It makes sense that General Tso’s chicken is an American invention and not a natural culinary product of home-grown Chinese cuisine. Why? Well, because it’s a ball of deep-fried chicken in a viscous, sugar-based sauce. That’s why, but also because it is the product of one of those countries’ values at the time of its invention, and not so much the other. Italians invented the Italian cut of men’s suits, slender and elegant and a touch charmingly self-celebratory, but unsurprisingly they did not invent lederhosen, pineapple pizza or those T-shirts reading “Body by bacon” that you see on male tourists at historical landmarks.
The Irish invented keening, colour photography (apparently, thanks to physicist John Joly, whose Protestant Anglo-Irish family and background we’ll ignore so we can claim his achievement). In our defence, the British started all that and it’s less embarrassing when we do it than when they try to claim Kneecap.
I’ll tell you what Irish culture could never produce, invent or conceive. The voice note. It is anathema to the values that generated and uphold Irishness as we know it. While ironically (but perhaps unsurprisingly) the Italians love a voice note, this seemingly benign technological artefact is the Irish person’s pineapple pizza. An offence. Something that threatens and undermines the Irish way of life, if your neighbour with the very weathered Child of Prague lying face-down on her front lawn has anything to say about it.
The voice note might just be a form of Irish cultural erosion. If it wasn’t so inherently American, we’d accuse it of being British just for its gall. The voice note presumes, nay demands, too much. That we are able to hear the sound of our own voice without screaming ourselves hoarse with horror, for one thing. Because once you’ve recorded a voice note, it’s mandatory to listen back to yourself sounding shrill and rambling and incoherent.
The voice note is anathema to the values that uphold Irishness as we know it
An Irishman at Oxford: It was an education in being an outsider. I felt alienated from the very start
Irishman in Singapore: I wondered if I was foolish to emigrate in my 50s. But I feel more alive than ever
‘Rome is a fantastic city to live in, but it’s very complicated. It’s a mess of a place. Madrid is clean. Everything works’
Realising that you sent a friend a recording in which you accidentally called them “Mam” for some reason or badmouthed the ex they are now decidedly back with can make you want to crawl into a hole and die. You probably shouldn’t have called him “a waste of polyester” or “the shame of Leitrim”. Worse still, you could send the voice note to the wrong person. This feels (and I know from experience) exactly how it felt that time I accidentally sent my editor at The Irish Times a text message saying merely “I love you” with no further context whatsoever. She was good about it and attempted to let me down gently, but it had been intended for my then boyfriend and really could have been a whole HR snafu.
Secondly, the incoming voice note sidles in presuming that you must want to hear the unfiltered, unedited thoughts of your friends and loved ones, or worse still, your colleagues or boss. It is a technology widely abused by those who consider their verbal incontinence to be a gift to the receiver, or by your mother who voice-notes you incoherently from what sounds like the strongroom of an underground bunker with demands that you remotely fix her various tech problems. “Is this email from Joe Biden asking for a pint of my blood fake?”
Irish culture sees an incoming voice note from anyone and thinks, he/she has some neck to be presuming that they have anything to say worth listening to, or that anyone would want to hear their Dundalk accent talking about “give me a call back when you can. Jimmy’s in the hospital”.
Needy stuff, you know? Have some dignity.
And yet. Though we could never have invented a mechanism whereby you presume somebody might like to listen to your impromptu monologuing, the voice note is a crucial component of the Irish emigrant toolkit in keeping a live connection with people at home. If you live far from home, even more so. At this time of year, my sofa in Australia is 11 hours ahead of my brother’s kitchen table in Limerick. When it’s waking-up time at home, it’s winding-down time here.
I’m as prone as my niece to wondering when someone becomes a grown-up when I answer work emails that have come in from the other side of the planet overnight
It doesn’t sound all that bad, except when you think about what it’s truly like to have a serious, or even a trivial conversation first thing in the morning or just before bed. No matter when you schedule it, somebody probably isn’t in the right head space. At the end of a long day with my small niece and nephew, my brother’s eyes are crossing with tiredness on a video call. First thing in the morning, those two pyjama-clad scamps need to eat their Weetabix and get help putting their socks on and ask exhausting philosophical questions that four-year-olds ask, like, “When do you become a grown-up?” or, “Why do kangaroos only have tiny arms?”
Here in Australia, in the morning I’m cantankerous and a similar state of affairs rolls around before bed. I’m as prone as my niece to wondering when someone becomes a grown-up when I answer work emails that have come in from the other side of the planet overnight. They lie in wait for me before 7am when I pick up my phone, bleary eyed. It’s such a joy, then, to wake to a voice note from my friend telling me about the date she went on with a man who turned out to be a fugitive wanted by Interpol, or sharing the news of a hard-won promotion at work.
It’s so cheering to hear my niece tell me, scandalised, that her baby brother farted in the bath. And it’s easy for me to voice-note her dad about the fact that in Canberra today, for some reason, the air is filled with vast numbers of winged beetles mating frenziedly, and that “beetle orgy day” had apparently not been advertised anywhere in advance.
This nonsense is the stuff of everyday connection.
Long live the voice note.
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