Squinter: Taking a sideways look at the week

Hammering home lost traditions

2008-04-17T10:22:00.000+01:00

At a recent editorial meeting with chairs pulled up, notebooks on laps and legs folded, it became clear that the favourite shoes of a young colleague had seen better days.
Or at least, the heels of the shoes had.
“Time to get those heeled,” said a colleague on the wrong side of 40.
The younger journalist looked nonplussed.
“What do you mean?”
“Get new heels on them.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In a shoe repair shop.”
“Can you still get those?”
Funny how the younger generation have turned their back on the art of shoe mending.

Oxfords
When Squinter was at school everybody wore Oxfords.
And the only thing better than a new pair of Oxfords was a pair of Oxfords that had just been heeled, because when the shoemaker heeled your shoes he inserted a small quadrant of steel where the heel touched the ground.
It was designed to make the heel last longer, but more importantly, in St Mary’s the sound echoed round the corridors so satisfying that anyone whose shoes didn’t click was out of the loop.
They call them geeks today.

New heels
So desperate were students to be part of the in-crowd that local shoe-menders were often tasked with replacing heels on shoes that hadn’t yet been worn.
There was a cheap option.
For 50p or so you could buy a bag of studs for your heels – small pieces of metal that traced the curve of the heel and out of which three short spikes protruded.
A poor man’s way of protecting a shoe, they could be easily hammered in and produced much the same noise as a full heel job.

Height of fashion
But fashion being fashion, you couldn’t let anybody see the heels of your shoes because the DIY option was considered terminally uncool.
That’s all a thing of the past, of course.
But demand for good shoe-menders continues.
The customer base has changed considerably.
No more do schoolboys queue up to have their heels shod, their shoes (if indeed they wear shoes) are designed to be thrown out when the heel wears down.
The school market is, to all intents and purposes, dead and the only customers left are adults who buy decent shoes.

New lease of life
So off went Squinter’s young colleague with the name and address of the mender in his notebook, and back he came the next day, £12 poorer, but his shoes (slip-on, brown, vaguely pointy) looking like they’d had a new lease of life, which they had, of course.
There’s one young fella who’s going to supply the industry with a steady flow of business in years to come.
Pity about all the others.

Time-line confused in hunt for ‘Nawrthern Ahrland’s’ most famous inventor

2008-04-17T10:21:00.001+01:00

Yes, yes, it’s true... back to the BBC for a third week in a row, but, look, somebody’s got to try and impress on these Auntie types that there are people reading this who are older than their beloved ‘Nawrthern Ahrland’.
Hot on the heels of BBC Ulster’s insipid Blueprint series - which appeared to suggest that the Craigavon roundabouts were from the Paleolithic period - comes an extraordinary BBC Radio Northern Ireland competition which aims to identify Our Wee Country’s foremost boffin.
It’s on David Dunseith’s Talk Back, which is normally something of a tranquil redoubt of accuracy and fairness in the sturm und drang of front line Ormeau Avenue.
But apparently they’ve lost the run of themselves too and have decided – a la Blueprint – to create their own history.
And so Talk Back has decreed that a piffling matter like the Act of Union of 1801 -which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland - doesn’t matter.

Inventors
Front-runners in the race to be what the BBC website calls ‘Northern Ireland’s most famous inventor’ are Harry Ferguson, who invented the tractor; Willie McCrum, who came up with the idea of the penalty kick in soccer; James Baker, who came up with jet plane ejector seat; and Frank Pantridge, who invented the portable defibrillator.
While the debate has raged hot and heavy, Squinter hates to be the one to point out the Emperor David is doing the show in the nip.
Take Ferguson, for instance, who was undoubtedly a giant in his, ah, field.
He was born in 1884 and first hitched a plough to a tractor unit in 1917.

Penalty kick
What any of that has to do with THP is anybody’s guess.
Then there’s McCrum, who first, um, pitched the idea of a penalty kick to the IFA in 1890, some time before David Healy rattled the winner in against England at Pairc Windsor.
How BBC Ulster have decided that this guy is a Northern Ireland inventor is beyond the (admittedly limited) comprehension of a bloke like Squinter.
The next two gentlemen were born in Ireland too, but at least their inventions postdated partition.
James Martin was born in 1893 – the first live test on his revolutionary new seat took place in 1946.
But the bloke legged it from Ireland to England in 1919 taking all his Irish and inventingness with him, but not his Northern Irishness; so while England has a bit of a stake in the matter as well as Ireland, it’s hard to see how he can be considered ‘Northern Ireland’s most famous inventor’.

Listen up
Frank Pantridge, somewhat embarrassingly for Talk Back, was born in 1916 when some of the events which would lead to the erection of the Harland & Wolff cranes were taking place 100 yards down the road (but not down the motorway, which goes to Dungannon, and which, like the portable defibrillator, wasn’t built for another 40 years and more anyway).
So while Frank was Irish by birth his invention belonged to the place and time of James Young, power station bombings, Teatime with Tommy, cinema pickets, breadservers, and all those other things that make your average Ulsterman’s heart soar.
So is Frank ‘Northern Ireland’s most famous inventor’?
Keep listening to Talk Back and find out.

It’s British PR gone mad

2008-04-11T13:45:00.001+01:00

We’ve all heard of three-litre barrackbuster of cider, but this is ridiculous…
Squinter is urged in an email to stick a bit in the paper asking people to nominate anyone they think is worthy of a prize in a sporting competition sponsored by the English brewing firm Thwaites.
The competition is called the Lancaster Bomber Grass Roots Sports Personality of the Year Award.
No, you’re not seeing things.
There is a sports competition called after the heavy bomber that created a deliberate firestorm in the city of Dresden in 1945, three months before the end of the war, that killed an estimated 40,000 innocent people.
If they’d keep that kind of thing confined to pubs in England where football fans still hum the Dambusters theme and pork scratchings and pickled eggs are on the menu, it would still be objectionable; but to attempt to export this madness across the Irish Sea is PR gone mad.
If indeed there is any other kind of PR.

NIE billing department to conduct Club House séance

2008-04-11T13:44:00.001+01:00

Tip of the week: Write a letter to Northern Ireland Electricity and tell them you’re not known at the address they’re billing you at and that it’s your belief that the Dalai Lama is living there. You’ll get away with it, honestly.
Many are the stories that Squinter has heard about the mess that is NIE’s computerised billing system, but he never thought it was as bad as it actually is.
Recently the Roddy’s received a letter from NIE. Nothing strange about that, of course, except that the letter was addressed to The Occupier, Club House Bar, Glenn (sic) Road, Belfast. NIE write: “It has been drawn to my attention (exactly whose attention is not made clear as the letter is not signed) that representatives of Northern Ireland Electricity Plc have been unable to gain access to the above mentioned premises for the purpose of inspecting the meter installation.”
Well, of course NIE workers are going to have difficulty accessing the Club House because it closed 30 years ago. Quite why the letter ended up in the Roddy’s is not entirely clear as the club is some distance from the site of the old Club House.
“Accordingly I hereby give you notice for the purposes of the Electricity (NI) Order 1992 that Northern Ireland Electricity Plc will require access to the premises at a mutually convenient time.”
If they want access to the Club House that badly then Squinter can only suggest that they go to Milltown Cemetery or conduct a séance.

It’s not big, it’s not clever and not for the city streets

2008-04-11T13:43:00.000+01:00

Spitting: A confession. Squinter does it, has done since he can’t remember when. It’s not big and it’s not clever but there you go.
Now don’t get Squinter wrong; he doesn’t spit in front of other people, he doesn’t spit on the pavement and he doesn’t do it as spectacularly or as regularly as footballers do. But he does it.
In all likelihood, Squinter picked it up from his da, who was a lorry driver and sometimes took the boy Squinter out for the day with him, mostly to pick up cargo from the docks, sometimes on the boat across to Britain.
Squinter’s da was a regular spitter, as were every one of his workmates, as indeed was just about everybody at the ports of Larne and Stranraer.
In fact, come to think of it, working class blokes were spitters to a man and it was no surprise that their working class sons were spitters too.
Whenever a gang of us would gather on a wall, we’d spend half our time talking and the other half spitting.

Spitter
Squinter doesn’t sit on walls much any more; he doesn’t spit that much any more; but he does it occasionally and – unlike those who smoke less than 40 a day, consider themselves ‘social’ smokers and tick the non-smoker box on the life insurance form – he’s not going to lie about it.
When he’s out walking up the mountains with the Irish Ramblers Association, or birdwatching on the banks of Lough Neagh with his pal Dúlra, Squinter will spit prodigiously.
But if he’s walking in a built-up area he’ll only do the occasional one when he thinks nobody’s looking, and then only on to the road or a piece of waste ground.
Even so, Squinter readily admits that it’s not nice.
It upsets a lot of people and it lacks class.
Squinter winces himself whenever he sees some burly bloke hock a loogy at the feet of anyone who happens to be passing.
But there’s no doubt that his moral authority is severely dented by the fact that he’s a spitter too.
When does Lent start?

The history of Ye Olde Province

2008-04-11T13:40:00.000+01:00

What’s that they say about being in a hole and putting down your shovel?
As BBC This Here Pravince forges ahead with its new Blueprint series, a press release lands on Squinter’s desk with a satisfying thump (or rather, in his in-box with an apologetic beep).
On the front there’s a picture of presenter William Crawley standing heroically at the top of a hill flanked by a couple of archaeologists in obligatory fleeces.
Funny that, if we can digress a tad. Once upon a time experts on the Beeb wore blazers with hankies in the breast pocket and perhaps a monocle or a lorgnette.
Now they wear fleeces because nobody wants the Eastenders crowd who don’t like that university prof thing to switch off. Anyhoo, that press release…
At school Squinter was always taught that Ireland was partitioned in 1921 under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and that the first Northern Ireland parliament was opened by King George V in June 1921.
Clearly, some people at the BBC were in bed sick the day that all came up in history class, as the opening paragraph of the press release suggests.
“The story of Northern Ireland’s remarkable journey through time concludes in the third programme of the landmark Blueprint series.
“This final programme chronicles the epic story of the people who have made Northern Ireland their home over the past 10,000 years, from our earliest ancestors to our recent European immigrants, and discovers how they made their mark on the landscape we know today.”
You can see the problem here, can’t you, even if the BBC can’t.
Northern Ireland’s “remarkable journey through time,” started eight decades ago, not eight millennia.
You’d think this might be just the right time for the BBC to refer to ‘the north’ of Ireland, but clearly that’s a bridge too far.
Even in 2008 Northern Ireland, the Province and Ulster are all permissible in the BBC style book, but for the BBC press office ‘the north’ remains outside the journalistic Pale.
You might not have heard of Mountsandel – Squinter certainly hadn’t.
It’s near Coleraine and, according to BBC Ulster, it’s where “evidence of the first humans in Northern Ireland” was found.
Of course, the first human beings in Northern Ireland didn’t live in circular huts, they didn’t wear animal skins and nor did they eat wild boar and hazelnuts.
They lived in terraced houses in the Pound Loney or the Shankill, they wore dunchers and pinafores and they ate porridge and stew; their chieftains lived in big houses in Co Down and ate kippers and pheasant.
It gets worse, unfortunately, it gets much worse.
A headline on page 4 of the press release reads: ‘Romans Once Had Plans to Invade Northern Ireland’.
Which means that Nero had something in common with Jack Lynch, which is going to prove quite a trivia teaser in the Roddy’s on Friday night.
Pity the Romans never made it as far as Our Wee Country.
Squinter seriously doubts if when they arrived in Hoc Provincio Minor they’d have decided to build the main road from Belfast to, ah, Dungannon.
They’d have done the right thing and gone straight to Dublinum.
And would they have allowed Our Wee Country to play their home qualifiers for the Known World Cup in Parcus Windsorius when they were used to holding their own grand events in the majestic Colosseum?
You have to doubt it.
Been interesting to read the report from the Legatus Legionis to the Emperor back in Rome…

Nostra Patria Minima, VII/XI/LXVI Salve Imperator Meus!
Arrived at last in Larnus after a choppy crossing of the Mare Hibernis.
Encountered a warlike band of Trevores Constabulares at the Terminus Stena who demanded that we produce our scriptum itineris.
They soon felt the keen cuspis of our gladii and we hoisted their heads high and took the AVIII dual carriageway southwards.
The wind from the north is decidedly frigus and the toga is here nowhere to be seen, instead a curious vestimentum ludus paying tribute to the Greek goddess Nike is the order of the day.
Sacrifices of young children are regularly made to canis diabolorum, the panting, slavering hound which is widely worshipped by the populus vulgus.
The streets of the larger towns are lined with infantiae ferae surrounded by XXIV-packs of alcopopae which they drink with even more delectatio than you, Imperator Caritas, put away the vinum that night last month in the bathhouse in Via Excessum.
We stopped our column to ask directions of these infantiae ferae and 12 legionnaires were stabbed, three centurions were badly beaten and we beat a hasty regressus.
As we marched deeper into the city, we encountered an Orgia Orangeus with much playing of music, wearing of funny clothes and cursing of Rome. We await your orders...

Say hello to my little friend

2008-04-04T14:58:00.004+01:00

Some of us of a certain age (mesaproterozoic, somewhere in between the woolly mammoths, the cleaving of the ice shelves and the heyday of the Hole in the Wall Gang), will remember OMA. Others from the same era, people like Squinter, probably won’t because if they can’t remember where they left their car keys or the name of the bloke who presents the Late Late Show, how are they supposed to cast their minds back 40 years or more?
OMA? Got it? Yes? No? On the tip of the tongue?
In fact, OMA is ‘One Man Army’, otherwise known as the Johnny Seven, the most desirable and exciting toy ever to have been devised by the devilishly cunning minds of the evil geniuses of Madison Avenue.
The Johnny Seven was a multi-function machine gun with seven different actions (hence the Seven bit, not sure about the Johnny). 1968, the year before the guns in the street became real ones, and the insanely exciting TV ads for the toy induced in the boys of the lower Falls a mass psychotic episode of such intensely painful longing that a kind of torpor descended over the district and normally hyperactive male children fell into a bottomless pit of covetousness and frustration. We wandered the streets at a listless shuffle, talking in hushed tones about the limitless opportunities that would be afforded by ownership, about the life-changing prospect of some day walking those same streets as the Falls Road’s first OMA.
The memories came flooding back as Squinter clicked on an email from an old friend in London who pointed out that a pristine Johnny Seven, complete with original packaging and operating instructions, has just received a bid on ebay of £299.67. Squinter checked, as he always does. It’s true. Only these days ebay rules require the vendor to place an orange cap over the muzzle of the gun, which is surely worth an angry feature in the Daily Mail. Squinter’s pal sent a picture too, and blow Squinter down if those deliciously painful pangs of desire and yearning didn’t reach across the decades to grab him by the guts every bit as firmly as they did before his street went up in flames. Squinter and his pal exchanged a few stories, the most vividly remembered, for Squinter, was more of a confession…
Christmas morning 1968 and the boy Squinter and several other street urchins were comparing their meagre festive offerings. The Johnny Seven might not have cost £300 in 1968, but it was still beyond the range of every parent in the street. We wandered from Dover Street into Ardmoulin Avenue and there, standing in the middle of the road in order that everyone might better see, stood a boy brandishing a Johnny Seven – the first one any of us had seen in real life.
We walked slowly by, trying as best we could to hide our modest Christmas presents, and as we drew closer and it became apparent that the thing was even more desirable up close than it was on TV, curiosity was replaced by envy which quickly morphed into a deep sense of injustice which in seconds became burning anger.
We knew the boy with the Johnny Seven, although we weren’t friends. He hailed us warmly – too warmly of course, his sense of well-being heightened by his acute awareness of our utter misery. And then he opened fire on us. He opted for the grenade launcher, it being the largest and most visible option available to him. The green projectile traced what was, quite frankly, a disappointingly low and shallow parabola before bouncing a few feet in front of us and rolling into the gutter. Without thinking, Squinter picked it up and as the gunman stood watching, he hurled it as hard as he could over the roof of the nearest house. This time the grenade sailed high, clearing the roof and chimney and disappearing into the brick-walled yards at the back of the terrace. The sight of the boy’s open mouth briefly lifted Squinter’s spirits, but in an instant came the dread realisation that this was a lonely child who was in the habit of sharing things with his mother that most of us would have sorted out on the street.
And so it came to pass that, ten minutes later, Squinter was knocking on doors in Ardmoulin Avenue, his mother and the Johnny Seven mother standing on the pavement, arms folded and watching. The grenade wasn’t found by a householder until the third door had been rapped and as Squinter handed it back, it seemed as if all the sorrow and misery and pain in the world had risen into the chilly air and come to land on the skinny shoulders of a single boy on a Falls Christmas morning.
That was the only time in his life that Squinter ever touched a Johnny Seven – or, to be more accurate, part of a Johnny Seven. For one fleeting moment as he surveyed the ebay site, Squinter considered putting in a bid, but after five minutes of staring at the computer screen, the memory’s bitter tang had fermented into sweet nostalgia and with that change came the realisation that some things are best left alone.

Back to a time long ago when the dinosaurs roamed This Here Pravince

2008-04-04T14:58:00.001+01:00

Bloke called William Crawley keeps popping up on Squinter’s TV, proposing to take him on a tour of what Northern Ireland would have looked like when woolly mammoths roamed the landscape. And so, in the forthcoming BBC This Here Pravince series Blueprint, we’re going to get computer generated imagery (CGI) not only of said mammoths, but also of stone age settlements and of erupting volcanoes. Squinter hates to say it, but he foresees problems.
The tricky question of how come BBC Ulster can do a programme about geology in Northern Ireland is answered by the revelation on the BBC website that partition was in fact a prehistoric concept. “Astonishingly, when I checked it out with the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, I discovered... that Ireland was once split in two…” says series producer Natalie Maynes, writing with breathless with excitement on the BBC website.
Squinter checked. It’s true. Ireland was once split in two, with the northern part of the island and most of Scotland attached to the North American continental plate and the southern part and England attached to Europe. This was 4,000 million years ago, at a time when China was locked on to Norway and Rathlin Island was part of the Phillipines archipelago, but still, it’s strangely reassuring to know that we’re separated from the Republic of Ireland by more than pints of Heineken, the Euro, Joe Duffy and brown envelopes.
Squinter called the BBC and asked whether the CGI mammoths would be allowed to roam freely in the new series, or whether they’d be stopped at Belleek by the RIR. Silence. The exact content of the programme is a closely-guarded secret, but a friend at Ormeau Avenue tells Squinter that that’s just what happens. True bill.
“Where are you coming from, sir?”
“The Hadean era.”
“Can you just spell that for me, sir?”
“Certainly, haitch…”
“Just pull over to the side of the volcano, would you?”
Anyway, Squinter urges you to watch it. The first episode shows us what Londonderry and the Ardoyne looked like during the Triassic and Jurassic periods; the second takes us back to the Phanerozoic eon when, incredibly, the T-Rex and the Velociraptor were the only natural enemies of Jackie Fullerton and Hugh Duncan; the final episode takes us to an unwelcoming, grim, dangerous and often even deadly place, where the doomed homo neanderthalensis grunted and clubbed his way through a fast-changing world that he couldn’t understand and to which he would never adapt. Windsor Park looks amazing.

Say hello to my little friend

2008-04-03T10:53:00.001+01:00

Some of us of a certain age (mesaproterozoic, somewhere in between the woolly mammoths, the cleaving of the ice shelves and the heyday of the Hole in the Wall Gang), will remember OMA. Others from the same era, people like Squinter, probably won’t because if they can’t remember where they left their car keys or the name of the bloke who presents the Late Late Show, how are they supposed to cast their minds back 30 years and more?
OMA? Got it? Yes? No? On the tip of the tongue?
In fact, OMA is ‘One Man Army’, otherwise known as the Johnny Seven, the most desirable and exciting toy ever to have been devised by the devilishly cunning minds of the evil geniuses of Madison Avenue.
The Johnny Seven was a multi-function machine gun with seven different actions (hence the Seven bit, not sure about the Johnny). 1968, the year before the guns in the street became real ones, the insanely exciting TV ads for the toy induced in the boys of the lower Falls a mass psychotic episode of such intensely painful longing that a kind of torpor descended over the district and normally hyperactive male children fell into a bottomless pit of covetousness and frustration. We wandered the streets at a listless shuffle, talking in hushed tones about the limitless opportunities that would be afforded by ownership, about the life-changing prospect of some day walking those same streets as the Falls Road’s first OMA.
The memories came flooding back as Squinter clicked on an email from an old friend in London who pointed out that a pristine Johnny Seven, complete with original packaging and operating instructions, is available on ebay for £299.67. Squinter checked. It’s true. Only these days ebay rules require the vendor to place an orange cap over the muzzle of the gun, which is surely worth an angry feature in the Daily Mail. Squinter’s pal sent a picture too, and blow Squinter down if those deliciously painful pangs of desire and yearning didn’t reach across the decades to grab him by the guts every bit as firmly as they did before his street went up in flames. Squinter and his pal exchanged a few stories, the most vividly remembered, for Squinter, was more of a confession…
Christmas morning 1968 and the boy Squinter and several other street urchins were comparing their meagre festive offerings. The Johnny Seven might not have cost £3000 in 1968, but it was still beyond the range of everyone in the street. We wandered from Dover Street into Ardmoulin Avenue and there, standing in the middle of the road in order that everyone might see, stood a boy brandishing a Johnny Seven – the first one any of us had seen in real life.
We walked slowly by, trying as best we could to hide our modest Christmas presents, and as we drew closer and it became apparent that the thing was even more desirable up close than it was on TV, curiosity was replaced by envy which quickly morphed into a deep sense of injustice which in seconds became burning anger.
We knew the boy with the Johnny Seven, although we weren’t friends. He hailed us warmly – too warmly of course, his sense of well-being heightened by his acute awareness of our utter misery. And then he opened fire on us. He opted for the grenade launcher, it being the largest and most visible option available to him. The green projectile traced what was, quite frankly, a disappointingly low and shallow parabola before bouncing a few feet in front of us and rolling into the gutter. Without thinking, Squinter picked it up and as the gunman stood watching, he hurled it as hard as he could over the roof of the nearest house. This time the grenade sailed high, clearing the roof and chimney and disappearing into the brick-walled yards at the back of the terrace. The sight of the boy’s open mouth briefly lifted Squinter’s spirits, but in an instant came the dread realisation that this was a lonely child who was in the habit of sharing things with his mother that most of us would have sorted out on the street.
And so it came to pass that, ten minutes later, Squinter was knocking on doors in Ardmoulin Avenue, his mother and the Johnny Seven mother standing on the pavement, arms folded and watching. The grenade wasn’t found by a householder until the third door had been rapped and as Squinter handed it back, it seemed as if all the sorrow and misery and pain in the world had risen into the chilly air and come to land on the skinny shoulders of a single boy on a Falls Christmas morning.
That was the only time in his life that Squinter ever touched a Johnny Seven – or, to be more accurate, part of a Johnny Seven. For one fleeting moment as he surveyed the ebay site, Squinter considered putting in a bid, but after five minutes of staring at the computer screen, the memory’s bitter tang had fermented into sweet nostalgia and with that change came the realisation that some things are best left alone.

When dinosaurs roamed the Pravince

2008-04-03T10:52:00.000+01:00

Bloke called William Crawley keeps popping up on Squinter’s TV, proposing to take him on a tour of what Northern Ireland would have looked like when woolly mammoths roamed the landscape. And so, in the forthcoming BBC This Here Pravince series Blueprint, we’re going to get computer generated imagery (CGI) not only of said mammoths, but also of stone age settlements and of erupting volcanoes. Squinter hates to say it, but he foresees problems.
The tricky question of how come BBC Ulster can do a programme about geology in Northern Ireland is answered by the revelation on the BBC website that partition was in fact a prehistoric concept. “Astonishingly, when I checked it out with the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland, I discovered not only that Ireland was once split in two, but that our landscape had also been drowned beneath a tropical ocean…” says series producer Natalie Maynes, writing with breathless with excitement on the BBC website.
Squinter checked. It’s true. Ireland was once split in two, with the northern part of the island and most of Scotland attached to the North American continental plate and the southern part and England attached to Europe. This was 4,000 million years ago, at a time when China was locked on to Norway and Rathlin Island was part of the Phillipines archipelago, but still, it’s strangely reassuring to know that we’re separated from the Republic of Ireland by more than pints of Heineken, the Euro, Joe Duffy and brown envelopes.
Squinter called the BBC and asked whether the CGI mammoths would be allowed to roam freely in the new series, or whether they’d be stopped at Belleek by the RIR. Silence. The exact content of the programme is a closely-guarded secret, but a friend at Ormeau Avenue tells Squinter that that’s just what happens.
“Where are you coming from, sir?”
“The Hadean era.”
“Can you just spell that for me, sir?”
“Certainly, haitch…”
“Just pull over to the side of the volcano, would you?”
Anyway, Squinter urges you to watch it. The first episode shows us what Londonderry looked like during the Triassic and Jurassic periods; the second takes us back to the Phanerozoic eon when the T-Rex and the Velociraptor were the only natural enemies of Jackie Fullerton and Hugh Duncan; the final episode takes us to an unwelcoming, grim,dangerous and often deadly place, where the doomed homo neanderthalensis grunted and clubbed their way through a fast-changing world that they couldn’t understand and would never adapt to. Windsor Park.

Schoolgirl smokers on the up reckons Squinter

2008-03-20T11:27:00.001Z

Last time Squinter mentioned the subject of schoolgirls smoking he got it in the neck from an angry teacher from the school named in the piece who thought it was his fault that young women are puffing away like laboratory beagles.
So this time it’s no names, no pack drill.
And anyway, there’s no reason to suppose that there’s much difference between the girls’ schools when it comes to how many pupils are having a post-breakfast feg on their way to school.
If the levels were high last time Squinter mentioned the subject a couple of years back, they must now have soared past the point where they become a matter for concern.
As Squinter does the school run, there they are: sitting on walls, standing in groups, walking in pairs or perhaps even singly, puffing away without a care in the world.

In Uniform
It’s not always so, but on one day last week Squinter saw more smokers than non-smokers in uniform.
If you’re the parent of a schoolgirl of 11 and over, you’re going to have to seriously consider the possibility that your daughter is a school-walk smoker.
According to the most recent figures, available on the Office for National Statistics website, seven per cent of boys aged between 11 and 15 are smokers.
For girls of the same age, that figure rises to 10 per cent.
Squinter wouldn’t want to hazard a guess at what the figures are for West Belfast – that would be far too unscientific for a column like this which takes its responsibilities so seriously.
But it would be fair to say that there is a hell of a lot more than one local schoolgirl in 10 smoking on the way to school.

Teachers
Funnily enough, the seven per cent figure for boys would seem to Squinter to be probably about right because there is nowhere near as many schoolboy smokers – not even close.
Of course, there are many social and societal reasons why young women are heavier smokers than men – weight and image issues being causal factors.
The fact that there are no teachers out and about being another.

Foundations of history

2008-03-20T11:26:00.000Z

It’s Sherlock for the purposes of this particular item, not Squinter…
A colleague compiling some information on Stormont inquires of Sherlock whether he knows anything about the place and its history that’s of singular significance.
Back comes the reply that during the war the entire building was painted black, a fact that most people are probably aware of – it was done so that German bombers wouldn’t be drawn like moths to the flame of the pristine white Portland stone of which Parliament Buildings are made.
What most people probably don’t know is that they didn’t use black paint for fear that the chemical in the paint would damage the masonry (the hard stuff outside, that is, not the brethren inside).
And so the geniuses in charge came up with the idea of using a mixture of bitumen and cow manure because it would apparently be easier to remove once Fritz had been dealt with.

Manure
Turned out they had a dickens of a job getting it off after the war – ten years it took, apparently.
Indeed, there are still significant portions of the building, mostly away from the public view, that are black with bitumen and dung.
Which, when you think about it, makes the place a particularly fitting symbol for the state of Northern Ireland.
To add insult to injury, the supposedly benign mixture did significant damage to the stone and the façade of the building is today a kind of off-grey when it’s supposed to be white.

Spelling error
That wasn’t the only cock-up that remains visible at Parliament Buildings today, sadly.
Another titbit of information that Sherlock was able to offer up to his colleague was that the Stormont architect was Sir Arnold Thornley, whose original plans for a larger building were evenmore with a Capitol Buildings-style dome on top were scaled back in the wake of the global recession caused by the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
His interest piqued, Sherlock went in search of some pictures and he found this one.
It’s the Stormont foundation stone, laid on May 19, 1928, the day work began on the Wedding Cake on the Hill.
You will note that the architect’s name is wrongly spelt – here he’s ‘Thornely’ instead of ‘Thornley’.
Squinter rang Stormont and asked who was responsible for the mistake. Back came a statement:
“Probably the same dcik who painted the place with cowsiht.”

Would a ‘turlet’ by any other name be less necessary in times of need?

2008-03-20T11:25:00.000Z

Still on the subject of Stormont and it strikes Squinter how many people here are unwilling or unable to give the place its correct name.
For a majority of people in West Belfast – including certain people in the Andytown News newsroom, let it be said – it’s not Stormont, it’s Stormount.
Funnily enough, for the same people the heart of politics in London is to be found not in Westminster but in Westminister.
Many and varied are the entries in the West Belfast Lexicon of Locution…
Something clearly defined or identified is not specific, but rather pacific.
Gerry Adams used to be mustard for that one until somebody wired him off about that and the duffle coat.
A camera that doesn’t use film is not digital – up where Squinter lives it’s digikal.
And as the TV revolution continues, many parents have advised their children that they are now watching Dora the Explorer on digikal instead of analogue.
Pasta that comes in long, slender strings in a West Belfast eaterie is often not spaghetti, but bisghetti.
Which probably goes a long way to explaining why spaghetti remains popular locally but conchiglioni and quadrefiori have never really caught on.
Last time Celtic played Rangers the TV room in the Roddy’s was absolutely bunged.
As Squinter entered the building, a considerate smoker standing outside advised Squinter that the place was chopper-block.
The function room, meanwhile, which attracts a more sedate crowd, was merely choc-a-bloc.

Getting caught out... in more ways than one
An Italian friend living locally, and who has excellent English, hosted a party recently and was bemused when one of the guests asked him where the turlet was.
He only copped that the toilet was required when the bloke put both hands between his legs and started hopping up and down.
During a lively debate on global warming recently, it was agreed that coal-fired power stations were not a good thing, but even so, most people were not in favour of the nukulur option.
Still on the subject of coal and in this environmentally conscious world a growing number of people are becoming concerned about what comes out of their chimney.
Unfortunately, even more are worried about what comes out of their chimley.

‘Bomber’ headline: more than just a little bit selective

2008-03-20T11:24:00.001Z

‘Meeting over bomber celebration’ reads an excitable BBC Ulster story on the corporation’s website on Wednesday morning.
As headlines go, elegant it ain’t and the queen was probably choking over the cornflakes in her Tupperware bowl this morning as she considered this slap in the face to her treasured English, but anyway...
The ‘bomber’ in question is Mairead Farrell, shot dead 20 years ago this week in Gibraltar by the SAS along with Sean Savage and Dan McCann.
The BBC could have put ‘woman’ instead of ‘bomber’ in the headline; they could even have put ‘unarmed woman’.
But they didn’t.
Indeed, nowhere in the piece about the furore surrounding the planned event in Stormont was it mentioned that the three were unarmed when they were shot.

Controversy
Nowhere does it mention the controversy surrounding the shootings.
Nowhere does it mention the lies churned out by the British government and media in the immediate aftermath of the shootings.
Nowhere does it mention the 1995 European Court of Human Rights decision which ruled that the shootings were in breach of Article 2:2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Fair enough, it’s a short enough piece and you can’t expect to get the whole picture in a handful of paragraphs.
But this short piece does manage to squeeze in that Mairead had served time for bombing a hotel in the mid-70s and that explosives had been found in Spain in the wake of the shootings.

Rifles
Needless to say, of Edward Carson, the finger-pointing guardian of the Stormont estate, not much will be said in any of the stories covering the planned Sinn Féin event.
It won’t be pointed out, for instance, that he was responsible for the smuggling of 20,000 rifles into Ulster (or parts of it, anyway) in April 1914.
The rifles were landed from two boats, the Clyde Valley and the Fanny (funnily enough, about the second boat not many songs are sung or banners made).

Gun-runner
You would think, therefore, that with a big statue standing just yards away celebrating the life of a famed anti-government plotter and gun-runner, unionists at Stormont might be more circumspect in their hysterical denunciations of the Mairead Farrell event.
You would think that, wouldn’t you?

Stale drink, smoke and a Sacrament

2008-03-20T11:22:00.000Z

Daughter number two makes her Confirmation this week and, to be honest, Squinter had forgotten how, ah, long the ceremony is.
Guts of two hours, actually, but it’s beautifully done and quite inspiring – or at least it would be if it wasn’t for some of the grown-ups...
The woman that Squinter squeezed in beside in the packed church had had a skinful the night before – there’s no other way of putting it.

Stale drink
The altar was to her left, and so, sadly, was Squinter, which meant that every time she exhaled Squinter got a waft of that unmistakeable stale drink odour that would otherwise have kept her in bed had she not been required to exhibit her devotion at a solemn religious occasion.
After a few minutes bathed in the fumes, Squinter began to wonder why he had bothered getting his suit and overcoat dry-cleaned and why he had taken the time to shine his shoes.
The eight-hour-old-alcohol breath would have been bad enough on its own, but it turned out the lady who had been flying her kite the night before was a chain-smoker as well.

Smoker
Or maybe she was just a regular smoker and bad hangovers make people smoke more.
Whatever the truth, she exited the building four times during the 90-minute service, and each time she returned the drink smell was masked behind the heavy curtain of tobacco smoke which clung to her clothes.
That’s a familiar smell in pubs and clubs as smokers exit and re-enter with gay abandon, but you kind of expect it there.
In a church, though, there’s something seriously objectionable to it – Squinter could have sworn the statue of the Virgin at the end of the pew was wrinkling its nose every time she passed by.
The good news was that the smell of stale tobacco disappeared in five minutes or so; the bad news is that the stale drink smell was considerably more resilient and reasserted itself as soon as the fog of smoke cleared.

Sacraments
And so the air around Squinter’s head yo-yoed between stale tobacco and staler drink while Squinter tried his best to concentrate on his daughter receiving one of the seven Sacraments.
And when the time came to offer each other the sign of peace, Squinter’s forced smile was evidence that the Holy Spirit hadn’t spread that far from the altar.

Altogether now – 'Quis Separabit'

2007-11-15T11:44:00.001Z

Another reason not to use Wikipedia, as if you needed one.
Squinter keys in ‘Northern Ireland’ – can’t quite remember why. Possibly looking for something to annoy him, possibly in search of a particular date.
There’s a panel to the right of the main entry that’s a kind of ‘ten things you didn’t know’ type deal.
One of the things that Squinter certainly didn’t know is that the motto of Northern Ireland, according to Wikipedia, is ‘Quis Separabit’. Squinter knew that this Latin phrase – it means ‘Who Shall Separate Us?’ – was the motto of the UDA, but it’s news to him that it’s the motto of This Here Pravince (THP) into the bargain. That’s not all. In the map of Europe in which Northern Ireland is highlighted, THP is highlighted in orange.
Oh dear, somebody at the NIO with too much time on his hands again.

Could you be in the frame?

2007-11-15T11:43:00.000Z

Back to Cullyhanna and Squinter’s favourite bunch of old codgers, the Independent Monitoring Commission, has described the killing of Paul Quinn as having taken place in the context of a “local dispute”.
Sitting forward in their bath chairs and squinting through rheumy old eyes at the press pack before them, the Old Gits opined that it was too early to say whether or not the killing had been sanctioned by the IRA leadership.
It’s not surprising that John Grieve had something to say on the matter.
After all, the former Met high-flyer is Emeritus Professor at the London Metropolitan University, Senior Research Fellow at Portsmouth University, Honorary Fellow at the Roehampton Institute, Chair of the John Grieve Centre for Policing and Community Safety and Independent Chair of the Greater London Authority’s Alcohol and Drugs.
How he squeezes that lot on to the occupation part of his passport is anybody’s guess, but we should just be grateful he can find the time to come over here and solve the national question.
Here’s what Johnnie had to say about themuns who done it: “Despite the fact that we are saying it is a local dispute, we do believe that those who were involved in the attack on him – in his brutal murder – included people who are members or former members or have associations with members or former members of the Provisional IRA.”
Johnnie, Squinter hates to be the one to break the bad news to you, but that bunch of suspects that you’ve outlined there ropes in just about everybody in South Armagh, for God’s sake, and here in West Belfast for that matter.
Squinter’s compiled the stats for greater Andytown, he’s fairly sure South Armagh would work out something similar.
Those in the four categories outlined by Johnnie represent approximately the following percentages of the local population here...
“Provisional IRA members”: 5 per cent
“Former Provisional IRA members”: 38 per cent
“Associates of Provisional IRA members”: 88 per cent
“Associates of former Provisional IRA members”: 97 per cent.
Squinter has allowed for a three per cent margin of error, which is particularly relevant in the final category there because, quite frankly Johnnie, Squinter has never met a single person in Andytown who isn’t an associate of a member or former Provisional IRA member.
According to the eight-inch-high Collins Concise Dictionary on Squinter’s desk, “associate” is defined as (n)… a person joined with another or others in an enterprise, business etc; a companion or friend; something that usually accompanies another thing.
So, the bottom line is, if you’ve ever counted an IRA member, past or present, as a friend, if you’ve ever had a chat and a laugh with same, then according to Johnny you’re in the frame for the Castleblayney job.
Given Ian Paisley’s warm relationship with Martin McGuinness, Squinter’s advising the Big Man to present himself to the PSNI for interview ASAP.
n Next week:
• Jack the Ripper most likely a bloke, says John Alderdice. Or else he might not be.
• Joe Brosnan reports that Lord Lucan could well have been spotted in South America. Failing that, he’s in China. Or the Yukon.
• Cock Robin murder: Dick Kerr says Sparrow confession is unreliable, suggests PSNI visit puffin nesting sites in Scotland.

Laird Lord and the Ordinary Decent People

2007-11-15T11:42:00.001Z

So Laird Lord has followed through on his promise to name those he believes responsible for the Paul Quinn murder. Apparently there were 14,000 people involved in various aspects of the operation, from running hamburger stalls, laying on buses, organising B&Bs, sorting media passes, providing toilets and putting velvet ropes around the VIP area.
Some of them were even detailed to tell Laird Lord about it.
Seriously, the bloke said as much himself in the Lords.
“I have been contacted by a number of people and groups from the area who would not normally consider me as a friend asking that the police remove and prosecute those involved and get them off the streets.”
Meeting of the Ordinary Decent People, somewhere in South
Armagh, November 10.
Chair: Right lads, what are we going to do to get these murderous Provo scum off our backs and let us live in peace and harmony here in the rolling hills and drumlins of our beloved Bandit Country?
Ordinary Decent Person 1: Let’s march on the local IRA chief’s house and let him know that the people are against him.
Chair: Hmmm, bit obvious, if you ask me.
ODP 2: How about we call in Alec Reid and Harold Good and ask them to call the two sides together in a spirit of comradeship and forgiveness so we can thrash this thing out?
Chair: Sit down, clever clogs.
ODP 3: Why don’t we run candidates against Sinn Féin in the next election?
Chair: Those Provo savages would have us killed before we could print the medical cards.
ODP 4: Mass exodus?
ODP 5: Rally in Jonesboro?
ODP 6: Night at the Races?
Chair: For Christ’s sake, lads, we’ve tried them all before and none of them worked.
ODP 7: Why don’t we contact Lord Laird of Artigarvan?
Chair: Who’s he?
ODP 7: Bloke who used to be the top Ulster-Scot but couldn’t speak Ulster-Scots.
Chair: Jings, crivvens, help m’boab, that kind of stuff?
ODP 7: Yep, plus he’s a decent sword-dancer, he likes pipe bands and parades and I like the cut of his gib in a kilt.
Chair: What are we waiting for? Get me his number!

It's meat, but not as we know it

2007-11-15T11:41:00.000Z

A colleague of Squinter has been vegetarian for quite some time now. Both of us being amateur cooks, we often share our culinary successes/disasters over a cup of tea and a slice of bap on a Monday morning.
Without seeming immodest, our most recent triumphs have been the talk of the office:
Squinter: Warm duck on baby spinach in an orange and red chilli jus
Veggie Boy: Steamed turnip cubes served in cabbage water with wilted dock leaf and dandelion salad
Squinter: Fillet steak smothered in caramelized onions with gavroche potatoes and lemon butter asparagus
Veggie Boy: Swede medallions on a bed of cold pea and parsnip mash in a strained carrot coulis
Mmmmm. Makes your mouth water just thinking about it, doesn’t it?
But things are moving on. Last week Veggie Boy announced to a disbelieving office that he was heading off down the Quorn road.
Quorn, for those of you unfamiliar with the product, is fake meat for vegetarians.
What it’s made from is a matter of considerable debate. The makers say it’s made from mushrooms, but others have argued that the main ingredient, fusarium, is not a mushroom, rather it’s a soil mould.
Just don’t ask Squinter what the difference is.
Squinter doesn’t get it. He thought vegetarians didn’t eat meat because they don’t like the idea of eating meat.
Yet here they are eating pretend meat. Go figure. Whatever happened to all that guff about the vast, delicious and nutritious world of vegetables being more than enough to cater for the dietary needs of humankind?
Veggie Boy reports that the Quorn in his spaghetti Bolognese on Tuesday night was “95 per cent as good” as the minced steak he used to use.
He invites Squinter to his home to try it because, he reports, he has leftovers.
Who’d have thought it?

Lighten up a bit, fellas

2007-11-08T15:47:00.001Z

Every week without fail Saoirse, the newspaper of Republican Sinn Féin, lands on Squinter’s desk.
Squinter normally throws his eye over it for a while in an attempt to discern whether he’s missing something and the Superchucks might be right after all.
To be quite honest, in Squinter’s case the Supers are pushing against a door that, while not wide open, is certainly slightly ajar.
Gerry’s been the West Belfast MP on and off for nigh-on 20 years and the place is, unquestionably, worse now than it’s ever been in terms of the quality of life of your average Josephine.
And yet it’s all somebody else’s fault, natch.
Maybe Big G will tell us when we’re going to be able to hang things at his door.
25 years? 30? 50?
Then you’ve got the Shinners making a balls of the Free State election and playing spin the bottle with the DUP up at Stormont.
It’s not a good time to be a Chuck.
But instead of gently inviting Squinter away from the dark side and into the light, the Supers prefer to bawl and gulder like a crowd of barstool drunks.
It’s Provo this and sell-out that; collaborators here, quislings there.
‘Provos take seats on Derry Brit policing board’ is a typical story. The first paragraph reads: “Provo collaboration was stepped up as Provisional members joined the British District Policing Partnership for the first time.”
Fellas, fellas, try and lighten up a bit.
Sometimes the rapier is more effective than the broadsword.
After leafing through the 20 pages of Saoirse, instead of wondering whether the Supers might just have a point, Squinter’s left feeling like he’s been the victim of a gang assault.

Mixed feelings about the men in suits

2007-11-08T15:38:00.000Z

Mixed feelings: we all know what them fellas are like.
Wayne McComb gets put out of Ballymurphy one day, the next he’s moving in next door.
The Trevors ring to say they know where your car is, then add that you have to collect it because there are too many smicks around it at present.
Squinter confesses to having been conflicted on seeing the images of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s shock troops clearing protesters off the streets of Islamabad.
The scenes of uniformed thugs beating unarmed civilians with batons and fists, dragging them unceremoniously into armoured vehicles and clearing the streets had uncomfortable echoes of the early days of the civil rights here.
But the blokes on the receiving end were lawyers.
With the best will in the world, and acknowledging that lawyers have rights too, there’s not a lot of sympathy out there for lawyers, regardless of their nationality.
And it’s hard to work up any fellow feeling, even when the forces ranged against them are those of a fanatical, unelected thug like Musharraf.
Squinter was on a flight to London recently and during severe turbulence the flight attendants instructed all passengers to return to their seats and buckle up.
Everyone complied except two blokes in business suits who stubbornly refused to sit down. The captain was called and it turned out they were lawyers handing out business cards.
True story.
The Islamabad business, in a funny way, reminds Squinter of the movie Cape Fear.
Movie fans will know that Robert de Niro plays a demented psychopath who carries out a terrifying campaign of intimidation and violence against a mild-mannered lawyer played by Nick Nolte.
Bet you don’t know whose side you’re on either.

Coffee shop carols on Guy Fawkes Day

2007-11-08T15:35:00.000Z

To the Simply Coffee sandwich shop in Andytown on Monday.
Or, to be more accurate, and thanks to recent high winds, the Sim... Coffee sandwich shop.
Squinter’s with the big guy, who’s off school with a sore ear.
And as we wait for our tea and sandwiches, oh dear, it quickly becomes clear that there’s a Christmas CD playing on a loop.
It’s Mariah Carey singing ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’, although given her recent, highly-publicised battles with the spare tyre, it could have been ‘All I Want for Christmas is Stew’.
Two things occur.
1: November 5 is a bit early to be playing non-stop Christmas songs.
2: Never is there a good time to play Mariah Carey singing, ‘All I Want for Christmas is Stew’.
It’s just Squinter: he never cared for the woman, but when she got up on a stage last year in an outfit that would make a five-dollar hooker shudder and started hugging her backing choir of little African children, mild dislike turned into burning enmity.
And when Squinter hears her singing Christmas songs on Guy Fawkes Day, well... it’s like the bloke in third year who used to scrape his locker key down the window; Diane Dodds reciting The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner through a bullhorn in the middle of a seagull colony; the car alarm that goes off when you’re having a lie-in; Steven Nolan shouting “It’s the biggest show in the country!”
Still, we had a lovely lunch, even though Squinter knew it was time to go when the CD ended and Mariah began warbling again.
It could have been worse, thought Squinter as he took the big guy by the hand and crossed the busy Andytown Road.
Jon Bon Jovi doing ‘Please Come Home for Christmas’ could have been on there, in which case Squinter would have been forced to take the staff and customers hostage and destroy the CD, CD player and quite possibly the premises.
Now there’s that image again: bloke with shoulder-length blond extensions and highlights in skin-tight spandex and pixie boots singing a stick-your-head-in-the-oven-with-the-turkey seasonal dirge.
Bells will be ringing the glad, glad news,
Oh what a Christmas to have the blues.
My baby's gone, my baby's gone, I have no friends,
To wish me greetings once again...
A colleague points out that, to be fair to Jon Bon Jovi, he actually wears a woolly jumper with reindeers on the front in the video.
To which the response is: Why would anybody want to be fair to Jon Bon Jovi?
And doesn’t that jumper kind of clash with the bouffant blond hair?
Good grief, it’s enough to make you Muslim.
Let’s have some of your suggestions for songs that need to be banned from the Andytown News Christmas party.
Best ones on www.squinternet.com will get the Christmas CD of their choice.

Now top that!

2007-11-02T11:16:00.001Z

A press release lands in Squinter’s inbox – not the usual read-the-first-ten-words-and-hit-delete nonsense, but something very dear to his heart. Veda.
Regular readers of this column will be aware of Squinter’s passion for Veda. A nice cup of tea around ten o’clock in the evening, two thick slices of toasted Veda, the butter melting before your eyes – sure where would you get it.
But it seems that Veda-makers Sunblest are on a mission to put Squinter off his favourite supper. A survey carried out by the company listed the five most popular toppings that consumers like on their favourite malted loaf. No big surprise to learn that cheese and butter are numbers one and two respectively – although Squinter’s a melted butter man, he has been known to have a bit of mature cheddar on his Veda, and very nice it is too.
But what really had Squinter reaching for the barf-bag was the number three topping. It seems that 22 per cent of people who responded said that what they like most on their Veda is chocolate – either in spread form or as melted chocolate bars.
Squinter’s enjoying The Tudors on TV at the moment, and it briefly occurred to him that if Henry the Eighth had been in charge today then people putting chocolate on top of Veda would have found themselves in the Tower before you could say ‘off with their heads!’

Blow into this car, sir

2007-11-02T11:15:00.001Z

In-car breathalysers for drunk-drivers, eh? That’s just one of a number of radical ideas being considered by the British government in a shake-up designed to improve road safety in This Here Pravince. A new range of offences and longer sentences are also part of the new package, which could be in place by next year if the government is minded (thanks, Arlene).
Of course it’s the in-car breathalyser bit that’s grabbed the attention. Squinter professes himself bamboozled by the concept, so he’s been engaged in some in-depth research (Google with a cup of tea and a slice of toasted Veda on Monday night) and has garnered a rough idea of how the system works.
Squinter must come clean here and admit that he’s been done with drunk-driving once. It was a long time ago and the bitter irony is that he was caught after being wrongly stopped for speeding. Squinter was firmly explaining to Trevor that he had been doing under the 40-limit when the missus piped up from the passenger seat: “No use arguing with him when he’s been drinking, officer.” And that, as they say, was that.
So m’learned friends have done their best, but you were convicted. Now you’ve paid your debt to society. Your year’s ban is up and you want to return to being a fully contributing member of society, but seeing as how statistics show that you’re much more likely to drink and drive, you’re only going to be allowed behind the wheel once you’ve negotiated your shiny new in-car breathalyser.
It’s wired to the ignition of your vehicle and the car won’t start unless you blow into it; equally, it won’t start if there’s a trace of booze on your breath. Not only that, the thing is programmed to deliver random tests while the car is moving – if you don’t deliver a breath sample within three minutes of the thing beeping, the car will come to an abrupt halt. Not good if you’re in the fast lane of the motorway, but there you go.
Already Squinter foresees problems. If it’s possible to get the full Sky package for nothing with a cheater box (including pay-per-view boxing from Vegas and medium-core porn at three in the morning) then it’s possible to beat a box screwed to the steering column of your car. If Rupert Murdoch can’t beat the criminal geeks, what chance the government? Already there are electronics graduates in high-tech factories with too much time on their hands drooling with anticipation at the thought of new business.
Not that you have to go the high-tech route. A colleague in the office here suggests you keep an inflated balloon in the car, undo the knot, fix over the tube and let go. Somebody else suggests keeping a small cylinder of pure oxygen in the vehicle.
And who’s going to pay for the machines, anyway? The government? The driver? Just thinking about it all is enough to drive you to drink.

Now top that!

2007-11-01T09:51:00.001Z