It was a matter of gravity, propriety and basic lexicography. In the mid-eighteenth century, while lesser minds fretted over taxes or the French, Sir Horace Honorius Hunt of Inverness dedicated his waking hours to a singular cosmic injustice: the celestial map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Consider the utter lack of symmetry, my dearest,\u2019 Sir Horace declared one blustery evening over a dram of single malt. He gestured towards the crackling hearth of the Highland estate where the Royal Highland Society had just been founded. \u2018The Creator fashioned the firmament with grand order, yet we are expected to accept that the ultimate dwelling of the righteous and the fiery pit of the damned do not share a neat, symmetrical pairing? It is untidy. It lacks poise.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lady Hannah, sitting gracefully by the window, nodded in solemn agreement. She was a woman of formidable intellect and boundless patience. \u2018Directly so, Horace. The aspirate \u2018H\u2019 possesses a majestic, airy spirit. The breath of life itself! Heaven<\/em> and Hell<\/em> have been left to standard spelling merely by dreadful accident. They must both be explicitly bonded under the same letter to preserve balance.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n For forty years, the noble pair laboured hard: they wrote pamphlets, lobbied the clergy and held grand symposia in Edinburgh. They argued that the \u2018H\u2019 in Hell<\/em> stood for Hope lost, while the \u2018H\u2019 in Heaven<\/em> stood for Hope fulfilled. They made it their life\u2019s work to prove that both realms were bound by that singular, noble breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, a mere sixty miles across the North Channel in County Antrim, two people held a vastly different, far more tempestuous view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Declan O\u2019Donnovan and his beloved wife Deirdre had spent their youth arguing with anyone within earshot, plus several who were actively trying to escape, that the Scots had it entirely arse-ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018An \u2018H\u2019?\u2019 Declan spat into the turf fire, his face turning the colour of a ripe beet. \u2018An \u2018H\u2019 is nothing but a soft gasp, Deirdre! A whisper for folk who can\u2019t make up their mind! The underworld needs bite! It needs a hard, ringing consonant!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Aye,\u2019 Deirdre agreed, slapping the wooden table with a hand calloused from years of churning butter and writing angry letters to the Bishop of Armagh. \u2018It\u2019s Dell<\/em> for the deep, dark depths and Deaven<\/em> for the divine daybreak. It has a lovely rhythm to it. Dell and Deaven. A grand Irish pair!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n The O\u2019Donnovans launched a fierce counter-campaign across the emerald hills. They hoisted banners, recruited local bards to sing ballads of Dell and Deaven and sent frantic missives across the water. A terrible feud erupted across the Irish Sea. The Scots insisted on the double \u2018H\u2019 out of high-minded Highland virtue, while the Irish fought tooth and nail for the double \u2018D\u2019 out of sheer, unyielding stubbornness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matters reached a climax in the autumn of 1789 at the Great Cartographic Summit on the Isle of Mull.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sir Horace, by then an elderly man with a magnificent silver wig, met Declan O\u2019Donnovan on a windswept cliff edge. Lady Hannah stood beside her husband, holding a leather-bound parchment containing three thousand pages of theological proof. Deirdre O\u2019Donnovan stood opposite, holding a heavy wooden shillelagh and a gallon of potheen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Good sir,\u2019 Horace began, his voice booming over the gale. \u2018Reason must prevail! The \u2018H\u2019 represents the holy breath!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Bollocks!\u2019 shouted Declan, his coat flapping wildly. \u2018The \u2018D\u2019 gives the Devil his due and God His dignity! Dell<\/em> sounds like somewhere you\u2019d actually fear going, whereas your Hell<\/em> sounds like a meisceoir clearing his throat!\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n The debate raged for seven hours. Arguments were traded, Scottish proverbs were hurled like cobbles and Irish curses turned the sea foam green. Lady Hannah attempted to mediate with tea, but Deirdre accidentally knocked the teapot into a wild bush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As twilight fell, a monstrous gust of wind whipped up from the strait. It caught Lady Hannah\u2019s three-thousand-page treatise and scattered the leaves across the Atlantic. Simultaneously, a stray wave leaped over the crags, soaking Declan\u2019s carefully drafted Gaelic petitions until the ink ran into a muddy violet blur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The four combatants stood soaked, exhausted and entirely out of breath, watching three thousand pages of theological genius bob gently towards Iceland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Well,\u2019 Lady Hannah remarked, wringing out the hem of her tartan shawl with quiet dignity. \u2018That was thoroughly unhelpful.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Aye,\u2019 Declan muttered, wiping sea spray from his eyes and handing Sir Horace a flask of potheen. \u2018A grand disaster altogether.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n They sat upon the damp rocks in weary silence, sharing the fiery spirit while the wind howled around them. In the end, neither side had the energy to rewrite their manifestos. The English printers, thoroughly confused by the endless cross-channel bickering and unwilling to reset their printing presses, simply published the maps as they were: keeping the ancient Scottish \u2018H\u2019 for both locations just to avoid further brawls at the docks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To this day, the ultimate destinations of human souls share an opening letter. The Highland Society claims it as a triumph of heavenly logic, while the O\u2019Donnovans\u2019 descendants still sit in Antrim pubs, nursing dark stouts and swearing blind that the world lost its finest alliteration to a bad breeze and a couple of stubborn Scots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [ To be continued … ]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For forty years, the noble pair laboured hard: they wrote pamphlets, lobbied the clergy and held grand symposia in Edinburgh. They argued that the \u2018H\u2019 in Hell stood for Hope lost, while the \u2018H\u2019 in Heaven stood for Hope fulfilled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,13],"tags":[195,194,192,193],"class_list":["post-4004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experimental-prose","category-trails","tag-heaven","tag-hell","tag-ireland","tag-scotland"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4004"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4007,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004\/revisions\/4007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}