Not Making Hay <\/p>\n
Author: Frank McNally <\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 9781804583197<\/p>\n
Publisher: Gill Books<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u20ac18.99<\/p>\n
As a boy, Frank McNally<\/a> learned to drive a tractor over the famous Monaghan<\/a> drumlins, a tricky landscape to negotiate, requiring patience and a clear head. It wasn\u2019t the only rocky terrain he\u2019s had to deal with in a long career in journalism, starting off in the jobless, joyless 1980s and eventually finding his home as incumbent of the Irish Diary column<\/a> in this paper. <\/p>\n Not Making Hay is a memoir, seasoned with columns from the Diary and covering the writer\u2019s progress from Carrickmacross farm boy, through the Civil Service, precarious years as a freelancer and the perils of the Dublin newspaper world, not least a job interview with Vincent Browne<\/a>.<\/p>\n As is often the case, the childhood years inspire the most lyrical writing. McNally\u2019s youth really did take place in a different world, agriculturally and culturally. The neighbours still rallied round for threshing days at harvest time; cows were milked by hand and the \u201cAI man\u201d wasn\u2019t Sam Altman<\/a>. McNally expresses a preference for hay over silage \u2013 until reminded by a correspondent that many suffered \u201cfarmer\u2019s lung\u201d from the dust of hay. This kind of acknowledgment is common in McNally\u2019s work: a romantic preference is re-examined in the light of sobering evidence.<\/p>\n The kind of precocious, well-read schoolboy whose essays were read aloud by his English teacher, in hope of emulation, McNally never really felt destined for life as a farmer. There\u2019s a very funny piece here about his managing to turn his writing talent into a grade D in Leaving Cert English. The Civil Service, and Dublin, beckoned, and Monaghan was left behind \u2013 though mentions of its football team abound in the column and this book.<\/p>\n McNally\u2019s relationships with his parents are not romanticised. Like many men of his generation, he didn\u2019t talk much to his father until it was too late. His mother was deeply religious and deplored her son\u2019s irreverence. One of the strongest and most moving pieces here concerns her funeral \u2013 the writer\u2019s mixed emotions, the telling intervention of a more empathetic relative. McNally is good at describing both his feelings and his failings. <\/p>\n Success against the odds is one of the motifs in this memoir: the path to the top of the letters page in The Irish Times has been a steep and slippery one. McNally left the Civil Service for a year doing terrible jobs in Australia \u2013 there\u2019s a chapter about his excruciating inability to give a beloved employer his notice. Then he spent much of the 1990s as a freelance writer in Dublin, contributing humorous \u201csketches\u201d to Phoenix magazine and others. His best-known, anonymous column was the Diary of a Nortsoide Taoiseach: it was funny and irreverent but not cruel, qualities that have been carried forward into his present employment.<\/p>\n Some of the frankest (sorry) anecdotes here concern his high-profile colleagues on (then) D\u2019Olier Street. The late Eileen Battersby\u2019s eccentricity is fairly unsparingly portrayed, and McNally had an uneasy, rather one-sided friendship with Kevin Myers, his predecessor as the Diary\u2019s anchor tenant, culminating in a breach when he was deemed insufficiently supportive at the time of the latter\u2019s break with the paper.<\/p>\n