened with those traditional Pirate Punishments, I wonder?), Alt City in Hamra, Beirut was found as the new venue which was an improvement on the now defunct Hard Rock café, a DJ employed, a source of really good British fish ‘n’ chips found and tickets sold. There’s no committee, just a wonderfully energetic and enthusiastic organiser by the name of Vicky. Some of us get dragooned into doing silly things under the watchful eye and humorous introductions of Anthony, the master of ceremonies to jolly us all along on the night. At this point, word plays on the “Jolly Roger” (the famous skull and crossed bones pirate flag) spring to mind, but I’ll leave you to work those out for yourselves.

My own silly things at past events have included writing and reading my own nonsense poems, playing a guitar and being interviewed with a gorilla;and I still had to pay for the tickets, I told you Vicky was a wonderful organiser. This year I just borrowed a disguise. And thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Plans to move on to a second event fell by the way side as a quiz, a fancy dress competition, eating, dancing and drinking carried on until after mid-night.

Anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last year knows that things are, well, err, sort of, like, a bit difficult here. One of the neighbours (Syria) has got rather noisy and the rowdy behaviour has spilled over into parts of Lebanon. And that has rather inhibited fun and frolics, as it seems (and would be) thoroughly insensitive to have a plethora of celebratory events going on while bombs keep going off. So we’ve been without the usual Christmas balls, while New Year and Burns’ night have just whimpered past. But this one was for charity and a little lifting of the spirits was sorely needed.

Thanks to Vicky and her volunteers, we got it.

Why did he do it? The Celtic curse?

There are days when it seems the universe was set in motion for the sole purpose of creating situations and events that make me feel angry or frustrated or miserable and on really bad days, all three at once.

Monday was one of them.

I wake up when it gets light, something my body learned to do to overcome jet lag. A wonderful trick it is, as on my first trips to New York I used to wake up ready for breakfast at two every morning and then have difficulty not falling sleeping over dinner. My longtitude sensing body clock works fine – as long as there is no early morning cloud cover. Early morning Monday’s sky was pretty well clouds and nothing else so I woke up late, which makes a bad start as something (my regular swim on this occasion) has to be cut out of the schedule for the day.  Another bomb went off, this time in Choueifat with the by now familiar, yet still gut-wrenching images on the TV. A set of trivial things I won’t bore you with continued to go awry so that, by early evening, the world had gone black and turned against me and I was completely unfit for human consumption. So I consumed instead.

Now that same day I’d read of the circumstances of the death of one of my favourite actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, at the ridiculously early age of 46. Seventy bags of heroin were found stashed in his flat. His mother bore an Irish name (O’Connell) and I began to wonder about the problems of us Celts, our apparent tendency to self-destruct while trying to escape from a world that can make us revolt from even having to stay on it. William Hamilton (mathematician), Oscar Wilde (writer), Dylan Thomas (poet), Brian Jones (musician), Richard Burton (actor) and George Best (sportsman) were all Celts who paid the ultimate price for over indulgence in sex, drink or drugs (and again sometimes all three) often presumed to be attempts to escape from reality. All of them provided insights and pleasure for the rest of us without finding personal peace and now they’ve been joined by another.

What is it about the Celts then? Well I can’t be sure, but Monday provided me with yet another experience of descending into the black followed by switching the lights out. And there’s another colour that can engulf me – red. I think of myself as easy going, I like the soft furriness of cats, I’m normally gentle with others and their feelings, but, and it’s a big but, very occasionally the red mist descends.

I think it was the manager’s fault. He should have ducked when, having ripped out the SIM card and crushed it under foot, I threw the empty phone across the shop. The details of the event don’t really matter, suffice it to say that what seemed like hours of my life had been wasted by a customer dis-services screw-up by a well-known mobile telephone company in the UK. One by one, all the pet hide behinds of data protection, health and safety and “it’s our policy” had been trotted out for my mental torture. Then it happened, the red mist that I’d been holding back finally exploded all over my brain anaesthetising good-sense, reasonableness and physical caution, during which time the phone was made to fly. My wife smoothed over the threat of assault charges, but I’m still banned from ever going in one of XXX’s shops again. Just the sight of me walking past the same shop half an hour later caused the manager to duck. Too late. I think it was that that caused the feelings of remorse, guilt and self-horror to set in.

It happens every five years or so, the invasion of the red mist followed by descent into black. Black alone perhaps once every few months. I can cope with that, but if they happened regularly? I’d have been pushed or fallen off the stage ages ago.

So I’m not going to blame Messrs. Hamilton, Wilde, Thomas, Jones, Burton, Best and Hoffman for leaving too early,  for I suspect they’d had to cope not just with the black and the red but many other colours too and all too regularly for comfort. I’ll just thank them for the bodies of work they, and so many other Celts, left behind.