Topic: Europe
Patrick Byrne was the first resident I met. He was originally from Ealing, London and ended up in working in The Green Door, Ireland because ‘…the wind blew that way,’ I overheard his fellow colleague mentioning to some European travellers that Patrick spoke French. Few Englishmen are multi-lingual thus I made a mental note that he might have some linguistic flair or simply unusually disciplined. Patrick sings, plays the guitar and believes that he knows most popular English folk songs. The most interesting point I remembered about Patrick was his obsession with this 1987 British alternative movie ‘Withnail and I’ which he claimed had watched it 265 times. This strange comedy was about two poor and struggling actors living in a crumpling flat in London going on a badly planned holiday. The main character played by Richard E Grant was someone that felt his talents were clearly unappreciated and the world somewhat owes him recognition and perhaps fame and fortune. I watched the movie for a mere fifteen minutes and was too tired to follow continuously stream of arty-farty cult lingo. Yet for that brief quarter of an hour I caught on what the movie was about. I would bet my last dollar that the reason why Patrick was practically reciting lines from the script was largely due to how he secretly feels that the movie was about his life.
Patrick was convinced I will not be able to understand the movie in the same way that he must be convinced I would not be able to comprehend the eccentricity of highly intelligent cult figures like himself. I wondered which part of my appearance gave him that conviction – had he assumed that young Asian girls must have a very different outlook in life or did he thought that someone with my unimaginative dress sense and lack of interest in booze and late night cannot possibly be too funky. Clever people can think in stereotypes too, unfortunately. Nevertheless, I was not offended, merely bemused, maybe even inclined to agree with him. I spent 3 years in one of the most avant-garde art and design colleges in Europe observing and occasionally befriending misfits from all over the world but never quite felt integrated into this island of nonconformists. It wasn’t so much the tattoos, ear piercings and unnatural hair colours that differentiate my college mates from the rest of the world, nor was it their choice of unusual work hours and methodology that set them apart from society. The paradox in trying to describe non-mainstream people is that they cannot be classified by any straightforward terms, but perhaps one underlying factor that links them all is their staunch belief that society cannot comprehend them, the way Patrick was confident that I cannot grasp the brilliance of ‘Withnail and I’.
