The measure of a writer isn’t success, but how hard he tried to do what he knew he couldn’t do.

 William Faulkner, American writer.

“An analytic pub crawl,” is how Patrick ffrench, professor at King’s College, London, described psychogeography. It is a lived experience - one drifts from one place to the next; observing, noting, reacting. We may drift aimlessly through a city, or drift through life and absorb, sometimes. Therefore the book title is not to be confused with the traditional drinking pub crawl, it is taken from the concept of psychogeography. This is the “dérive” or drift. It is a feature of psychogeography, where the participant wanders through cities, observing and reacting to their attractions and encounters. The urban topography is one of fragmentation and dispersal, a separation of objects and their functionality. Charles Baudelaire named this person, the flâneur. A figure that was conceived in 19th century France and popularised in academia by Walter Benjamin in the 20th century. A romantic stroller, the flâneur wandered about the streets, with no clear purpose other than to wander in a fragment of the urban landscape. In this busy world, perhaps the flâneur is due for a revival. Just as the past left traces in today’s built environment. This book traces the journey through a life, a snapshot. These are observations, wanderings and reactions on life’s pub crawl. The title is a way of describing the psychogeographical nature of this book. A wander, a dérive through places, interests and readings. 

Where psychology and geography intersects is a good starting point for a brief definition of psychogeography, the psychological experiences of the city and the soul of a place illuminate aspects of that environment. Psychogeography is therefore useful in understanding the connections between the histories, the myths and the contemporary landscapes. Or it could be about a life or a journey, reflecting on its people and their present or past experiences. How do different places make us feel and behave? Often it is focused on the past, but it could be contemporary observations, and one’s emotional response to it, such as the journal of the pandemic.

Psychogeography can integrate the now, the place, the memory and the history. We question the here and now, and check our response to it. Local graveyards are a good source of gauging the fabric of a community around it. Psychogeography treats the city as a book, an exploded museum or gallery. Often, it is just a dilapidated building, or a shadow of a century-old advertisement on a wall, some discarded elements of a past gone age. An exploration of what went before, but this book is an exploration of not just a landscape, but snapshot of the landscape of a life. A psychogeographical landscape: experiences, books, history, cities, ideas, and travel. So, something caught one’s eye on a drift. It could be a banal event. Someone pumping air into a tyre, or the owner of the cafe climbing onto his motorbike, or a shoemaker tapping away inside a tiny shop. Or it could be two bronze cannons lying in tanks of water from the Spanish Armada, or a photograph of the surrender of German U-boats at the end of the second world war. Wallow in it, advises the poet, Patrick Kavanagh. It could be a building or piece of art or a few sentences that made one linger and ponder. Sometimes this event or sight evokes an emotional or physical or mental response. The smell of saw dust and leather emanating from Baxter’s saddlery, in Strabane, on the way home after primary school. Because of this childhood emotional response, it is still almost tangible today.

“An insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveller” is how Will Self, a practitioner of psychogeography, describes it. It has evolved from these positions with notable contemporaries, like Ian Sinclair. The practitioner is simply not a walker, but goes on a dérive. Nor is it just the act of walking, an exercise of the physical movement of muscle and sinew, but about culture, and lived lives in lived buildings. Create a building and they create us, said Churchill. It is more than the buildings, it’s the homes, the community, the society, the city, the people or a discovery. It’s the soul of a place. It could be a literary extract, or simply an aphorism. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours,” Alan Bennett in the The History Boys.

Vague but observant wanderings probably started in the town of Strabane but more so in Derry after the secondary school day ended at the Christian Brothers. Because of the pandemic, planned wandering through the cities and places of Europe have been, hopefully just postponed. Only by walking the cities themselves and  going on a dérive, will they reveal themselves. The walking has to be done. Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” wrote that she needed the pretext of buying a pencil to justify her urban explorations, a pretext to fire her imagination. To step out of the usual habit, the normal, and take a more random course. We may open the door or window to surprises, might be pleasant or unpleasant. The point is to be attentive to them. To be mindful in the current parlance. In the Zen tradition, it’s only when you give yourself over to the unknowing, the unthinking, that something interesting might happen.

Trying to capture the atmosphere of growing up in Northern Ireland is the objective of the books. Creative memoirs, based on fact. That upbringing in Northern Ireland permeates everything written here. It could be just a trace, a fragment but it is there, as one peels away the layers. The 1960s of Strabane and Derry and then the Troubles of the 1970s. The Troubles, in simple terms refers to the three-decade conflict (1968-1998), between nationalists (mainly self-identified as Irish or Roman Catholic) and unionists (mainly self-identified as British or Protestant). They exploded, when civil rights demands by the nationalists were being denied by a sectarian state. The violent insurgency, was led mainly by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), with the aim of creating a United Ireland but it was a complex situation with many other violent participants, including collusion by the forces of law and order.

“Utter shite,” declared a man beside me, while I was viewing the display of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes in a Galway city bookshop window. It was a publishing success about an Irish American growing up in Limerick. Some Limerick locals had been in disagreement on how McCourt dramatised the hardships of growing up in Limerick. Whether this was the Irish in denial of their history or McCourt exaggerating, or a bit of both but this “Irish misery memoir” annoyed the man outside the bookshop. Ireland was a colonised country.

Derry-born Seamus Deane, academic and writer, refers to colonisation as “a process of radical dispossession. …. the naming or renaming of a place, the naming of renaming of a race, a region, a person, is, like all acts of primordial nomination, an act of possession.” There are also current moves to replace colonial place names and remove statues of colonialists. A statue in Bristol, UK of a slave trader, Edward Colston was thrown into a harbour by anti-racism protestors. It was retrieved by the council and taken to a secure location to be hosed down before becoming a museum exhibit.

This book merges: reportage - the pandemic and contemporary Irish politics. The history of the Ulster Plantation and its significance for Derry. Irish humour, urban development, liveability and life skills are some of the other topics. Its urban focus is mainly in the cities of the countries of the UK, Ireland, Australia and Spain.  Travelling with a “slow” mindset urges travellers to embrace what the local community has to offer, instead of making a bucket-list or the tourist spots. Focus on things that locals do everyday, things that usually excite them and give them joy. It is not to deny the tourist their photo opportunity, as time and money is often scarce. The impact that these local connections may have, will last a lot longer than the photos taken, while racing from tourist attraction to tourist attraction.

Education, from teaching in nursery schools and with almost 40 years teaching in higher education, the employment section covers IT and educational developments over the years. Then, the slow drip toward retirement. There was a five year sojourn in the IT industry and some years of chronic ill-health. 

“On writing”, could be called “on reading”, because the writing bit comes after the reading. The reading powers the imagination. This is not a literary or academic treatise. It is about the journey, the exploration and curiosity. It’s as much about newspapers and magazines, travels and house sitting, as about literary masterpieces. The key takeaway is to read anything you like, just read, and write one word at a time, if that takes your fancy.

Being a geography teacher ignited an interest in urban development and the idea of liveability. This section looks at urban development in Ireland, Australia, the UK and Spain. From the model village of Sion Mills outside Strabane to apartment living in Spain. The research demonstrates what type of cities residents need, not necessarily what’s being built.

Positive psychology sprang from reading a book in the USA. Liveability and life skills are linked because positive psychology can provide a framework for living a happy and contended life. The key takeaway from this section is know thyself. The research points to what makes some people happy. The individual needs to provide their own framework.

Contemporary issues feature in the Brexit section, its consequence are still being played out today and how it affects Northern Ireland. A journal of the pandemic, almost month by month, details how it affected people in different countries but mainly in Spain, Australia, UK and Ireland. 

Humour is fascinating, not just Irish humour. Vital to survive life. If someone hasn’t got a sense of humour then they have no sense at all! Telling humorous stories is a skill. Someone may glean some wisdom from these words.

This book is an updated version of Fragments of an Analytic Pub Crawl, rewritten and including house sitting, travelling, Brexit and a journal of the pandemic.

Have you explored the links? childhood in Northern Ireland, ( childhood photos, teenage photos), the Troubles, (the Troubles photos),  IT education, (psychogeography photos), Irish humour,  reading, music, writing. What life-skills are needed for a happy life? (Quotes). Emigration, (down under photos), family, and urban liveability. A journal of the  Pandemic is included. Other Publications. 

Click here for all links to all the pages.                                                                                                Buy the books here

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                                                                    © Hugh Vaughan 2023