Men be like.

 It was Halloween and Sean Connery died. 

My social media was already full of smug Irish hippies insisting I pronounce Samhain "sow in". Doing otherwise was akin to cultural vandalism as the Irish invented Halloween. Which is sort of true. There was also a lot of poetry about witches just being beautiful, intelligent women that men could just not deal with. So they set fire to them. 

Yes, alright. Samhain is pronounced Sow in. I know that. I haven't always known that and I have, in the past, pronounced it "Sam Haine" like it was a cool guy in a bar, just like everybody else did. Later on, as I'm interested in mythology, ritual and folk lore, I found out how its actually pronounced and now I pronounce it correctly. 

Back when I pronounced it Sam Haine no one ever corrected me. Its only this year that its become a big thing that must be eye-rolled into oblivion: fucking Americans with their stupid St Patty's Day:  they can't even pronounce basic Irish words for things. But its this year that people are getting annoyed about it, almost as though they've only recently learned to pronounce it themselves. Or that people don't feel the need to be polite on social media. 

English and American men rarely cover themselves in glory on the internet and with predictable haste we were subjected to horrific scenes of mansplaining, as they attempted to tell Irish women they were getting Irish wrong. It did not go well for them, but as always in these matters it did not go quietly either. These answer back guys really do have nothing else going on. The sheer time wasting is criminal. I mean, I feel ridiculous for writing a blog no one reads but at least its an aid memoir, and with a memory like mine I need it. But these guys are going to look back at their lives, smiling ruefully at a faded virtual scrapbook and see hundreds of occasions when somebody called them out on their ignorance and stupidity and they decided to double down at novel length. A life well lived, guys. 

The witch thing though. I mean its nice to think that all those poor women were murdered for their sheer fabulousness, but they weren't. They were murdered for the reason the least valued people in society have always been murdered: they were expendable. They had out-lived their usefulness, they looked like a drain on their society and they were easily othered, their humanity destroyed long before their bodies were. They had ugliness and ignorance projected onto them and they were removed and destroyed from society like a malignancy from the body, the wound cauterised. They were killed because they were the least able to protect themselves. Its not a very nice story. But power interacting with the powerless is rarely ends well for the latter. 

Anyway, all of that chat stopped when men found out that Sean Connery died and they allowed themselves a single tear, like when a favoured sports star takes his last bath. Sean Connery is the spirit animal of men of a certain age as his James Bond, the "proper" James Bond, embodies all of their fantasies. He's good at fighting. He shags loads of birds but doesn't have to have relationships because the first one he meets dies and the second one, who doesn't die and didn't initially like him, is long gone by the next film. He knows loads of stuff about food and wine and Faberge eggs but he doesn't really use his knowledge unless he's point scoring in a meeting with his crusty superiors or being smug in a restaurant. His tastes are perfomative not sensual. He likes gambling and he smokes and drinks and he does it all in an immaculately tailored suit. Mostly they think he's "cool". Its a mutable thing cool, it changes over time and context, but for Sean Connery Bond fans its pitched somewhere between style and sociopathy. Bond looks good. He has immaculate trimmings: even his ashtrays have a walnut dash. His stuff is expensive, well made and has no built in obsolescence. He has the trappings of wealth and exclusivity but we know he's not a toff because he's a milkman from Edinburgh. Also he loves killing people. Of all the Bonds Connery is the most convincing murderer. He looks like he'd give it a go. And men love murderers. By the time Roger Moore was Bond the show was a box-ticking exercise of established tropes. Rog had to kill people but he never looked that happy about doing it. It was a bit grubby, a bit sordid. He didn't convince as a brutal killing machine for the state. But you could totally see Sean killing you out of boredom. That's why he's the best Bond. 

I'm a Roger Moore man myself. Of course.