39 /Boris Howarth
Boris Howarth,
whom I’m proud to have known as a friend, had a glorious sense of humour. He would have loved this nugget of golden nonsense unearthed for me by my son: garden path sentences. It’s a wondrously silly
literary device where the reader in all good faith begins at the beginning but
ends up scratching her or his head, lost among the lush undergrowth of the English
language. For example, "The old
man the boat"; "The complex houses married and single soldiers and their
families"; "The man who hunts ducks out at weekends"; "The prime number few"; "We painted the wall with cracks";
“Cooked books cooked their goose”.
When Boris stayed
with us in Belfast and Dublin his visits brought vast joy and fun to our
household. In Belfast, with
Welfare State International, he was the dynamo that allowed the staging of ‘Jungle Bullion’ in the Botanic
Gardens on 25th June, 1983. This large-scale, community carnival was attended by some 5,000 people, young and
old, from across the complicated, fractious divisions of N.Ireland – and not one bone was broken in the process. The Good Friday Agreement was not signed until Friday 10th April, 1998. Among his many
achievements elsewhere, in Dublin he devised training workshops and elective
courses at Trinity College and for Create/Cafe, an umbrella arts in the community
organisation. In latter years he took to carving signs and place names in solid rock and stone, steadfastly using hammer and chisel, deliberately eschewing machine tools in order to
feel the words forming under his skillful touch. He died on 17th May, 2009, and is survived by his son George and
Maggy, his wife, who creates
wonderful mosaics for civic and private spaces in UK and abroad. Community arts in Ireland, north and
south, owes a huge debt to Boris and I shall try to trace and honour this in a
later blog post.
• “The old man the boat” (Old people are the
crew.); •"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families”(The
apartment complex provides living quarters for both married and single soldiers
and their families.); •"The man who hunts ducks out at weekends”(He ducks out/
avoids his responsibilities.); • "The prime number few”(People who are
excellent are few in number.); •”We painted the wall with cracks”(The cracked
wall was the one that we painted.) ; •“Cooked
books cooked their goose”( Crooked bookkeeping got them into trouble.).
