READING INVENTING THE MYTH BY CONNAL PARR

Inventing the Myth - Political Passions and the Ulster Protestant Imagination by Connal Parr is enjoyable and readable. It is an academic book, published by a major university press. It includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as informative, non-intrusive footnotes and a useful index. Don’t be put off: you don’t have to be an academic to read it. It’s for anyone with an interest in Northern Ireland and/or in cultural formation and expression.

It aims to show that 

Ulster Protestants have historically and continually demonstrated a vigorous creative pulse as well as a tendency towards class politics.

It seeks to re-establish a forgotten history and to engage with contemporary debates, with fascinating chapters on specific writers, illustrating the tensions, the divisions and the legacies of Ulster Protestant cultural manifestations, particularly in drama and literature. 

There is a ‘two tribes’ approach running through the piece, leaving, as happens in such cases, the ‘colonial master’ largely off the hook. A colonial impress is widespread, deep and often strident in Northern Ireland. The passing of time barely dilutes it. Historical anniversaries and cultural manifestations that celebrate them serve to re-ignite the actuality of the impress and make it live in today’s society. In so far as cultural practices make expressions of identity more complex, they may contribute to peaceful intra- and inter-tribe developments. There is a role for the artist in offering complexity, sometimes through dissent, sometimes through bridge-building, though this is a difficult position for the artist to embrace within a society riven by settled colonial divisions.

Dramatist Sam Thompson is quoted in Chapter 3.

A writer is not accepted as part of the community. If you are a writer and you speak your mind, you’re a danger here.

The bedevilling phrase here is the community.

Schools in Northern Ireland (NI) follow a UK/NI national curriculum. History and culture largely happen elsewhere, mainly in England - monarchs, The Battle of Hastings, WW1, BBC/ITV/C4/Sky. Individual schools do their best to give children information on and exposure to local history and culture. Here again a ‘two tribes’ sensibility often applies, though inter-school projects and programmes occur. 

Parents are implicitly pressurised to get their children into the grammar school sector, despite the best efforts of many schools in the secondary and integrated sectors to ‘prove’ they can compete for academic honours. A class schism is introduced to the school population at age 11. In the context of massive de-industrialisation, allied to the slow crawl to a data-based economy, this is chilling. 

Both ‘tribes’ are badly served by an educational system that values elsewhere (‘the mainland’) over the home place. What impact this has on the possibilities of stories emerging from those ‘tribes’ is a matter for educationalists to consider, noting that schooling isn’t the only route into literature and art. But it is a good one.

The striking voices of Andy Tyrie and Glen Barr appear across the book. They straddle loyalist militancy and unionist politics. Their dissenting positions echo a strand of Labour activism that was well dampened down in late 20^th century politics with the decline of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. The Social Democratic and Labour Party attempts to keep both red and green flags flying. It is not attractive to unionists and loyalists. How Trades Councils, and trades unionism generally, might re-invent the myths spancilling the macro-politics of the day is something of a ‘two-tribes’ conundrum at present. 

Writers Danny Morrison and Ronan Bennett, both Irish republicans, come across as bête noirs. Parr labels a 1984 article by Bennett in The Guardian (London) as ‘infamous’. Though it is outside the remit of Parr’s book, note should be taken of Bennett’s anti-colonialist novel The Catastrophist (Simon and Schuster, 2001). Keener gazes through a post-colonialist lens might mitigate against the narrowness of a ‘two tribes’ view. 

The question is begged: how much do contingency and context form the writer? Could Danny Morrison be any other sort of writer? Could Gary Mitchell, writer of successful plays largely set in the loyalist Rathcoole Estate, where he lived before being intimidated out by local paramilitaries, be any other than the writer he is?

He is quoted in Chapter 6.

If I was a Muslim writer whose work upset my community so much that some members were threatening to kill me I’d be a cause célèbre.… But because this is Northern Ireland what’s happening to my family isn’t part of the peace process narrative.

And if his work excites such vehemence from unionist militants, who, perhaps, have never considered themselves part of this narrative, and validation from the Irish National Theatre (The Abbey), is it because these two reactions are echoes of one another? 

It is a commonplace of general usage in a post-colonial setting, where religion, politics, culture and national identity remain contested, to coalesce and conflate the terms Protestant with Unionist and Catholic with Nationalist/Republican. Parr is not alone in this usage and practice. It is unsatisfactory, nonetheless.

The term ‘Protestant imagination’ is fascinating. Can any and all religious adjectives be put in front of the word ‘imagination’? And what do such schismatic descriptions mean for human communality, when all those religious imaginings are ‘right’ - and contesting – in the eyes of their Gods?

Multiplicities of cultural expression are covered, emanating from the ‘Protestant imagination’. The famous verbal selfie coined and voiced throughout his life by poet and self-described utopian socialist, John Hewitt, is included in Chapter 3.

I belong to the north of Ireland and all the complexities of its occupation. I was born before partition when Ireland was a complete unit, so I’m an Irishman in that way. But I was born in the British Isles and I speak English and I know no other tongue, so I’m British. And because we’re an archipelago to the west of Europe, I’m European. So that’s my hierarchy. I’m an Ulsterman, an Irishman, British and a European.

What John Hewitt would make of Brexit would be worth knowing.

Chapter 7 is entitled Loyal Women?.The doubt is not as bad as the Field Day’s near-omission of women from its anthology. Chapter 7 of Parr’s book features dramatists Christina Reid and Marie Jones. One of Reid’s characters opens the chapter, with a line from The Belle of Belfast City

There are no women in Ireland. Only mothers and sisters.

The gender-role note and the geo-political note are both striking. Parr suggests that if Reid’s work is influenced by Sean O’Casey, then Marie Jones’ is influenced by Arthur Miler. Jones is concerned with

the survival of the ordinary individual against the odds.

Jones’ and others’ work with Charabanc Theatre Company is well covered by Parr. He describes its origins in the difficulty women experienced in getting work in established theatres. The theatre scene in Belfast suffered from an inferiority complex, aptly named, in Maurice Leitch’s telling phrase, as ‘colonial cringe’. Charabanc’s Lay up your Ends brought a fresh approach to theatre in Northern Ireland, infusing it with local stories told with engaging style, that offered resistance to that cringe.

Christina Reid’s work and her self-description often wrestled with the national identity challenges faced by an artist in Northern Ireland. She said she would always call herself an Irish writer 

from this Protestant background of being proud to be Irish, but more English than the English all at the same time.

She often wrote about a strong grandfather figure, an echo perhaps of her own grandfather, who was a proud Orangeman. When she asked him questions about iconic moments in Ulster Protestant cultural history, such as The Battle of the Somme, seen perhaps as horrific slaughter rather than stirring victory, he replied 

Your problem is you don’t know what you are.

Orange Culture asserts itself as a secure location of identity, but it is not the only manifestation of Protestant Culture. It is, nonetheless, the dominant one, as experienced, albeit differently, by people who live in different parts of Northern Ireland and who could be said to come from ‘two tribes’. The Maoist line about power coming from the barrel of a gun applies. Boots on the ground and the threat therein are very forceful, both for the in-group and the out-group of the ‘tribes’ concerned. 

Currently, a form of Pax-Brexitannia pertains in Northern Ireland. Post-conflict gangsterism and corruption by militants and politicians feature. Indolence, hubris, neglect and incompetence feature in the consuls sent to the province from London.

Will writers emerge in the coming years who will cultivate and elaborate their desires, instincts and volitions into purposeful actions – plays, poems, novels, songs and films – that lean us all into new imaginings?

Connal Parr’s book can make the reader feel and think. Who could ask for more?

Inventing the Myth ; Connal Parr; Oxford University Press; Oxford, 2017

The Collected Poems of John Hewitt; ed. Frank Ormsby; The Blackstaff Press; Belfast, 1991

The Catastrophist; Ronan Bennett; Simon and Schuster; London, 2001

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READING AGENT RUNNING IN THE FIELD BY JOHN LE CARRÉ

John Le Carré has written twenty-five novels, as well as essays and memoirs, works The Guardian of London says 

“charted – pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers – the public and secret histories of his times.”

As far back as his breakthrough novel, The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963), Le Carré has largely written about British spies, their interpersonal politics, their antagonists, and their place in the world. Even The Constant Gardener (2001), an exception, set among diplomats in Kenya, only steps a feint away from East-West espionage into international pharmaceutical scandals, where there is plenty of deceit, duplicity, villainy and cant, staples of all Le Carré’s books.

In Agent Running in the Field, the Russians persist as arch-villains, taking the reader back to Cold War tensions, super-heated by the current Trump-Putin Axis. If the Russians are villainous, the Americans are grasping and overwhelming, pulling strings from afar and getting boots on the ground.

The hero is an experienced British spy, christened Anatoly, later Anglicised to Nathaniel and clipped, buddy-wise, to Nat. The English names have a chummy ring to them: Nat, Prue, Steff, Ed, Flo, Dom. Le Carré quotes Nat’s personnel file to give us his physical and personal attributes. He manages “fluent and capable argument, in the short term”. He is “headstrong” and sometimes resistant to discipline. He is ideally suited to deliver the shakedown that forms the conclusion to the book.

Nat is the hero who tells us the story in clear, deft and often elegant sentences, with set-piece scenes that move the reader about, without ever dropping his or her attention.

Ever since The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), Le Carré’s great novel of his Smiley series, he has often hung a story on the wilfulness and inexperience of a boy; if not entirely callow, then a youth nonetheless, fired up about something, an earnest idealist, who’s impulses and urges are honest but wrong-headed. In Agent Running in the Field (2019), Nat, more worldly-wise and experienced, saves the boy, Ed, from the forces of the State, in a chase sequence that has the mild whiff of an Ealing Studio comedy about it.

The key plot line concerns the chance (?) meeting between Ed and Nat, over a challenge to play badminton. There is more to Ed than the ungainly youth, who admits to working in an unrevealed area of the media, probably on-line, keen to take the club’s shuttle-cock champion down a peg ortwo. The reader wonders why Ed’s out-of-the-blue appearance does not trigger the full-scale forensic uncovering that Nat and his colleagues are advised to pursue in such circumstances. 

Weekly badminton sessions and a “kindly uncle/ebullient nephew” friendship develop between the men. Their conversations, over post-match pints, are mainly rants by Ed, airing his (and Le Carré’s?) frustrations at Brexit, Trump, Putin and the British Foreign Secretary (Boris Johnson), Nat’s ultimate superior.

When Ed discovers that elements of the British and American secret services are busy putting the clock forward, to take maximum benefit from the out-workings of Brexit, he embarks upon a solo-run, way beyond his pay grade and experience.

When Ed blows his top, Nat calms him, in his reasonable and put-upon manner.

“Yes, Brexit is indeed an unmitigated clusterfuck, though I doubt there is much we can do to put the clock back.”

Perhaps this is Le Carré speaking, through Nat, the long-serving spy, with years of experience behind him of being duplicitous and patriotic for the Crown, in Moscow, Berlin and other parts east. It is a neat summation of the commitment within the secret and civil services to the survival of the existing order, echoing Supertramp’s album title “Crisis? What Crisis?”

Is Le Carré being humorous when he calls his place of work The Office? It used to be called The Circus, but perhaps the fun has gone out of it for him. The public politics remain resolutely at the macro-level. The private politics are clearly middle-class and at the level of The Office, the cringe-making tv comedy (sic). 

With Russian villains and overwhelming Americans, the worst that can be said about the British is that they’re bumbling and individually self-serving, strapped onto ski-lift T-bars on the slopes of the permanent civil service, going up and down, sometimes sideways onto lesser slopes, which is Nat’s situation, as he returns to London to be put out to grass by Dom, his boss, another professional paid to lie and kill when required. Dom survives, as the shakedown unfolds, reportedly set for a safe seat in Parliament, via the Westminster-City of London-Civil Service revolving doors. Le Carré doesn’t tell us which party offers Dom his new home.

As in all Le Carré’s spy novels, there is a God, an all-powerful being, above the fray, but stirring and managing it. In Agent Running in the Field, this God is Welsh, curiously Roman Catholic, though named Bryn for the Non-Conformist Chapel, the Pit and the Valley. Bryn, the top spy in The Office, lives in a gothic villa overlooking Hampstead Heath. He is inscrutable, unflappable and always one step ahead of his underlings. He is minded to be merciful, even as he plunges the knife into Nat.

“Do you still love him? Not carnally. Love him for real?”

The knife draws out the muted, yet impassioned 

“I’m fond of him, Bryn.” 

There it is, neatly opening the book’s final section, blazing under the typesetter’s star, to confirm its importance, on page 227 of the Viking 2019 paperback edition: the impulse that drives Nat to undertake Ed’sconvoluted and hectic salvation.

There are many other strong scenes, such as the interview between Nat and Bryn. Possibly the best is the dialogue between Nat and his daughter, Steff, on a ski slope. They ascend in a lift, then sweep down on skis in silence, before continuing the dialogue again. Steff, as headstrong as her father, huffs, when he reveals he is a spy. She sends him, and her mother, Prue, back out into the cold.

Is Le Carré having another laugh, naming Nat’s wife Prue? She’s an ace lawyer, focussing on pro bono work. She has major venom for Big Pharma (as does Le Carré himself, fair play to him). The reader learns how the young Nat and Prue made love in their flat in Moscow, where Nat’s cover was as a cultural attaché, with KGB listeners attentive to their every whimper, moan and call. Grim it is, yet the tone remains “Posy Simmonds”. 

In the end, Nat and Prue reprise their early Moscow spy-craft, to save the young couple in jeopardy. It is unclear how salvation will work itself out beyond the pages of the book.

Marriage is the remedy for the ills of determined women. Both Nat’s daughter, Steff, who reportedly had great fun with the boys at her boarding school, and Flo, Nat’s junior, who simply grows tired of lying and walks out of the Secret Service, end up engaged to be married to different men, concluding their parts in the narrative. It feels like a modern-day taming-of-the-shrew. Perhaps it is.

If The Spy who Came in from the Coldis a tragedy, Agent Running in the Field is a melodramatic romance. It may be a lesser work – a matter of opinion, obviously – but it is wonderfully written and entertaining. It offers the vicarious pleasures of subterfuge, the chase and a peek into the undercover activities of states. It is a human drama, played out, almost wistfully, against the bellowing background of the clashing tectonic plates of world affairs. 

Recommended.

Agent Running in the Field; book; John Le Carré; Viking, London, 2019

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WATCHING THE IRISHMAN

Anzio, Italy. World War 2.

Frank Sheeran, an American G.I. in full combat gear, carries an M1 carbine, standard issue for the infantry of the U.S. forces of the time.

Two German soldiers complete the digging of a hole in the forest floor. They climb out, throwing their shovels before them. Have they completed their task so well in the hope of gaining a reprieve?

There is no reprieve. Not in this war. Not in Frank Sheeran’s world, where the officer who ordered him to kill the German soldiers simply said: “And be quick about it.”

Frank Sheeran shoots both soldiers, who gasp in surprise, then tumble, with neat synchronicity, into their self-made grave. Frank Sheeran steps forward and fires again, applying coups de grace to both young men. 

There is no grace in the scene, though there is digital de-ageing of the character of Frank Sheeran, played with dour élan by Robert De Niro throughout the overlong telling of his life as a Mafia killer.

It is as if director Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Raging Bull and many other acclaimed films) has created a summation of his own life’s work. It is yet one more telling of the life and times of a gangster psychopath, set in the sweeping context of historical events in America after World War 2. 

This film is paced to the metronome of a geriatric day-centre, right from the outset. See the cars: huge, sedate and lovingly pictured reversing round corners, in hearse-like motion, displaying their elegant tail fins.

Character development and plot advancement are largely achieved by dialogues that take place at tables with food and drink. Nobody is doing much running around. The delicious Italian practice of eating fresh bread with red wine appears throughout. The director loves this imagery of bread and wine – versions of it appear in many films, an image from his grand lore of Catholic rituals. There is, however, no resurrection from the dead, not for the young German soldiers nor for the numberless others Frank Sheeran later murders on behalf of his Mafia bosses and their Teamster Union associates. And of course, there is a baptism, the director’s central image of family regeneration and continuity.

The idyll of family life has a rotten core in Frank Sheeran’s case. His first marriage – to an Irish-American – ends as he deepens his relationship with his Mafia overlords by marrying a Siciliana-American. Did his first marriage unravel when his talent for following orders into deepening chasms of murderous violence became more obvious? He throws money on the kitchen table, saying he did well at the numbers, but Frank Sheeran is gambling on more than numbers. He is throwing dice, spotted with the lives of his family and of his victims. The scene where he pulverises the neighbourhood shopkeeper, with his bare hands, confirms what has been emerging. Frank Sheeran is a psychopath, very much at home within a Mafia family of psychopaths.

What choices does the director make in the way that scene, and others, are presented? Watching the film, the viewer asks, ‘what emotions are we supposed to be experiencing?’ Dismay, disgust, disbelief, disapproval? Coupled with the World War 2 scene, is this the scene that confirms that Frank Sheeran is a killer and the rest is no more than window-dressing on his vile actions?

The myth of de-ageing has a long legacy in art. Grappling for eternal youth is a trope found in literature and film, as well as in other forms. For Irish figures, we have Oisín in Tir na nÓg; Dorian Grey in his portrait. And now we have the Italian-Irish Frank Sheeran/Robert De Niro, de-aged and ageing on the silver screen. There is no de-ageing for soldiers mouldering in the ground or gangsters, union bosses and others shot in the face. There is death, of course. Even for Frank Sheeran.

See the hunched figure of the aged and diabolical Joseph Kennedy, staring across the water from the deck of his house at his beloved Hyannis Port compound, where the Kennedy dynasty roosted. 

The film presents a chilling critique of organised power in its 20th century American forms. Organised labour. Organised business. Organised politics. Organised crime. It presents the manner in which they interweave and support one another to advance their several aims, using murder when tensions strain the existing order, causing violent convulsions to re-set the system.

Nowadays, young people, they don't know who Jimmy Hoffa was. They don't have a clue. I mean, maybe they know that he disappeared or something, but that's about it. But back then, there wasn't nobody in this country who didn't know who Jimmy Hoffa was.

Personal and national histories are woven into the telling. Frank Sheeran’s father was a house painter. Frank uses the euphemism ‘I paint house’ for his murdering. All of the action takes place in the aftermath of World War 2, with the intersection of economic development with organised crime, capital and labour sharpening the stakes, for all the actors; state, criminal and labour. See the rise of the young Kennedys, in law and politics, the emergence of Jimmy Hoffa in The Teamsters Union and the strengthening of the power of Mafia families. The use of Union pension funds as investments in Mafia casinos in Las Vegas is the key driver of the film. Pressure from Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, seeking to bring Jimmy Hoffa and Mafia associates before the courts triggers Frank Sheeran’s violent actions. Not only does he pull triggers, but he also gets involved in supplying them to the mercenaries, US military personnel and exiles, making up the CIA-backed Brigade 2506, attacking Cuba as the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion. They were beaten back by local forces, commanded by Ché Guevara. 

Throughout the mayhem of this period of US history, Frank Sheeran kept taking orders, as he had in World War 2. He kept obeying and killing. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the waning of Frank Sheeran's murderous career, in the organisation he served, coincided with the rise of Black activism, the civil rights movements and the domestic refusal to unanimously support the new war in Viet Nam.

If they can whack a President, they can whack a president of a union. You know it and I know it.

This epic context is present, but kept in the background, as the film uses a road trip with two middle-aged couples to tell the killing of Jimmy Hoffa. Or a least tell Frank’s version of it, as Hoffa’s body has never been found. The director uses his A-list cast: De Niro as Frank Sheeran, Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino, the Mafia boss. They are all terrific, Joe Pesci, in particular. There will be Oscar nominations. Women characters are well in the rear. African American characters come late and are marginal. All the cast play well, none more so than Scouser Stephen Graham as Anthony ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano.

Then who? 

I'm gonna tell you. Tony. 

Tony. Which Tony? They're all named Tony. I mean, what's the matter? Italians, they can only think of one name.

Frank’s daughter, Peggy, is possibly the only actively moral person we see in the film. She is living the American dream in her own way, working as a teller in a bank, where she refuses to serve her father. The shield of security glass between them chillingly reflects the prison visits she never made.

What emotions are being offered in this final sequence, this slow, long-winded slide to the grave down the chute of an old folks’ home? Is the director seeking to evoke sympathy? Should we empathise with the murderer, while he rebuffs opportunities to express regret and seek forgiveness from his putative God, via the earnest young priest? 

The music is terrific throughout, from the do-wop of The Satins to the strings of The Barefoot Contessa, with scenes cut to the music and given crisp tone and shape by the edits. The music brings us back to the 50s and 60s USA from which much of contemporary, global pop culture arises.

The viewer lives through the legacy of these times, Frank Sheeran’s times, when orders were obeyed, when capital, crime and labour contested with each other, when psychopaths did the bidding of their bosses. Much like today.

Would you like to be a part of this, Frank? Would you like to be a part of this history? 

Yes, I would. Whatever you need me to do, I'm available.

The Irishman, film, Martin Scorsese, Tribeca Productions et al., 2019

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1302006/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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A FLOURISH FOR ETHAN

A Flourish for Ethan: on the occassion of his naming, 21.11.2019 

There is a piece of Gaelic wisdom which goes

Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí.

It translates to English as

Praise the young and they will flourish.

Dá bhrí sin, molaim Ethan agus tiochfaidh sé.

Thus, I praise Ethan and he will flourish,

Mar atá sé tagtha go dtí an lá seo

As he has flourished to this day.

Molaim Zoë, Brian agus Arlo agus tiochfaidh siadsan.

I praise Zoë, Brian and Arlo and they will flourish.

Agus sinne, fosta. Comhluadar Ethan.

And us, too. Ethan’s family and company.

Molaim muidne agus tiochfaidh muid. Le Ethan.

I praise us and we will flourish. With Ethan.

FROM AN EMPTY AUTUMN DITCH TO A DREARY WINTER BOOTH

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;

The people of the UK woke up this morning to the shocking news that, despite his vehement promise, their Prime Minister had not been found dead in a ditch. Searches up and down the Kingdom, covering England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where ditches are particularly many, tangled and deep, revealed them all to be void of a Prime Minister. There was a surfeit of cans, plastic bottles, tattered Halloween outfits, used condoms, busted wardrobes by the dozen and a number of bed frames and mattresses showing evidence of people having been busy making the beast with two backs.

The UK Prime Minister gave a solemn promise that he would die in a ditch if UKexit/Brexit did not happen at Halloween. The fact that ditches across the UK do not contain a dead Prime Minister leads to a number of speculations:

Firstly, that the Prime Minister has fallen into a ditch at sea.

And having thrown him from your watery grave,
Here to have death in peace is all he'll crave.
That he’s somewhere on the shipping lane between Belfast and Liverpool, resting on a wet border in a seabed of new tariffs.

Secondly, that though he has indeed passed, he has not passed into immortality in a ditch, but, through the zombie machinations of arch-ghoul Dominic Cummings, who wears a permanent false face, regardless of season, that the Prime Minister is no longer human, but is, in fact, a changeling, taken by the Other World and returned to the UK even more malevolent, damaged and flawed than before, no longer to be named Boris, but from now on to be known as Síofra.

With that in mind, UK voters will enter dreary booths in December and adjust their preferences accordingly. Otherworldly promises will be made, gifts offered, platitudes, enticements and appeasements laid before them.

So, let's see: it was told me I should be
rich by the fairies. This is some changeling:
open't. What's within, boy? 

The election will decide if UK subjects will be ruled by a Síofra or by a human, a much-traduced human, in the person of the leader of the Opposition, who is variously coloured ‘flaming red’ and ‘dithering magnolia’.

Meanwhile … 

Number of food parcels given out across UK soars 73% in five year

New data released today shows April 2018 to March 2019 to be the busiest year for food banks in the Trussell Trust’s network since the charity opened. During the past year, 1,583,668 three-day emergency food supplies were given to people in crisis in the UK. More than half a million of these (577,618) went to children. This is an 18.8% increase on the previous year.

The main reasons for people needing emergency food are benefits consistently not covering the cost of living (33%), and delays or changes to benefits being paid.

Quake in the present winter's state and wish
That warmer days would come:

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org

https://www.trusselltrust.org/2019/04/25/record-1-6m-food-bank-parcels/

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