Sometimes, there’s no telling where it – hysteria – comes from; or when it begins its build-up. It may be a cynical thing to say, but it can actually be germinating right there on a clear sunny day, when the azure sky is at its bluest, when the coolest of cool summer breezes kiss the cheeks and restore the concept of freshness. It – hysteria – can be right there, simmering beneath the surface.
Dorothy Comerford — Dot-com to her friends — confesses she had no idea it — hysteria — lay nestled viper-like in that warm patch of the garden where she habitually sat, Saturdays and Sundays, between 10 and 10.30 am sipping Darjeeling tea from a cup and nibbling biscuits; keeping alive a tradition set by her mother and her mother before that, resolute despite the driving pace of change, the restructuring of the pillars of society by the geeky masons and architects of Facebook, Google etc, using modern building blocks such as iPhones and iPads to stretch and rearrange the boundaries so that now all things proximate became distant while all things distant could be linked instantaneously.
Her colleague at work, for example, Mabel, who for years sat shoulder to shoulder, now couldn’t be further apart as she focused on connections established with cousins in Dublin.
Her daughter, Sandy, a similar case in point, although to give Sandy her due she was born in a time when the restructuring was already well under way and words like audio cassette and video tape were making a sad march to a dictionary graveyard, to join other terms interred in the word bone yard mausoleum; words such as radiogram, telegram, record changer and 45rpm.
And now Sandy’s daughter, Petrina — the harbinger of all the hysteria that followed in the household — emerges through the side door and lets out a piercing shriek.
Gift of tongues
Dot, lost in the tranquillity of the day, said, to quote her, “I nearly had a heart attack, believe me. One moment everything was still and peaceful, the next the whole world’s turned upside down. This girl was standing on the porch screaming something incomprehensible, I thought for a second she’d developed the gift of tongues and, not having mastered her own thoroughly, had been granted a reprieve and allowed to speak, no to shriek, in another language. It brought everybody running, I tell you, everybody in the house and nearly everybody from the neighbour’s. Oh what a scene it caused on such a wonderful day. Ruined the serenity of the moment utterly.”
Granted, Dot is, on occasion, given to a sense of drama and a fluidity of expression.
What they all eventually managed to gather, after carefully editing out the paroxysmal screeching, was that One Direction, the UK boy band, was arriving in Australia. Once the news had been passed on to the elders Petrina, exhausted and overwhelmed by the anxiety of it all, threatened to pass out and never return to the conscious world (as she knew it) if tickets to the concert were not acquired. She had to be there. She simply had to.
“And that’s how hysteria becomes mass hysteria,” observed Dot, “Mass hysteria in the house. Petrina screaming, Sally screaming back that she couldn’t afford the tickets, then George, Sally’s husband barking up the wrong tree and ringing the metropolitan opera for tickets because someone had mentioned the word metropolitan and he didn’t want to waste a minute, seeing how these concert tickets sell out in a matter of minutes.”
And then, of course, that infamous race to the airport and from the airport, chasing the One Direction van, with mum — Sally at the wheel — speeding through red lights, willy-nilly, “just to catch a glimpse of history before it becomes history itself which in this day and age could be like tomorrow, thank goodness for that,” as Dot says.
“That was a while ago, today’s a fine day as you can see, but don’t doubt what can be simmering under the surface,” says Dot, with a measure of distrust.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney.
