Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Whatever you write will get twisted

During a dozen years in Belfast I collected a number of political coffee mugs, hailing from both sides of the divide. Unionist designs including the heartbreakingly punctuated ‘Ulster Say’s No’ (not merely to the Anglo-Irish Agreement; no to everything) and the impressively witty ‘Reservoir Prods’: four toughs in shades identified as ‘Mr Orange’ and ‘Mr Boyne’, etc. The republican mugs exhibit no such sense of humour, which won’t surprise you. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams stare sternly from their porcelain. Worse, the mugs from the Sinn Fein bookshop are cheaply decorated with decals, which are less robust than the inked unionist ones, and tend to melt in the dishwasher.

I was among several journalists I knew who picked up these kooky keepsakes — which, along with a trove of other ‘Troubles ephemera’ like bumper stickers and tea towels, were also archived in the attic of the Linen Hall Library, faithfully curated by the memorable Robert Bell, who eventually fled to Denmark. After years of gathering key chains that memorialised murderous cretins, you couldn’t blame him.

I, for one, haven’t accorded these mugs the respect of museum pieces, and for years routinely used them for afternoon tea. If an interviewer dropped by to do a profile, I’d make sure to balance idiocies: one of us would get a William of Orange mug with its awkwardly drawn white horse, the other the tribute to the Easter Rising. But once I moved to London and abandoned the whole Ulster fracas, I started finding the mugs mouldy-feeling and gloomy. To be sure, the notion of scary, hugger-mugger paramilitaries flogging coffee mugs in tourist shops to commemorate their derring-do is intrinsically comical. But the joke had worn thin. For several years, I’ve reached for the John Harvard Library cups, their handles charmingly perforated for matching ceramic spoons.

Thus the editors of an obscure Irish website would have had to pore through photos going back to 2010 to find a stray picture of me at home with a UFF coffee mug, ‘artfully turned towards the camera’ (alas, professional photographers are tyrants, and the poor subject never arranges anything, artfully or otherwise).

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in