IS STABLEMATE, DAMIAN KENNEALLY, IRELAND’S DH LAWRENCE?

This week, rather than blether about all last week’s fantastic PBs and podiums, we’ll let them speak for themselves. 

Instead, this week, I want to chit-chat about the beautiful softness of Corkman, Damian Kenneally, and how he resembles the great Nottinghamshire writer, D H Lawrence…

Lawrence famously said, “How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.” He also said, “The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.”

Kenneally recently said, while threatening to sue The Stable News: “Maleness manifests and expresses itself in the beauty of baking bread.”

As a child, young Damo would join his gang of rapscallions and roll around in the wet grass, wrestling and playing Gaelic football. For little Damo, the physicality of wrestling and playing sport gave expression to his burgeoning manliness. And yet, a close family member told me recently, “He would often hang around the kitchen, watching his great, great grandmother baking bread.”

The relative went on to say: “One day, I saw him caressing the rolling pin and sniffing the flour on the table. I vividly remember his little fat fingers playing with a small ball of dough. He made it into a runner and pretended to have his little bread–man runner do laps of the kitchen table. It’s no surprise to me that he recently finished second in the Thomas Kent 10k, running a savage PB—he’s some man.”

Like Lawrence, Damo The Bread Man, has struggled with the quotidian vicissitudes of life: one minute he’s a ruffty-tuffty GAA player, scantily clad, sweating and panting and grappling men on the football pitch, as though he were a character from Lawrence’s, Women in Love—wrestling, naked, with other men, around the fireplace, and next, he’s a puny runner, who loves to bake bread.

But Damo The Bread Man embraces the dichotomy of his new–found manliness. He told The Stable News (before threatening to sue, like Paula): “As Lawrence did, I grew up in a physical world. For Lawrence, his youth was spent scuttling around the graft and grime of the coal mining town of Eastwood, for me it was the wind and the rain and the muck of the GAA fields.”

Damo went on: “Like a well made sliced pan, Lawrence rose from the coal face of grit and grime to artistic magnificence. He never forgot his roots. I too haven’t forgotten the dank smell of wet grass. The years of grappling made my portly fingers strong and great for kneading dough. For me, my artistic magnificence finds its voice in the perfect fruit scone.”

For Lawrence, love and life operated like the two phases of the cardiac cycle—diastole and systole. Each phase, wholeheartedly independent and yet contingent upon each other. For Damo The Bread Man, love and life operate like the cycle of his life—running and baking. Each love, wholeheartedly independent and yet, contingent upon each other.