In the almanac of Ireland on RTE the writer Manchán Magan talks about the word magh – a measurement of distance in the old Irish – the distance that a bell or a cock-crow can be heard. Magh. I’ve been thinking of that idea for a couple of years now since I first heard it from my friend Colette Kinsella who produced that show – a fantastic radio producer and like-minded lover of sounds and the way we inhabit a world of sounds, and they – sounds – they inhabit us.
You can find the episode I'm talking about here.
I met Colette when I was living in The Hague in 2023 and we hit it off immediately, not least because we shared a love for a bakery called Kitty’s Kitchen run by a most inspirational woman called Mary Bruton – though that’s another story. So me and Colette would meet in the morning, have scones and coffee, and talk about radio and sound and splashes and history and crack. And in the way of all the most fantastic friendships do, I’d always come away with my heart abuzz and my head ringing with ideas, the freshest of breezes blowing through me, and joy – how’s that for a far north Antrim man – joy at having spent that time with Colette.
The distance a bell ring can be heard from the church – on a Sunday morning in The Hague the bells still ring as they have for centuries it seems like, a sound I miss now I’m no longer living there. The ringing, the voices of those bells, carrying out from the church tower through the air, over the hedges and ditches and streets and canals, grachts and puddles and briars and lawns and trams and shops – to us, me and Colette, sitting drinking coffee together.
I’m going to play you something today – it’s very short. much shorter than this introduction – that I recorded in 2012 or so. It’s a poem by a fella called Phil Sprang, who became a friend very dear to me. I met him when he was 70 or so and he was a still a broad, slightly forbidding figure in an eternal plaid shirt. Who shook hands like a man who’d been on the tools all his life; would greet you with an arched eyebrow and a grim sceptical at eye, then a smile and he’d ask you in. He was a poet, Phil – a storyteller, house-builder, dramatist and writer, a San Francisco beatnik in the 60s, a sufi mystic in England in the 70s, a trekker and bluffer, and a lover of baseball, who’d pour a couple of glugs of Baileys into his morning coffee; a ghost of times past in Seattle’s great once literary boozer The Blue Moon Tavern and a string of other andcient drinking shops in Pioneer Square in the 60s; a student of the great American poet Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, a skier a football player and a drinker of a couple of bottles of starpramoen pilsner each winter afternoon as we would sit talking in the glowering twilight; a man who described his life as a mystery in which he somehow managed to remain upright with no visible means of support. Who told me he didn’t fear death, he was curious to move onto the next stage of the journey and find out what was up ahead, round the bend.
I last saw Phil in 2022 a few months before he died…I visited in him his retirement home, he’d had his beard shaved off and didn’t look like himself. He seemed shorn of more than his beard somehow, lying in a bed with the TV at the foot of the bed on all the time. When I told him I was there he reached out his hand, and called out to his first wife, then already gone, ‘Noni, Dominic’s here.’
I played him some of the things we’d recorded, sat with him on afternoons as the sun shone bright and blustery outside – that deep, West Seattle sunlight.
I need a word that does for friendships what magh does for that ringing bell…a word for the distance from which friendships can still be felt within us, despite the passing of time and the vast spaces separating us. That they CAN still reach us even after all the seconds minutes hours days weeks months years that have passed, those friendships, seems miraculous, miraculous, and yet we feel them – ringing as they do within us like – well, a bell, what else…out across the water on a clear morning.
This is Phil Sprang, my friend, the poet, Out on the Ocean.
You can hear more of Colette Kinsella's work at Red Hare Media - check it out. A treasure trove of lovely audio pieces.
https://www.redharemedia.ie/
