Charlie Adley's Double Vision - illustrated by Allan Cavanagh

We Galwegians are divorced from the Galway Arts Festival, but want to love it again!

2009-07-11T12:52:00.002Z

Everyone hates a whinger who comes out with the same knocking copy each year. Yet once again I find myself looking ahead to the Galway Arts Festival with a mixture of excitement, hurt and sadness.
I couldn’t pin down exactly why, until I read in this Noble Rag a few weeks ago an interview with Noeline Kavanagh, the Director of this year’s Macnas Arts Festival Parade.
“Macnas is like the largest divorcee in Galway.” she said. “Everybody has a relationship with it.”
There it was: replace the word ‘Macnas’ with ‘Galway Arts Festival’, and that’s how I feel. We Galwegians used to be married to the Galway Arts Festival. We lived in the same place, loved each other, had our ups and downs of course, but generally knew that we were good together. These days, the people of Galway feel so divorced from the Galway Arts Festival, they can barely remember what it was like to love it.
I want us to renew our vows. I want the Galway Arts Festival to ask us to move back in; to woo us; love us; kiss us and lick us the way it used to.
I’m not sitting here on my voluptuous arse trying to diss that plethora of extremely talented people who put a vast amount of creativity and energy into the two week splurge.
I think they do a fantastic job, but somewhere along the way the whole affair was lost.
I talk to a lot of people, and at the moment the word on the street is that shows are simply too expensive. To be fair, I don’t think that price is the single biggest factor in the decline of the Galway Arts Festival. There are many cheaper happenings in this year’s programme than other years, but through their pricing policy we glimpse how badly the Galway Arts Festival has lost touch with the people of Galway.
I wanted to see the New York Dolls, Femi Kuti and Primal Scream, for which I would pay €112, to stand at all three gigs. But what really made me angry was the fact that if I was on the dole, I’d still have to pay €110 for those three tickets.
For god’s sake, get real, Arts Festival people! Are you trying to intimidate the poor with art? Do you want us once again to believe that art exists only for the affluent élite? Isn’t that the opposite of what the Galway Arts Festival once stood for?
Climb out of your ivory towers and take a look at how many of us have been laid off, or are just plain broke. Cop on to the fact that a night out which starts with a pair of tickets at €90 belongs to a dream of a Galway past, and exists now as an insulting anachronism.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the Tiger is dead, and we’re trying to stay alive by picking mouthfuls from its rotten corpse.
We all have our personal beefs about what is wrong with the Galway Arts Festival.
Project 06 splendidly reminded us how vital it is to include local artists and performers, yet each year, the official word comes forth that the Arts Festival have pulled off another major success.
Trouble is, for years now, it hasn’t felt like a success to us, the people of this city. Let’s learn from the dazzling success of the Volvo Ocean Race. If the organisers of the Galway Arts Festival understand anything of Galway City at all, they know that you could take a burnt banana skin, mount it on top of a bus shelter, and advertise ‘The ‘Burnt Banana Skin On Top Of The Bus Shelter Festival - the biggest thing to hit Galway since last Tuesday Afternoon!’, and as long as the people of this great city were behind it, hundreds of thousands of people would flock to Galway, because we’re the finest hosts in the best city in the world to throw a party, where fun is free and family-oriented.
Don’t tell me a over a half a million people came to our little city to see a sail puff in the wind. They came because Galway is uniquely packed with brilliant, skilful and diverse talents. We’ll give you the time of your lives, as we do every year during Race Week, but the joy of Galway is on the streets.
Doubtless during the Galway Arts Festival, our city centre will be strewn with buskers and performers of all kinds, which is just as well, because this year’s Galway Arts Festival programme lists a paltry 2 street acts, performing in total 5 times on 3 different days.
Shame on you, Galway Arts Festival.
If this marriage is ever going to work again, you really need to listen, learn and understand that whereas 15 years ago we were all buzzed up and proud of you, now you appear like a distant lost relative who expects us to run around, cook, clean, sweat and serve whenever you turn up on our doorstep.
As for the 10.00pm start time of the Macnas Parade, I say again, shame on you!
Parents simply won’t want to expose small children to crushed hordes of drunken midnight revellers. I’m sorry, Noeline, because I understand what you are trying to achieve with your segmented parade that tells a story, but who is entertaining who here?
You don’t see the purpose in “walking along with a rail of images that snake through the streets”?
Well, let me enlighten you. The purpose of the Macnas Parade is to say ‘Thanks!’ to the people of Galway with a dazzlingly fun and colourful event that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. If you are with Daddy at Spanish Arch and Mammy is in Shop Street with Granny, you’ll all see the same parade and later share your thrills and joys: it’s what they call a ‘communal event’.
Do I have any positive suggestions? Why yes! In order to save this sick marriage between the Galway Arts Festival and the people of Galway City, first quadruple the free street theatre; return the Parade to the afternoon; and offer a hefty price concessions on all tickets sold to locals, upon production of a locally-addressed utility bill.
Then we might learn to love you again, and put the best of Galway - the fun, family and free - back into our own Arts Festival.

Oh yes, you know when you’ve been Galwayed!

2009-07-06T08:11:00.003Z

I’ve been Galwayed. Galwayed good and proper, that’s what I am right now. I had a double, a double Galway: that’s city and county.
If I’d mixed the county after the city, I might not be feeling so bewildered and crap.
But I didn’t.
So I do.
My head is crushed, my thoughts spinning in negative spirals that I know well to leave alone. This is not about a hangover. Being Galwayed is a combination of sleep deprivation, over-consumption, over-stimulation of sensory experience and a glut of social auld bollox that seems substantial at the time, yet dies into ephemera with the first snore of the semi-comatose night.
Coming or going are concepts you abandon when being truly Galwayed.
As I write this I know that it’s Monday, but it could be Saturday, Flipday or tomorrow.
I’m going to pin the guilt for the whole sad and wonderful day on the sun, which rises so early and sets so late over Galway at this time of year, you wake up three hours before you’ve gone to sleep.
So yesterday, Sunday morning, at 5am, I open my eyes, go for the middle-aged peeper, and realise to my horror that I am quite awake.
I also notice that herself the Snapper is not yet home. A text tells the tale of a well-earned glass or two after a hard night’s work which led to a party, and who could blame her?
I go back to bed but I’m half thinking about herself getting home safely, and half thinking about how that’ll be fine, and half thinking about the blue sky and sunshine and how you can’t have three halves.
So I get up at silly o’clock on a Sunday, and walk the causeway to Mutton Island under blue skies before the shops are open, wondering how to fill my day off. Even when you work for yourself, you have to have days off, where sloth is no crime.
But today is a day for action. Firing up Shaaanny car, I do what I do most naturally, and head west, excited at the prospect of the very early very empty road to Clifden.
Connemara looks jaw-droppingly beautiful as piercing summer sunshine is hidden and released by towering tumultuous storm clouds. The Maamturk Mountains themselves appear to move, as vast black shadows travel at speed across them.
Speeding along but less stunning, your scribbler arrives in Clifden at 10:15, and takes a most excellent breakfast in the Off The Square Restaurant. Great service, fab food, followed by a stroll down to the bridge on the Ballyconneely road, to watch the river cascade a while and build a thirst.
All the serious pubs are shut.
Himself the Goat is not responding to texts, and why would he?
What am I doing in Clifden so bloomin’ early on a Sunday?
Well, now what?
Back in Shaaanny, to drive at a more leisurely pace back to Galway. I pick up a hitcher in Oughterrard. We chat and laugh and then I’m back, aimless and hyper in Rahoon (never a good combination). I call round to Angel, but he’s not about, and Soldier Boy has been out since yesterday fortnight, so I’ll leave him be.
I go home and see the curtains upstairs still drawn. I sit and try to read the Sunday papers but no, not for me, not today. Something is eating me up, so I drive into town not knowing if I really even want to go into town.
Instead of parking in the Claddagh, I drive down Henry Street and for some reason decide to pointlessly pootle in circles around the town centre.
Sitting alone outside Neachtain's, watching Sunday strangers throng with cameras, up pops the Artist Formerly Known As Snarly. Off to the Quays, where we talk of religion, fly fishing and zombies in dreams.
Then I wander up to God knows where looking for the Devil knows who, and stumble into Dalooney outside Tigh Coilis, who persuades me to have a pint. Half of me is still in Connemara, half of me still on the road, half of me in bed asleep and the other half suddenly holding a pint that somehow makes sense in a world with too many damnable halves in it.
But I’m driving and have to call it a day, so I walk over the bridge and bump into The Waistcoat, who thrusts a can of Apples into my hand, and feeling bad and reckless and boring and mediocre I sit and chat as we reminisce of 80’s London and great travels and watch the river flow past.
Then, knowing that this is one of only 3 occasions in my long life when I have driven whilst possibly over the limit, I drop the car back to Salthill.
The bedroom curtains are still closed, so I go into the house, have a blissful peeper, and head off, again, into the city, feeling like Martin Sheen going into the jungle in ‘Apocalypse Now’.
Deadly black clouds are hanging huge and low. Me no walky, no be soaky.
Get a bus? But no, there’ll be an age to wait but look at that cloud and ennyhoodyhoo, why are you going in when you haven’t any money you fool and look -yahoo! -there’s a bus!
‘Tis meant to be. ‘Tis written.
Amen.
Quay Street again, where first I gorge myself on piping hot salty vinegary potatoey heavenly chips from McDonaghs, and then head towards the motley crew of eccentrics, musicians and gobshites (myself included) hanging outside Tigh Coilis. Dalooney and the Waistcoat show great generosity with the drink, and I know I’m being Galwayed, but I don’t care, because at that moment you care about neither future happiness nor past pain.
The Snapper texts to say she is coming into town to pick up her car, left in town the night before, and would I like a lift home?
Finding myself incapable of texting properly, I realise that thanks to the beauty of Connemara and the kindness of friends, I have managed to make it through this strange day. Hallelujah! Now I must indeed go home.
Later, despite being wrapped entirely in the synthetic warmth of the Chelsea blanket, herself trembles and shivers on the sofa, while I sit mouth agape, dribbling staring unblinking at a procession of godawful Sunday evening white chocolate TV dramas.
We know.
Oh yes. We know we’ve been Galwayed.

If UPC Support is a lottery, I’ve so many numbers I’ll be a winner soon!

2009-06-30T12:00:00.004Z

Dear B from UPC/NTL/Chorus,
Thanks so much for all the calls. You called twice on Tuesday, leaving a message on my mobile and my landline, and twice again on Thursday. You might have wondered why you bothered. Did I really gave a damn?
By way of explanation, let’s pretend our screens are going all wavy and wobbly as we drift in time, all the way back to February, when the Snapper found she couldn’t access her Eircom email.
Eircom advised that the problem lay with our Internet Service Provider, which is you NTL/Chorus/UPC guys.
She asked me to help. I couldn’t face phoning your technical support, because I didn’t want to spend hours sorting the problem. I just wanted a simple explanation; either a ‘Do this!’ or ‘Forget it and start again!’ type of response, so on April 27th I sent an email to NTL Broadband Support, asking what a ‘parsing error’ meant to the average bloke? Why was it blocking the wife’s email and what could I do about it?
Instantly I received your automated response:
‘Your query has been given a unique tracking number for your reference - 452724. Our aim is to contact you within 2 working days.’
Kind regards,
Customer Support Team Chorus NTL
On May 8th, just as I was about to give up on your support, one of your colleagues sent an email:
Ref: 452724
Dear Mr Adley
Thank you for your email, my sincere apologies for the delay in getting back to you. If possible, can you please provide your account number so I can escalate your details to our Technical Support Desk?
If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us on our freephone number 1908 or email us on customer.support@upc.ie
Kind regards,
S
“Escalate?”
I didn’t want my details escalated, but naturally I sent off the information she requested, and immediately got yet another automated response: Your query has been given a unique tracking number for your reference - 461272. Our aim is to contact you within 2 working days.
Now I'm getting slightly confused, because I’d been given two unique tracking numbers for one problem. And having actually made contact (albeit by email) with a real human being (herself ‘S’) was my query now back out wandering, lonely and helpless in the NTL Support wilderness?
But no. S came through, thanked me for the details and referenced Ref: 461272, which was the latest most recent number.
Aha! So that’s how it works! The unique tracking number is killed off by the next unique tracking number.
Sometimes it’s terrible having testicles. You’re forced to try and understand everything, even the most boring trifling detail which ovary-bearers quite correctly might dismiss as surplus to requirements.
S said she had “passed your query to our Broadband Support Team for investigation and a member of their team will be in contact with you shortly. Thank you for your valued custom.”
Thanks S, I think, but - and call me stupid here if you must - I’d dared to think that I was already dealing with the Broadband Support Team, because all my emails had been addressed to broadbandsupport@upc.ie.
Silly me.
Anyway, that was May 8th, and then I head nothing. Nada. Zilch and diddly squat. I started to come over all agitato jubilato. This was no longer about the Snapper’s email account, which doubtless had by now been deactivated through lack of use.
Now it had become personal. We’ve paid a tidy amount to Chorus/NTL/UPC over the years, and this is the first time we’ve ever asked for help, yet after 2 months all we’ve been given is a rake of reference numbers and emails telling us how much they value our custom and we’ll hear from them in two days.
When I decide to write about a person or a corporation, I feel it only fair to let them know, especially if it’s part of an existing problem, so on June 3rd, I sent off an email referencing all my reference numbers, saying how I was intending to write about this process, and in the meantime, what was going on with my query?
Obviously, the first thing I got was another pesky automated response, assigning me another bloomin’ unique tracking number
“Our aim is to contact you within 2 working days.”
Which unique tracking number was I now? 452724? 480639? 461272?
The following Saturday morning, my mobile phone rings, and it’s you, B from UPC, and you’re very upset about all my troubles. You are delightful, telling me you don’t really understand computers yourself, but if we set up a time to call, you could patch me though to the technical support team, without me having to wait.
‘Splendid! Fantastic! Are you really calling me on a Saturday? Wow! Lets make it Monday at 11:00. Is that okay? Great, Monday it is then.’
Within minutes I receive your email, B, confirming our arrangement that you will call me on Monday at 11. I send you one back to thank you and yes, get another automated response and another unique tracking number.
If UPC Support is a lottery, I’ve got so many numbers in it, I must be a winner soon!
On Monday I rush around before 11 o’clock, at which time I am to be found sitting at my computer, mobile phone charged and ready to take your call. I sit and wait. And wait and wait and wait, but no call comes.
My heart sinks. I wanted to sort my wife’s email, and then, very importantly, I wanted to ask you, B, why our newly-installed NTL/UPC/Chorus Digital TV box keeps turning itself off, for hours on end? I wanted to ask you why it came fitted with a two-pin plug? Do we live in Greece? Is it even legal to sell a two-pin plug on appliances this country? More to the point, with the inbuilt protector on modern 3-pin sockets, extracting two-pin plugs is tricky at best, but we have to keep doing it to reboot the bloomin’ Digi-tv-box. It feels unsafe.
But B, you didn’t call.
Well, you did, on Tuesday and Thursday, when I was out and busy. Now I lack the energy to deal with NTL/UPC/Chorus anymore. What a shame. All their kind regards, and reference numbers made me feel unique for two nano seconds.

"Are you eating your own hand, Charlie?" "No shanks, I'm fine!"

2009-06-22T15:48:00.003Z

The Irish habit of leaving Ireland when times get tough appears strange to this Englishman. Maybe the English stay in England because they love a grumble, while their Irish counterparts mutter only:
“Sure, I’d complain, but what’d be the point?”
Maybe it’s because the Irish are broadly welcomed anywhere in the world, while the English have to overcome post-colonial loathing in so many countries.
Then there’s the two things that Paddy loves best: the leaving of Ireland and the coming back to Ireland. Personally, apart from a couple of weeks’ hols abroad, I hate leaving ireland, but Galway City is another matter.
With Galway I suffer a similar paradoxical conundrum to Paddy’s. I have left it and returned to it three times, each stay being an absolute pleasure, until it becomes unbearable.
Now, as another Summer of festivals approaches, my mind wanders back to the Spring of 1994, the first time I left Galway City.
Truly, it was one of the happiest days of my life.
Two years before I had left England, and arrived at Galway after a few months spent wandering, wondering whether I might live in either Granada, Barcelona, Roscoff, Cork and Kinsale.
Sharing in a tiny house in Salthill, I had partied like a mad thing for two years, but not as madly as the 24-hour party people living next door. My nerves were shot to shit, my liver was the size of Cyprus, and I yearned for privacy and peace. Each weekend I’d hitch out to Connemara, and recharge my soul, gradually realising that what I really wanted was to live out there, alone.
Some things are just meant to be. Through a bizarre twist of fate I called a certain Pat from Ballyconneely on the phone about a house I’d heard he was renting and got through to a completely different Pat from Ballyconneely, who purely coincidentally just happened to have a house to rent, but hadn’t even advertised it yet.
Off the main road, by a lake, with nearby beaches on three sides. the tiny housesheen was perfect, and as I loaded my life’s belongings into my transit van, I was aware that this was indeed a seminal moment in my life: the end of a very long road which ran from the leaving of London 5 years previously, downsizing to Bradford, Galway and finally to the townland of Bunowen.
The sun shone as I drove out of the city, the silhouettes of my broom handle, upturned chairs and boxes of books appearing in my rear view mirror. I’d never had a house to myself before, and was amazed how easy it was to move my stuff into it. There were no parking problems; plenty of space, and unlike flats in the cities of my past, no flights of steps to struggle up and down up and down, with all my stuff.
Within an hour it was all in the house, and I was off to the pub to celebrate.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of grass being ripped from the ground by cows outside my bedroom window. I was in a state of bliss. After walking to the beach I started to prepare my first proper meal in my first solitary house. In honour of the occasion I was treating myself to a lamb shank, with roast spuds and crunchy green things.
As I took the meat out of the oven my stomach growled with hunger as my heart swelled with pride.
I was plain full of myself, so happy I could burst. I had done so well, to get away from all the madness of it all, to be alone at last, wanting nothing from nobody, anywhere, ever.
The sun shone in the blue sky. A hare sat on the gravel outside my house. A soft breeze whispered a scented zephyr through my open windows and the carving knife slid slowly but surely through the tender lamb, out the other side and right through my hand, at the base of my thumb and finger.
Instantly I knew it was a deep cut, and my body settled straight into shock.
Fuck fuck fucketty fuck. Not now please please not now. No no no.
Being a most basic beast, my main concern was for my dinner. All I had wanted was to sit and eat a fine meal in my fine house and feel fine.
My roast lamb was pink, but I was looking increasingly crimson. Having washed the wound and caught sight of something white that hopefully wasn’t bone, I considered asking for help.
Clearly I needed to go up to the farmhouse and ask them to take me to a hospital for stitches.
And then again, maybe if I did, I’d look like an idiot incapable of lasting 24 hours on his own without managing to dismember himself.
No. Nobody needed to know.
Screw it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Instead of being sensible, I wrapped my gaping bloodied wound in acres of toilet paper, and holding it high above my head in an effort to staunch the bleeding, I stubbornly proceeded to try to eat my dinner.
Clearly a knife and fork were out of the question, but who cared? I was all alone in the middle of nowhere, and still had four good fingers and one opposable thumb.
The veggies and spuds went down in three or four hand scoops, and as I lifted the shank to my mouth and started ripping into it like a cross between Fred Flintstone and Henry VIII, my young landlord just happened to put his head round the door to make sure his new tenant was settling in alright.
In place of the calm clean Englishman he had welcomed 24 hours previously, he was greeted by the site of an insane gravy-smeared carnivore, holding a blood-soaked arm high above his head, muttering through a lamby mouthful:
“Yesh yesh hime fine, danksh Pat! Good ash gold, shanks!”
Afterwards I wondered if he thought I had chopped off one hand to eat it with the other. Poor guy probably still has nightmares about that. Sorry Pat!
Having once again learned that pride comes before a fall, I proceeded to live a splendid life in that house.
But every two weeks I made an excited dash to Galway City, to see my mates, make sure I still had the power of speech and could behave like a human being in public.

Deface yourself and become a bamboo!

2009-06-15T09:26:00.003Z

It started with a simple email from my old friend, the Guru:
‘Hi, just to let you know I'm closing my Facebook account. If you want to contact me my email is ...
I wanted to do it too, but my vanity said I should wait a while, otherwise I’d look like a prat incapable of original action. But then I got another email from somebody on Facebook, a friend of a friend of a friend who wanted to add my birthday to their Facebook Birthday Calendar and I thought no. Nuhuh. That’s it.
I don’t know their birthday because I hardly know them at all. The people who already know my birthday are the ones who matter to me.
Of course I could have just ignored it, but that wouldn’t stop more people coming along who wanted to send me a badge, ask me to choose my favourite food colours, or demand I eat my own toejam for a laugh.
Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand why Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, bebo, Second Life and all the other social networking and Web 2.0 sites are such a success. Were I a decade younger or simply a slightly less grumpy person, I’d be out there with the rest of you, sharing my whims, fancies and online farts.
But the only reason I signed up for Facebook in the first place was to be polite; to respond to requests and generally feel a part of what’s going on.
Trouble was, I didn’t belong. I never wanted to play Top 10 Popes of the 1970s, or nudge or poke anyone in any way. The whole thing became depressing, as I saw what my Facebook friends were up to. Increasingly I felt like a slightly pervy voyeur, wondering if so-and-so wasn’t maybe feeling lonely, what with all the time he was spending playing inane Facebook games.
Oh look, that ‘friend’ is going away for the weekend, this one is drinking a cocktail and that one is having a cup of coffee.
A cup of coffee? Why would anyone feel the need to share the fact that they are having a cup of bleedin’ coffee?
Go on my son. Just tick the button, and yippee, my account is deactivated!
Well no, apparently it isn’t over yet.
A page appears with photos of some of my Facebook friends, captioned by ridiculous assumptions:
‘Deirdre will miss your messages. Herbert wants you to play ‘Lick my Lapel’ games with him. Jerry will miss seeing your face on your profile. Maeve was going to tell you she loves you but has decided not to now that you want to leave Facebook.’
What a nasty attempt at emotional blackmail, just to try and make me return to Facebook.
Now, what’s this?
Yet another page, demanding I click a box in a list of possible reasons why I’ve decided to deactivate my Facebook account. None of them come close to reflecting how I feel, so I just click ‘Other’.
Up comes the dreaded internet red print, telling me that having ticked ‘Other’ I’m compelled to explain further in the text box below. Failure to do so will result in the cancelling of my account deactivation, bad breath, plague, leg falling off, that kind of thing.
Barely managing to restrain the darker side of my vocabulary, I type ‘Precisely because of this attitude.’ in the text box, and hit return.
Tick this box if you don’t want any more emails from Facebook.
I tick it, feeling liberated for a second. At last, my account has been deactivated.
I check my email. There’s a new email from Facebook, saying should I ever want to return to Facebook, all I need to do is log in as normal and my page and details will still be there, just as I left them.
So what in God’s good name was all that deactivation shite about, if it’s all still there? And, despite the fact that I specifically asked for no Facebook emails, they immediately sent me an email.
The whole process was truly nasty, and I am delighted to be freed of Facebook.
It seems I am not alone. Many others were inspired by the Guru’s leap of faith, and have since defaced themselves, as I call it.
Do I miss it? Do I hell? There’s a physical life out there, with extraordinary people doing fantastic things.
Galway City is crammed with them, and sure enough, just the other day I met a particularly amazing human being.
Joël Francois was raised by nuns in a Belgian orphanage, and introduced to Martial Arts at the age of 6. Recently he passed his Yondan, a 4th Black Belt grading of Traditional Japanese Ju-jutsu. For anybody this would be an astonishing achievement, but to achieve that level by the age of 39 is astonishing.
Yet the quietly charismatic man refuses to talk about his achievements, instead enthusing about the Martial Arts Festival he is organising in Galway City.
“It is absolutely incredible the people we have at the Galway City School of Judo. Sergei Alexandrov is Black Belt in Judo and Sambo. Ronan Kane is Nidan, 2nd Black Belt in Aikido. Raul Sannueza is 6th Black Belt in Muay Kensan, a Chilean Martial Art. Chris Hickey, the owner of the school, is Yondan, 4th Black Belt in Judo, while current European Champion and ex-World Champion Shane Fitzgibbon is 5th Black Belt in Taekwondo, while his wife Lisa Connolly is 3rd Black Belt as well.”
All of the above will be demonstrating alongside Joël at the Galway City School of Judo, on Saturday 13th June, between 2-6. There will be finger food, tea and coffee, and a chance to talk and ask questions of these world class experts.
“Our code of honour in Ju-jutsu is: Integrity, respect, discipline, peace, love with balance. We must be like a cane of bamboo. When times are hard and the wind blows, we must be flexible and bend, so that when times are good we can be strong and upright.”
So unplug yourself from the recession, the internet or whatever might be getting you or your kids down, and head on down to the show Deface yourself, and make like a bamboo. You just might rebuild your body and free your mind.
Try doing that on Facebook!
So Contact: Galway City School of Judo
Unit 27 Oldenway Business Park
Ballybrit, Galway, Co. Galway, Ireland
086 251 0909
www.gcsjudo.comocial networking

“I can see Galway now, the race has gone, all of those pretty flowers will disappear...."

2009-06-08T09:51:00.003Z

“And nowwwww the end is neeeeear, the race yachts faaace the final keel turn.....”
No, that’s not it. Too punny and painful.
How about
“I can see Galway now, the race has gone,
All of those pretty flowers will disappear.
There’ll dog poo again upon the Prom,
Gonna be a dry wet grey Galway-ay day...”:
I love Galway and I love living in Galway, but thanks to those who run the place, I feel a bit like a student living in a hovel with the parents coming round for Sunday dinner.
Cripes, we’d better clean this bloomin’ mess. Quick, shove some plants into the roundabouts! Throw a lick o’paint over that wall! After the race, sure, we can flog the flowers and yeh, I know that paint won’t last and that old mouldy damp will soon show through, but sure feckit, it’s called whitewash for a reason.
I’m house proud, but there’s no point in my home only looking good when I’ve got poshies over for tea. I want it to look its best all the time, ‘cos I live there. Yet somehow, in their efforts to spruce up the city with hanging baskets, arty murals and the annual ceremonial relaying of the cobbles on Quay Street, those who seek to make Galway look great manage to make us Galwegians feel generally a bit crap.
If they can make it look fab and clean and fun for 2 weeks, why can’t they make it look at least half as good for the other 50?
Don’t Galwegians deserve that? As they say where I come from: ‘What are we? Chopped liver?’
Mind you, 5 million wooden planters aside, we won’t be able to see our city until all those photographic facial avenues of power-seeking underachievers are taken down.
Some of the nicest people I know are politicians.
Well one of them is.
Poopers, I was trying to say something touchy-feely about our elected representatives, but I just couldn’t, because essentially they all seek power, and beyond Coco Pops and cluster bombs, I can think of no more abhorrent product.
I am very grateful for my right to vote, but what purpose does it serve if there is no reason to use it?
The MP’s expenses scandal in England has shown once again that corruption knows no political boundaries. Left and Right were all at it, while here all the political parties habitually fail to convince us that they truly give a damn.
If only we had the right to vote for None Of The Above, as they do in Ukraine, Spain, France and Colombia. Then we could really show those pompous politicos exactly what we think of them.
Imagine: the Irish vote in a massive majority for None Of The Above, and force all the political parties to go back to their think tanks and drawing boards and country estates and tax-free havens and come up with a better idea or five, because all of a sudden they’re facing a worthy and powerful opponent: active democratic dissent.
“How dare you!”, they will cry. “How dare you make us work so hard to come up with new ideas? Why should we have to do this all over again?”
To which we, the downtrodden masses with blissful grins on our collective faces will reply,
“Oh poor diddums. Did ickle wickle wannabe leaders forget how you told us that you didn’t like our vote on the Nice Treaty? Didn’t you tell us to go back home and have a good think and come back and vote the way you wanted us to vote in the first place? Didn’t we know you were never going to give up until we employed our democratic liberties to do exactly what you instructed? And aren't you about to ignore the way we voted for the Lisbon Treaty and ask us to go back home and have a good think and come back and this time bloody well behave ourselves and vote the way we were told the first time?
So with this majority for None Of The Above we have a mandate to send you home and come up with some morally sound compassionate policies that won’t force us to choose between a geriatric’s hospital bed or a mile of motorway.
And while we’re on the the subjects of motorways, which we weren’t at all, I have a proposition to make.
There’s a roundabout just beyond the Dublin Road/Oranmore roundabout, on the way to Clarinbridge.
It’s a small perfectly formed roundabout, yet it lacks a certain something. Built at the tipping point of the boom, it was meant to offer an entrance to an estate that will now most likely never be built.
It is a dead roundabout. It is not sleeping, nor pining for the fjords. This roundabout is going nowhere and it desperately needs a function in life, beyond just slowing down the traffic a bit and confusing tourists.
Out in Recess, on the Galway/Clifden Road, a monument declares that ‘On this site nothing happened’.
Well hell, we can beat that.
This colyoom suggests that we formally name our pointless roundabout the ‘Dead Tiger Roundabout’, and pile high upon it twisted ‘00’ car number plates and smashed-up Estate Agents ‘Sold!’ signs.
It will serve as a national monument to greed, lucre and hubris, until a far-distant future when the High Kings return and proceed to build giant grassy burial tombs on all the major roundabouts in the country, despite outcry from radical extremist civil engineers who will camp out, sit in and beat protest rhythms in clipboard circles through the night, and fight against what they see as the abominable and hateful greening of Ireland, and the mindless destruction of its ancient motorway network.
Galway is meant to be Ireland's capital of Arts and Culture, with capital As and Cs, so let’s get down with our interactive circular installation. Let’s turn our impotent roundabout into a living breathing (it’s got grass, ain’t it?) meaningful sculpture.
Eat your shark’s heart out, Damien. Suck our sheets, Tracey baby.
Interactive? I should coco. You can drive around it, can’t you?
What use is a roundabout that goes nowhere? As much use as a vote for someone you don’t want to win. Fight for the right to elect None Of The Above. As the Anarchists say: “Whoever you vote for, the government gets in.”

It’s my party and I wouldn’t cry if I was able to get to it!

2009-06-01T06:59:00.002Z

By the time you read this I’ll have been 49 years old for two weeks, and as I write this now, I’m not feeling too excited about my birthday tomorrow.
Most people are thrilled about becoming 21, and find deep and meaningful significance in turning 40. Neither really meant anything to me.
My 21st birthday party was a hoot for a lot of people, but for me it was a bit of a nightmare. We all went up to the West End, where I had booked a table to see the great Horace Silver play at Ronnie Scott’s.
In my pretentious youthful mind, I envisaged us sitting around drinking in a darkly-lit smoke-filled pit, but as it turned out, the famous jazz club was lit loud, while the silence imposed on the audience was oppressive.
We were a young and giggly bunch, secretively pouring vodka from hidden hip flasks into our orange juices. None of us had imagined that we’d have to sit back and say nothing at all. What about all those jazz clubs in the movies where the Mafiosi meet to make deals while strange men send Martinis to women at distant tables?
Ronnie Scott’s was not an informal swinging joint, and as the voddies tickled our fragile laddish brains, we started to chuckle a bit to each other.
After all, this was a party, wasn’t it?
I was right in the middle of telling a funny story to my friend Jon when the music suddenly stopped, mid-song. I turned around to find Horace Silver himself staring at me, his head cocked to one side.
“Some of the folk here have come to listen to the music. I say why not let them?”
As I sank lower and lower into my chair, a round of applause rippled around the room. Part of me was cringeingly embarrassed, the other pretty pissed off with having been made to look like a right royal prick on my big night out.
As soon as the band finished their set, I dashed off to the loo, but when I came out there was no sign of my mates.
I checked the ladies loo and then stood outside the club, waiting for some or all of them to turn up, but no, the low basstids had scarpered, gone without me.
Even more annoying was the fact that I knew precisely where they had gone, and how they had got there. Back in those days I had an account with a minicab firm, and had ordered three cars to meet us outside the club to whisk us off to my sister’s house, where I was staying while she and her family were away on holiday.
On paper it had looked like a great night: cool jazz followed by a hot party in an empty luxury house.
Trouble was, the gig had been a nightmare and I wasn’t at the party.
I called the minicab firm, but by now it was peak time on a Saturday night and they had no spare cars. Eventually I resorted to spending a week’s wages on taking a black cab all the way to the outer suburbs, where I finally found the drunken dribbling detritus of my own 21st birthday party.
Naturally, my friends all thought it absolutely hilarious that I’d missed my own party, and the fact that I’d been told off by a famous Jazz musician was the icing on the birthday cake none of them had thought to buy.
So my 21st birthday didn’t ring my bell, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t important; just numbers, and what difference could a bunch of numbers make to me?
Maybe I’d feel different at 30, but no, that landmark came and went without so much as a mental twitch or whiff of mortality.
But then, out of the blue, 35 hit me really hard. I just couldn’t work it out at all, but for some reason I suddenly felt my age, didn’t like it, and had to come up pronto with some kind of explanation to calm myself.
Eventually I decided that maybe the reason I felt so dreadful about being 35 was because my Dad was always going on about the ‘three score years and ten’ we are allocated in the Bible. 35 being half of 70, I accepted that there might be some sad corner of my subconscious that felt I’d passed the half way line and was now headed down the inexorable slope towards death.
40 came and went without a whimper, but then, blow me down with a feather if 46 didn’t come along and knock me sideways. Why was it that such a seemingly arbitrary age made me feel so very low and miserable?
Why couldn’t I just conform and attach significance to the same big birthdays as everybody else?
And then, of course! I realised that the reason 46 hit me like a blow over the back of the head was because I was all of a sudden nearer 50 than 40, and evidently didn’t like that feeling one bit.
So now a few mere hours from being only one year from 50, with old school friends celebrating their half-centuries all over the place, I face the new frontier.
I know that 90 is the new 80 and that there are nutters climbing Everest at 75. I know that and 50 is the new 12, and that what with advances in medical science and the application of horse chestnut bark cream and octopus rennet mud and sand flea blood compound you can feel as right as rain and twice as fruity, even deep into your dotage.
I know, but I don’t care. I’m getting older and accept that. I have no choice. The other day I spotted some of those ‘old people’ freckles on the skin on the back of my hand.
So I take comfort from the words of the late great Jim Morrison, a man who embraced an early death and certainly lived life to the full. Addressing his own mortality, he offered the following comforting prayer:
“I tell you this. I tell you this. I’m gonna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes down in flames.”
Amen to that, and a Happy Birthday to me.
Well, if I make it to tomorrow, that is!

Sure, the Volvo boats are stunning, but Galway has the finest boats of all!

2009-05-25T09:44:00.002Z

You know how it is when you hear yourself saying the same thing, over and over again, year in year out? Unless you’re an arrogant fool, after a while you find yourself wondering if maybe you were wrong all the time.
So can there be a better outcome than to be proven right, just when the self-doubt was starting to niggle?
Ever since I arrived in Ireland back in 1992 I have been shocked, saddened and confused by the bizarre Irish mentality that so often looks abroad for help.
Fresh off the boat from France, I walked the streets of Cork City looking for a job, but found myself continually discouraged by the locals.
“It’s all been shite since Ford and Dunlop left.” they told me.
“But that was ages ago, wasn’t it?”
By the time I arrived in Galway, Digital ruled the jobs roost, and not a bad word was ever said about them. Sure, didn’t they help out families with their mortgages, and didn’t they sponsor the Galway Plate?
Yes, and didn’t they then bugger off exactly when it suited them, just like all the other American and multinational companies? Didn’t they lay off all their workers in the name of economic efficiency, and who could blame them? Just like Boston Scientific and MedTronic, they are corporate creatures, whose only concern is profit.
And that profit is cashed in abroad: somewhere else, not in Ireland.
Yet here in Ireland I met every day resourceful Irish people, fired with passion, imagination and well up for hard graft.
Everyone had a scheme or a dream; a business that’d make them rich; a product that’d sell by the millions, but tragically these ideas drifted into empty pint glasses, unrealised and unsupported by successive governments, who thought it more important to pump Irish taxpayers money into offering tax breaks to foreign companies, on the off chance that they might stop over for a while and pump some short-term money into the economy.
Just like the Volvo race, you might say.
As my love of the Irish grew, it hurt more and more to see their talents, ingenuity and energy squandered. Gripped by some kind of post-colonial inferiority complex, (apologies to Martino and any others who object to the term ‘post-colonial’ in this 26 county republic, but down here in the real world...) it seemed that having finally gained independence, the Irish didn’t trust themselves to deal with it. They quickly found warmth and security clinging to the belly of the European Union beast, while they suckled on the teats of American and global industries.
Now the milk’s run dry, and a fake boom built on greed, foreign investment and EU Structural Adjustment funds has plunged us into potential ruin. But fear not, fair readers, because I was right all along. The Irish are indeed magnificent, and all that passion and all those skills are still available.
Yes, we’ve got the Volvo yachts coming in this weekend, and I am genuinely excited to see them. But I’m much more excited about seeing the ‘Badoiri an Claddaig Gleoiteog’ coming upstream into Claddagh Quay on her maiden voyage this Sunday, May 24th, at 5:00 pm.
Purchased in a poor state of repair last year by the Claddagh Community Boat Club, the Gleoiteog is truly the physical embodiment of all those exceptional Irish qualities listed above.
From the great works of Club President and King of Claddagh Michael Lynskey, through Chairman Michael Coyne, Vice Chairman Martin Joyce, Secretary Peter Connelly and Treasurer James Croker, all 35 members are local boatmen who burn with desire and ambition to revive and sail the great Galway Hookers. They want to teach young people how to restore the boats, how to sail them and on the way, instil within Irish youth the importance of their own history, and its relevance in the modern world. Alongside the inestimable collective experience of these Claddagh seafarers, the club were lucky to have on board a member who has an in-depth knowledge of timber work in boats.
But of course such a massive restoration project needed a lot of financial support, so the members of the club recently turned to the people of Galway for help.
You might be forgiven for thinking that in such desperate economic times, a few lads knocking on the doors of hard-up businesses looking for sponsorship of an auld boat might have had a rough ride, but oh, you’d be so wrong.
As Peter Connelly explained to me, everyone from local businesses to City Hall jumped at the chance to invest in the project.
“We had 100% great reaction, passionate and unquestioning. This project has shown and will show the city that the talent is still there. All these people involved with their own businesses know how look after the pennies, so we never wasted a cent. Everything we used was carefully sourced and priced. It’s a community project, through and through, and when they gave us money we respected them for the trust they gave us, to take this boat upstream.”
Alongside the bucket collections, barbecues and small business sponsorship, the Gleoiteog project has been helped and supported by the Galway City Partnership, as well as City Engineer Kevin Swift, Heritage Officer Jim Higgins, and Catherine Connolly, who helped to co-ordinate meetings.
From the tip of her keel to the top of her mast, ‘Badoiri an Claddaig Gleoiteog’ is a symbol of how great the Irish can be, if they are simply asked to invest in themselves and be proud of their skills, vision and heritage.
Now more than ever the time has come for the Irish to start appreciating each other, and to work as a team, like these heroes of the Claddagh Community Boat CLub.
The magnificent Galway Hookers crossed the Atlantic centuries before anyone had ever heard of a Volvo.
Yes, it’s great to see the fastest and most modern boats in the world in our harbour for the next two weeks. But the greatest boats of all have been there all the time, and I’ll be on Claddagh Quay on Sunday to cheer my heart out as the pristine and perfectly restored ‘Badoiri an Claddaig Gleoiteog’ sails up the Corrib.

The club has been asked by the Galway City Heritage Department to restore another Gleoiteog. For information on how to become a sponsor, please call Michael Coyne: 086 383 9150; email: claddaghboatmen@gmail.com.

If you can’t afford to tip properly, you can’t afford to eat out!

2009-05-18T16:24:00.001Z

“Bloomin’ eck, is it just me, or are these desserts taking a long time? I mean, the mains came really quickly, but we’ve been waiting ages for dessert. It’s been yonks!”
The Snapper looks over at me. She can see that I’m agitated, and knows well enough how impatient I can be when hungry, but for once it’s not hunger that’s driving my mood.
When money is harder to come by, life’s little luxuries grow in importance. Recent figures from the retail and service industries show that people are now shopping frugally in the supermarket so that they can still enjoy the occasional luxury.
Hey, I’m nothing if not a man of the people, so we are sitting in this pub in Barna, waiting for our desserts, and because it’s now a rare treat to eat out, I want it all to go swimmingly; to feel a bit special for an hour or so.
I start grumping silently to myself.
Wasn’t too much to ask, was it? Must’ve been twenty minutes now, and this wait is spoiling a lovely evening out.
Mind you, herself appears unperturbed. Maybe it’s time to light the fires of indignation within her belly.
“I mean, how long does it take to scoop a bit of bloody ice cream?”
“But Charlie, we haven’t even ordered dessert yet.”
“What?”
“The waiter came over and asked if we’d made up our minds. You were lost in a quandary about sticky toffee pudding and pistachio ice cream, so I asked him for a couple more minutes.”
“Really? Oh bugger. How long ago was that?”
For once I’m delighted to be in the wrong, because thankfully I haven’t yet verbally abused an innocent waiter. Something dangerous happens to certain human beings when they are being served. A little like road rage, we suddenly and irrationally see ourselves as the single most important and powerful person on the planet, for whom all must run perfectly.
Having been a barman for years in my youth, and befriended many chefs and waiters, I know all too well what it’s like to serve people like me, and therefore respect and honour good service by smiling, saying thanks, and because I know it’s a vital part of a server’s wages, leaving a chunky tip.
Shame that others don’t do the same.
I was talking to a despondent friend of mine the other day. A city centre waiter, he was bemoaning his lot, complaining that as the recession bites, people are leaving tinier and tinier tips. He couldn’t understand how people decided they could afford to eat out as long as they left pathetic tips.
“It’s like cutting the weakest link in the chain just so you can pretend to be well off! And now people like me can’t afford to live!”
“Sounds like the government all over again, if you ask me!” I offered, amazed at how thick and selfish some folk can be. “I don’t know how you do it mate! I wouldn’t have the patience.”
“Oh believe me, mate, you so wouldn’t. You’ve got no idea. The other night I seat two tables at once, right? I give menus to both and go to the first table to tell them about the venison special. They say they’re not ready to order, so I say
‘Fine, take your time!’
and go over to the second table to take their order. Three of them order the venison special, so by the time I’m back at the first table, we’ve run out of it. Of course yer woman orders it, so I tell her that I’m afraid there is no more venison. She says I shouldn’t have told her about it if it was all gone.”
“Do wot! She wha’?” exclaimed your colyoomist. “Ooooh, I’d’ve bloody hit her!”
“And that’s why you’re not a waiter, Charlie. So I explain politely that when I first told her about the special, there were three portions left. Then she asks me who had those portions, so I point to the other table. And then, get this, she says that I should go over there and explain to them that she wants a venison special so they can’t all have it.”
“She she she WHAT? No way mate! Don’t believe you!”
“God’s honest truth, mate. So I smile and tell her that no, I simply couldn’t do that, as she’d actually had first choice but declined to place her order when there was still venison on the menu.”
“I cannot believe she told you to go and nick the other table’s food! That makes my arrogance look paltry and weak-kneed. I mean, it’s not too hard to understand is it? Not exactly complicated stuff? Yes, we have no venison, so tough bloomin’ titty love. Stuff a scallop in your gob and shut the hell up.”
“You’d think, mate, but she still hadn’t given up. She asks me if there is any chance of me finding some venison in the kitchen. I tell her again that it’s all gone. And then she turns a bit nasty and sarcy and says that if I should happen to come across some venison that I didn’t know about, I was to tell her and she’d order it. I smile once again and tell her as calmly as I can that that isn’t going to happen, because Chef has a very precise knowledge of exactly what he has and doesn’t have in his kitchen, and there ... is ... no ... venison.”
"Don’t know how you do it mate. I do not know. Fair fucks to you, and all of your comrades.”
A voice is muttering in my ear. I’m ripped from the memory of my mate’s tale of venison, waitering and woe by a smooth gentle servile voice.
“Would you like to order dessert now, sir?”
How lovely to be asked that question. How lucky am I that professionals employ their superb cooking and serving skills just so that prats like me and that vile venison woman can have food brought to them?
“I would, and thank you! Thank you so very much!” I say to a slightly bemused waiter who thought we might be upset because he had taken so long to serve us.
I leave him as big a tip as my pocket will allow, and suggest you all should do the same.
If you can’t afford to tip properly, you can’t afford to eat out.

The Strange Case of the Half-Empty Half-Filled Fish Food Fraud!

2009-05-11T09:45:00.001Z

You know how it is with the Spring cleaning. It’s taken me weeks to find that combination of the right time, energy and mood to get well stuck in, and then, a mere couple of minutes into shifting my gear out of the way so I can have a proper go at that skirting board, I find myself holding an ancient notebook.
Oh, and look, there’s a newspaper clipping in it. The Irish Independent, May 14th, 1993.
Now Adley, don’t go getting distracted. You’ve got a job to do!
Yeh, but I wonder what was going on in Ireland back then?
Just two stories on the yellowing scrap torn from the Indo’s World Report: one about fresh killings in Israel and the Gaza Strip; another about ...er... ‘Home Alone Fish’?
Under the simply splendid headline:
‘Fish owner facing scales of justice’
an unidentified Indo journo told the story of how 37 year-old David Sharod was up in court, accused of abandoning his pet fish, for your indulgence m’lud, they being one South American suckling loach and one sucking plec, in circumstances likely to cause them unnecessary suffering.
The accused, a former electrical engineer, had left his home in August to work for a friend in the Cricketers pub, a full two miles away in the dreamy-sounding parish of Littlewick Green, of the county of Royal Berkshire.
Leading the prosecution, Glyn Lloyd made a strong case for fish:
“When animals are abandoned, the public tend to think of cats and dogs, but fish have a right to be looked after as well.”
You tell ‘em, Glyn-o.
Apparently, RSPCA Inspector Mark Turner had somehow been alerted by ‘electricity board officials’, and proceeded to stick Sellotape over Mr. Sharod’s front door, to see if negligence was afoot, or even, afin.
Mr. Sharod protested his innocence, claiming he had frequently returned home to feed his pets, but Inspector Turner told the court that the filter had not been working, the tank was half empty of water and that there was a nearly empty container of fish food.
Had your confused colyoomist been defending the innocence of any man accused of such deeply dastardly deeds, I might have asked the court to consider that the tank was, in fact, half full.
In addition, m’lud, I ‘umbly ask the court to tell me when it became a crime in this true realm to offer pets a ‘nearly empty’ food container.
Instead the stout defender Richard Blake came up with a bizarre line of questioning, truly worthy of the case before the court.
Grilling the RSPCA Inspector, Blake asked:
“Did the fish look distressed? Were they behaving in an unusual way?”
After a long and heavily pregnant silence, Inspector Turner finally offered the court his expert opinion:
“I don’t know what a distressed fish looks like. I’m not an expert on fish.”
A mighty gasp doubtless rouse from the public gallery. The case was adjourned to June 10th.
Trouble is, what with that being June 10th 1993, we’ll never know the outcome of The Strange Case of the Abandoned Suckling Loach.
Who were those mysterious ‘electricity board officials’, what did they know about Mr. Sharod’s movements, and why did they care so much about his fish?
How many years can you get in an English jail for letting your fish almost run out of food?
All this comes as a wonderful distraction, not simply because it means I can go and have a cup of tea instead of Spring cleaning, but also because a few days ago Sammy was put down, and pets alive and dead are on my mind.
My family always had cats. First there was Pussy, (yes, as a blushing insecure pubescent, I had to go outside late at night and get the cat in by yelling that more-than-risqué name out loud, so that all the other teenagers in the neighbourhood could be 100% sure I was a sad pathetic loser) a Tortoiseshell and White of rare beauty and vicious temperament, who ruled our house throughout my entire childhood. She was replaced by Junior, and then came Sammy and his mother Tizzy.
Tizzy died just before my father last year, and so together Sammy and my mother have made it through a difficult year. Sammy sat on mum’s chair while she watched TV. He slept on her bed, and allowed her to talk out loud to herself as she pottered around the house, because, you see, she wasn’t really talking to herself but to Sammy.
Yes, we see, Mum!
But Sammy was suffering and took the needle just before his nineteenth birthday. I was sad, because Sammy was a cutie and even though I don’t live over there, he always recognised me as family and gave me as much feline attention as he could.
But mostly I was gutted for my mum, who had lost her friend and companion, and so I was delighted when my sister organised the adoption of two little grey tabby cat sisters, who needed a home to be saved from the pound.
Their previous owner had been an Arsenal fan, and displaying an ignorance befitting his football choices, had ignored his pets’ genders (and the fact that both namesakes have long-since departed Arsenal) and called the girl cats, ‘Thierry’ and ‘Coley’.
Outraged, my mum declared:
“Well it’s so stupid, because they are girls. And anyway we are Chelsea in this house!”
I declined to mention that ‘Coley’ (or ‘Cashly’ as he is known in my home!) now played for the Blues, instead asking what names she had decided upon.
“Well, I didn’t want to confuse them by changing their names too much, so I’ve decided on Tiffany and Chloe!”
“Brilliant mum. Very girly!” said I, “Just be careful never to leave their food almost empty, or else you’ll be arrested by an Inspector and taken off to Holloway Prison for ever and ever and who’ll feed the little kitties then!”
“What was that dear?”
Oops. Did I really say that? Must’ve temporarily lost touch with reality.
“I just said how lovely and excited I am for you to have new catty company and they sound cute and lovely and I can’t wait to meet them.”
“Oh, that’s funny, I could’ve sworn you said something about me going to prison.”
“Now mum, I’d never say anything like that. Just feed the cats and look out for sellotape on the front door.”

The advice from my FAS Officer? “Keep your eyes on the vacancies!”

2009-05-04T11:57:00.002Z

I’m sitting in the FAS office, waiting to see a FAS Officer. Trouble is, I don’t want to see a FAS Officer.
It’s nothing personal. Just that at my advanced age I know what I can do (office administration, writing, cleaning, fundraising and youth work) and what I can’t do (everything else), and I know that to find work, I must put myself out there, in as many different ways as I can.
So a couple of months ago I wandered up to Nun’s Island, to update my address and recent job details with FAS, and check out their vacancies boards.
The extremely helpful woman behind the counter printed out my details.
“Just make any changes you need to.” she said, and less than a minute later, having done that, I took the forms back to the counter.
“Grand. Now take a seat over there and a FAS Officer will see you in a while.”
I told her that I really just wanted to update my details.
She told me that she couldn’t make any changes to my details. That had to be done by a FAS Officer.
I looked over at the big table where several people were already waiting.
“Can I make an appointment?”
“No, you can’t, because you’re not on Social Welfare. But it shouldn’t take long.”
So I sat and waited, a little frustrated that these simple changes couldn’t be made without wasting the time of a FAS Officer, who might be better off helping somebody who genuinely needed guidance in how to find work.
As the minutes went by, I realised that my wait was pointless. People who arrived after me were being seen before me, because they had appointments.
I returned to the desk, where another woman was now working. She gently explained that I might be better off to come back in the afternoon, because there weren't so many appointments in the afternoons, so I wouldn’t have to wait for so long. What with her being a fresh face, I chanced my arm and tried to explain to her that if she could just change my address on the database, I wouldn’t have to come back at all.
But no. I simply had to see a FAS Officer. Ah well, I’d come back some afternoon and anyway, the trip wasn’t completely wasted, because I spotted a vacancy on the boards.
Having started this FAS process, I needed to finish it, for my own peace of mind, so here I am, back in the afternoon, waiting to see a FAS Officer that I don’t really want to see.
Alongside a few blokes and a couple of women, I sit around the table in patient silence. The utter pointlessness and waste of time involved in changing a couple of lines on a database is beginning to get to me. Why can’t I just go into their website, offer a password and update my details there?
Finally I am called through to see the FAS Officer.
“Hello there. I’m Charlie! Look, I don’t want to waste your time, because I know you are busy. I’m working full time to find part time work in my chosen fields, to supplement my freelance writing, so if you could please just update my address and most recent job, that’d be great. Oh, and here’s my CV and current references, which I send along with every job application.”
The FAS Officer motions me to sit, and then proceeds to tap into their computer.
I stare out of the office window, wondering why they are typing so slowly.
taptap...tap....tap tap tap.....tap.........tap tap......tap.......
In silence I sit, as Spring turns to Summer. The chicks in the nest on the branches of the tree outside the window grow, learn to fly and head to Africa.
tap....tap tap.....tap....tap tap tap.....................tap.
Not a word has passed between the FAS Officer and myself, which is fine, but there are needy jobseekers out there patiently waiting to see somebody.
tap,,,tap.....tap tap tap.........TAP.
The tapping stops and the FAS Officer turns to me. I sit up in the chair, expecting to be told that my details are all updated and asked if there’s anything they could do to help.
But no. Instead, the FAS Officer looks down, picks up my CV and references and starts to read them. All of them. Crushingly slowly. In absolute silence.
I sit and stare out of the window, as the Polar ice cap melts, the ocean levels rise and most of Galway is engulfed.
The FAS Officer turns the page and reads on, apparently unaware that the silence has been deafening for the last twenty minutes.
Night turns to day, Autumn to Winter to Spring once more, as the FAS Officer turns the page of my final reference.
Why they are reading so incredibly slowly? Can they not skim, while I am physically there with them?
Finally, as post-apocalyptic zombies prowl the remains of our charred planet, just before our ancient sun collapses into its death throes and goes Supernova, the FAS Officer turns to me.
“So. Keep your eyes on the vacancies. Now, that’s it.”
I walk out, furious and completely confused.
Keep your eyes on the vacancies?
Keep your eyes on the bloody vacancies?
Was that really all they said?
Did that really happen?
To be fair I wasn’t looking for advice, which was just as well, but I’d made two visits to their offices, spent three hours of my time waiting and sitting in silence, only to be told by a professional job counsellor:
“Keep your eyes on the vacancies.”
This farce was not the fault of the people working for FAS. The entire debacle was the fault of a rigid idiotic system, which forced me to waste my time and theirs, when the whole thing could have been done in 30 seconds.
But as I stepped outside, by god that fresh Galway air felt good after the frustrating stress of such a wasted visit.
Clearly, if FAS and other similar organisations and agencies are really going to help those who need help most in this country, then these arcane systems need to be crushed and thrown away.
In their own mission statement, FAS declare: ‘We strive to be as innovative and as flexible as possible in meeting the changing needs of our customers.’
Yeh, well, strive away.

Are you a word nerd? Do you know your ‘til from your till?

2009-04-27T09:24:00.004Z

I’m sure I used to have a subconscious mind, but these days all I ever hear about is the unconscious.
Everyone is passionate about something. As a kid I used to go to school on London trains, speeding past thousands of back gardens leading up to terraced houses and semis, each as different to all the other houses and gardens as it is possible for identically-built gardens and houses to be.
Everyone was into something. Right there, blurred by speed and glass, was everybody’s passion.
This one grew leeks, that one loved her roses, that one was building a pond and herself over there had put down a crazy paving patio with deck chairs.
Even as that naive teenager, I didn’t suspect she loved crazy paving. But sipping her Campari and soda of an evening, she could dream of flying to Luton Airport and looking like Lorraine Chase.
There’s loads of things in life that we love, in different ways. I love my wife, my family, my friends and then, in a different way, I love my football team, north Mayo beaches and pie chips and beans.
But for pure non-physical passion, words motivate me to think and search for truth; to master a craft and explore an art. So I’m a word nerd, and I noticed when people stopped saying subconscious.
Freud used the word unconscious and in all fields of mental medicine they use the word unconscious too, but language works on many levels, and out here on the streets where we’re just mental without the medicine, those words that mean very precise things to head doctors mean very different things to us.
In my own wee mental world, the word unconscious was what you ended up as, after three bottles of Buckie, or a swift blow to the head from that lamppost that leaped out and head butted you.
Unconscious was to me a state of being, in which you were neither thinking nor doing anything. You were on at the mains but your plug was out of the wall.
Subconscious, on the other hand, always sounded much more my cup of tea. To the mental medicine folk, the subconscious is merely where you keep your phone numbers; where thoughts of hunger come from when you smell sizzling bacon.
That’s the official version, but it’s much more fun to ignore all that and just go back to what we meant by the subconscious before we knew better.
Wasn’t your subconscious that potentially blissful and equally dangerous bubbling stew of all your darkest secret bad bits? Wasn’t it the answer to every “Where the hell did that come from?” question.
Thirty years ago, far less worried about staying alive than I am now, I dropped acid to journey into my subconscious. I wanted to go all transcendental and deep and wise and meaningful, like the Beatles and their Yogi, but sadly, I wasn’t quite ready for my Enlightenment.
All that happened was that I thought I was Sir Lancelot for three hours, and then, to the horror of my friends, I spent ten minutes shouting aggressively at some plain-clothed cops, before stumbling home and lying on my bed for four hours, wishing the feeling that I was onboard a boat would go away.
Goodness knows why I bothered, because being a prolific dreamer, I'd welcome a break from my subconscious.
Or is it my unconscious?
Who can truly say? There is no right or wrong with spoken language. All that ever matters is to be completely understood. So we quickly come around to the fact that wicked means great, bad means good and cool means hot.
There’s nothing new in this kind of verbal evolution. Many might like to be considered a sophisticate, but in early usage, to be accused of sophistication was to be corrupted, to have no innocence.
Words change all the time. I read and loved all of Ken Bruen’s ‘Jack Taylor’ books, but winced whenever I saw him reduce ‘until’ to 'till’. Then, high on hubris, pumping with my own pomposity, I started to see it everywhere: Till till till, all over the shop, ‘til finally, worst of all, I found it in a document several hundred years old.
Undeniably wrong, I realised all I’d been responding to was those booming words lasered into my brain by a crazed teacher at an English public school:
“A till is a cash register, Adley, neither a contraction nor a diminutive, you vile half breed ignoramus.”
Aha! The reason it’s important for me never to abbreviate ‘until’ to ‘till’ lay all along hidden in my subconscious!
Nobody else gives a damn, and quite frankly, I agree with them.
In his book ‘Made in America’, Bill Bryson claims that the English spoken by Americans is actually more historically authentic than that which we, the English and you the Irish speak. Isolated and entrenched, the English speakers of America carried on with the language with which they arrived.
If that’s right, I reckon there must have been a terrible storm on that crossing, and a bag marked ‘vowels’ must have fallen overboard and be lying deep in the North Atlantic Ocean. While aluminum, color and flavor work fine, they look to Europeans a little naked.
Maybe that bag of vowels was accidentally sent to the wrong New World, and ended up in Australia, because those Aussies seem to have ‘o’s to spare. Every word in sight is shrunk and ended with an ‘o’.
Afternoons are arvos, relatives are relos, service stations are servos and rather brilliantly, the Off Licence is a Bottlo.
So sad but true, I give a damn about words. I love them and sometimes they love me back, but the relationship is full time and never-ending. I’ve let ‘till’ go now, although I still twitch a little when I see it, like when you look at an old photo of a dead childhood pet.
Anyway, there’s already a new verbal bête noire on my block.
Nothing gets my back up more than people trying to impress with words they don’t understand. At the moment some are saying ‘apropos’ as if it’s some kind of fancy French way of saying appropriate. Yuck, but more to the point: why? If you’re going to use a word, pay the language some respect and know it makes sense, because words are only worthy if they are understood.
So, till the next time...

If you have a heartbeat you are worth a Basic Income!

2009-04-20T21:06:00.002Z

There have been short periods of my life when I’ve had more money than I knew what to do with, as well as, of course, long periods when I’ve had just enough. Certainly the happiest years of my life have coincided with times when I had little dosh and a lot of time, but equally, the darkest times came when there were debts: court summons’ piling up on the chair in the corner of my squalid 1980s London flat, covered by a pile of bills in red ink, final demands, credit card bills, letters from banks and overdue rates bills.
I knew I’d made it the top of Penury Mountain when I received one day from a certain charge card company a letter in a black envelope on bright red notepaper. Their message was printed in black ink on a scarlet sheet, and even though I was spending my days squatting on my knees, in the corner of my living room farthest from the bill-piled chair, gently rocking back and forth, humming a little tune to myself, it’s all going to be fine, ha ha doo bee doo, I did feel a thrill of perverse pride at having reached such a high echelon of corporate annoyance.
Everyone I knew back in those poverty-stricken days occasionally got bills in red ink, but I never heard of anyone else getting a bill on red paper.
And oh, that black envelope was an intimidating beauty.
So having found out that being hugely in credit doesn’t really make me happy, I also have first-hand experience of how terrible a thing is debt. Back then, in my 20’s, my financial crisis was pretty much self-inflicted, through a combination of youthful ignorance and a splash or two of hedonism and indulgence.
But it was no fun. Believe me. You never want to live in London on the dole. One of the things I love about this country, and particularly the West, is that in Ireland you are rarely punished for being poor. Of course you suffer the same lifestyle barriers and human right infringements that poor people suffer all over the world, but in your dealings with the dole and others, you are not confronted by the intimidating and often terrifying attitude prevalent in Thatcher’s England.
Back in the early 90s I was briefly on the dole in Galway, and could not believe how compassionate and cheerful the interviewers were. Ten year’s earlier I had been reduced to tears by a small English woman in the Shepherd’s Bush dole office, after she saw fit to tell me how pathetic I was and no, she had no idea when my benefit money might come through.
Some of those tears were of self-pity and dejection, but mostly they were furious and full of indignation. How dare she? What gave her the right?
Of course at the moment the Irish Welfare State is overwhelmed, the queues are stretching out forever, and doubtless tempers are fraying on both sides of the glass, but if you have never tried to draw dole in England, you do not know how lucky you are.
I’ve no idea whether this disparity in how the two nations deal with poverty is down to historical, cultural and religious grounds. It’s too easy to say the Irish are more compassionate because they have suffered so much in the past. All populations have suffered.
Whatever the causes, the difference is stark. With the Euro and Sterling close to parity, a week on the dole in England right now will earn you a measly £60.50, while over the water here in Ireland, the same week will give you €204.30.
However, right now welfare systems all over Ireland are backed up with a glut of applications, and traumatised people who have recently lost their jobs are having to make the weekly trawl up to their CWO (Community Welfare Officer) to get emergency payments, so that they can feed their children and survive until the dole payments come through.
I’m hearing stories of 2-3 month waits for official payments, and it breaks my heart. Why should these people, who have suffered so much, many for the greed and sins of others, be subjected to this exhausting and demeaning Poverty Trail?
Have we not finally arrived at a time when Basic Income might be the perfect answer?
Simply put, a Basic Income is a singular amount paid to every permanent resident of a country. It is not applied for; not means tested; not predicated on age, sex, gender or anything. If you have a heartbeat you are entitled to receive a Basic Income.
There are many highly-respected organisations the world over who have explored the fine economic details of Basic Income, and in his final book ‘Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective - the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
This colyoomist is no economist, so let’s say for the sake of argument that the Irish Basic Income was set at €200 a week. There are those who would choose not to earn more than that, but equally there are many millions who prefer a better lifestyle, and would rather work than live on that subsistence level.
But oh, think of the benefits. Think of the economic savings. There would be no need for the massive bureaucracy that is the present Welfare State. Instead of processing hundreds of thousands of forms, welfare workers could concentrate on the needs of those most vulnerable in society, those very people whose schemes and day centres and projects are now the first to be slashed in the name of ‘savings’.
Instead of chasing scammers and fraudsters and dole cheats, agency workers could apply their funds and time to improving the dignity of those on the fringes of society.
There would be no need for the costly, pointless and dreaded Emergency payments; no shamed faces in the dole queue; no need for terror at the thought of being made redundant.
Right now Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are spending billions in a bid to stimulate the world economy. What could possibly do more to encourage people to spend, to invest, to share their funds, time, ideas and ingenuity, than a cash injection of human dignity?

A glass of wine with your food? Isn't that what Jesus would do?

2009-04-13T10:26:00.002Z

Easter, and Ireland is about once again to be gripped by Good Friday fever. The pubs will be closed for one day, and there will be only one topic of conversation: where is the booze, how do I get there and how much might I consume?
It’s ridiculous to assume that this is the behaviour of a nation of alcoholics doing their darndest to live up to their stereotypes. Ridiculous, yes, but then again, the frenzy that accompanies this one single publess day is absurd in the extreme.
In truth, it’s only the Irish showing how wonderfully fallibly magically human they are. God and the Law combine to take away a favourite toy, and all hell lets loose.
Back when I was an idiotic imbiber, there was more than pure hedonism in the Easter Galway air. The young Irish I was then befriending had had enough of being told what they could and could not believe in and wear on their genitals, so when informed there would be no drink taken, they all went teenage mental and drank as if there was no Judgement Day.
Thankfully, Ireland has come a heck of a long way since then. Last September, Judge Mary Fahy refused to fine several Galway City restaurateurs for serving wine to customers on Good Friday. Acknowledging that technically they had broken the law, she understood how ludicrous it would be to criminalise tourists and families who wanted a glass of wine with their meals in a modern city centre.
How refreshing was it to read a news story about a Judge who was actually in touch with what’s going on in the country, instead of the usual horror stories about Judges who think Peter Stringer owns a nightclub and Girls Aloud is a permission slip?
Most people probably believe Christmas to be the holiest Christian festival, but as a Jewish lad at a Protestant school, I became very quickly aware that Easter was Number One. A hot time for a Jew, at Easter some of the other kids used to have a go at the ‘Christ killer’, but I managed to avoid violence by using my Jewish skills, and talking them around.
“What are you on about?” I yelled at them as they made ready to do unspeakable things to my terrified schoolboy self. “He was a Jew, just like me. Don’t you see, if you hit me it’d be like hitting Jesus? No no no, I’m not saying I’m as good as Jesus, but when they put him on the cross he was Jewish, and all you Christians came later. So back off!”
To this day I’m still a bit confused about whether Jesus might at any point of his life be considered a Christian, or whether, by definition, the followers of the Christ came after his death.
Whatever, whoever, I understand that Easter is the holiest time of year for Christians, and I’m sure to those of true faith it matters not one minuscule drop whether in a different place, others of varied credes, orthodoxies and appetites are able to swig a glass of Cabernet with their carpaccio.
It’s not a matter of disrespecting the Christian Church, its traditions and the people that believe in them. Nothing can shake a strong true faith, and Ireland’s restaurateurs are not in the business of killing religion. They just want to make a living while offering a service and let’s face it, running a restaurant is a thankless task.
80% of new Irish restaurants fail within their first year, and to succeed you not only have to be open all the hours God gave you (apt and not intentionally offensive!) but also you have to maximise your income during those brief periods when the punters pack in.
In this 21st century you simply cannot tell a couple of tourists from Manchester that even though they’ve wisely decided to visit Ireland over the long Easter weekend, they’ll not be able to have a drink.
For weeks, nay months I watched the eager and exciting contestants on BBC’s Masterchef turn out new dishes, work under pressure in top-class kitchens and uniformly, as one, declare their dream was to open a little restaurant where they could do what they loved for a living.
It broke my heart every time I heard it. Why is it that, having found the one thing we most love to do, we assume that we can make a living out of it? Cooking good food and running a successful business are two totally different and very specialised skills, and unless you have excessive lashings of the latter you dare not dream of opening up a restaurant.
Once you know the business, you might proceed to create a special place, in a great building; of cultivating a unique atmosphere, employing talented chefs and building up a regular faithful clientele.
For all of the above, we in Galway City were very lucky a few years back to have Harriet Leander’s Nimmo’s. An exceptional place, marrying a genial almost clubbish ambience to the cosy woods, eclectic art and soft tones of the building, Nimmo’s chefs were excellent, the staff all true individuals, eccentric to the last, offering service as glorious as the fresh local ingredients in her cuisine.
Inasmuch as Harriet’s Nimmo’s offered a true alternative to the fairly formulaic menus on Quay Street, so now her colleague and friend Seamus Sheridan has opened a restaurant above his eponymous pub on the docks.
With a menu that changes monthly and a tremendous team in the kitchen, Sheridan’s restaurant is very much its own place, yet (along with much of the art and style that made Nimmos so great) it carries on Harriet’s ethos of improving the restaurant experience in Galway, of making eating out and drinking wine a real and special pleasure, for which we are truly grateful.
So whether you are contemplating your faith in God, and marvelling at the sacrifice Jesus made so that you might be saved, or simply enjoying a bite to eat and a drink with your loved-ones in a restaurant, enjoy your Good Friday and this Easter weekend.
After all, even as we approach the fast of Yom Kippur, our most holy day, we Jews still drink the blessed wine as we break bread together. And Jesus was one of us, like it or not.

All seriousness aside, if this is Spring Fever, I don’t want to be cured!

2009-04-07T12:14:00.002Z

It’s 06:56 am, and I have been wide awake for half an hour, my head tumbling with all manner of pointless nonsensicals.
Why?
Because bright sunshine is bursting through my bedroom curtains and being a nerdy old prat from wayback, I know that Ireland is in one of those high pressure systems that tend to settle here in Spring and Autumn.
As long as that breeze brushing the tall trees outside my window keeps coming from an easterly direction, we’ve got a couple of days of dry sunny weather, safe as houses.
Yippee! It’s Spring!
A mammal who loves his seasons, I leap out of bed eager to leave the cave.
The fresh-squeezed juice of a lemon sees me out of the door and into Shiny car. Ain’t got no money, but there’s a tank of fuel below me and a bright beautiful blue sky above.
That’s all I need.
In days gone by all I’d need was my thumb, but it’s good to be in Shiny as we sweep through a pre-rush hour Galway City, straight through town and out the other side before most school kids have forced opened an unwilling eye.
The early morning mist has lifted from the fields either side of the N17, and the stone walls and green grass bring Sham tunes into my head.
Having been way too healthy earlier on, I stop and snarf a sausage and bacon roll before turning off the main road. Slowing the car I now have time to spot the unbelievably white lamblets, gambolling in rolling lush pasture, and suckling calves lingering in old farmyards.
Miles from anywhere, yet in the middle of wonder, that old hitcher inside of me demands I stop and get out of the car. The trouble with driving is that you become so intent on arrival you forget to stop, look and listen to the silence of the country.
So now I’m standing in the warmth of the early morning sun, smelling the sweet dampness lifting from the long grasses, simply taking the time to appreciate the wonderful, almost intimidating power of Spring.
Under the ground and all around, burgeoning and inexorable pumps nature’s desire to bloom, breed, blossom and billow.
And yes, we are a part of that. Despite our arrogance, ignorance and notions of grandeur, we are part of it all. It’s so easy to become blinded by bills and banks and being broke, but here, now, this is mine, yours, free and everlasting.
We are indeed fools if we think we’re above loving the country, unappreciative of how it nurtures us.
A short drive through the back ways and bohreens brings me into the tiny car park by my favourite beach, near my old home in North Mayo.
Not a soul in sight; golden beach as far as my legs will take me, and a tide that just turned, leaving damp hard sand for my feet to speed upon.
Man, I am buzzing like a crazy happy beast. Aaahhve got the Spring Fever and ahh don’t want no cure!
Isolated and ecstatic, normally I’d find myself a warm comfy rock and sit upon it for several hours, contemplating the ocean, my backside and all physical and philosophical points betwixt the two, but today that’s not going to happen. The strong south-easterly breeze is whipping up the sand into whispy twisty snaky strands, making it a little uncomfortable to linger
But anyway, I am not on a mission of pure self-indulgence, having long-wanted to thank my friend who lives around the corner from this beach for the massive favour she did for me.
Her text says she’ll be home at 11.
At 11:20 I go up there, but she’s not home.
Back to the beach! ‘How bad?’ thinks I, and by 12 I am drinking tea in my friend's farmhouse kitchen.
Another good friend, a man for whom I have the greatest of time, has texted to tell me he’ll be at his place by 2, so having had a good old goss and two slices of homemade fruit cake, I head off inland a few miles to find my other friend is also late.
Well, no. Nobody’s been late, just running to the speed of a sunny day deep in the Irish countryside, while I’m still on Galway City time, where 11 means, well, 11:10-ish.
I’m so happy to sit and wait and do nothing for a sunny hour or so in the country, and my friend's dog Boogie is overjoyed to have me around. We go for a wee walk, exploirfy an old house and investimagate a big muddy puddle together.
A few years back things were not so happy in this friend's home, and during that time Boogie and myself became firm friends, so now he’s all over me like a licking loving rash
Mind you, he’s a soft git anyway, and would probably lick and love the Devil himself, were Beelzebub to take his hols in North Mayo.
Yes, Charlie. Just stop. Slow down, sit down and play with Boogie.
The greatest gift that money cannot buy: a free sunny West of Ireland Spring afternoon in the middle of nowhere.
Eventually my mate turns up, and we talk, and laugh and drink and visit the village and have a little talk and laugh and drink. Then we return to his place, feed the children and put them to bed, have a little drink, laugh and talk until his wife turns up, when we sit, talk, laugh and drink some more.
A perfect little road trip, costing next to nothing and filling every vacant hole in my soul. As the heat from the coal and wood roasting in their huge fireplace rises, the standards of conversation tumbles.
By the time all those little drinkies have combined as one, my friend's’ wife and I are mercilessly mocking himself, with all his wandering tangential amorphous ramblings.
He raises his hands to protest:
“Now now now!” he bellows defensively, eager to plead his case. “All seriousness aside -” says he, blissfully unaware of the wee verbal slip that has caused us, his audience, to both fall physically from our chairs in inebriated mirth.
But now thinking back, my friend has the last laugh, as some wisdom lurks in his inadvertent and hysterical error:
All seriousness aside?
Isn’t that the best medicine in the world?

Ireland promises ‘Céad Mile Fáilte’, but “No problem at all!” is as good as it gets!

2009-03-30T13:50:00.002Z

I’m in a cosy warm lightly-lit pub in Lehinch, Co Clare, sitting alone at the bar, happy as this scribbler can be.
This is what the tourists who come to Ireland want: as real a slice of Irish life as it is possible to experience.
A few families are eating fish and chips around the tables along the wall, their kids playing, dancing and generally treading that fine line between being delightfully exuberant and intrusively annoying.
But I am a visitor, and they live here.
The late afternoon March twilight has brought with it a strong westerly wind. Gigantic breakers are crashing over the sea wall, drenching intrepid walkers, yet in here, in this calm cocoon of 'Clareness', we are safe.
Well, safe from the elements, but by god, that Guinness tastes good. It took forever to settle, but was well worth the wait. What is it that country pubs do with the black stuff that city pubs cannot? Is it purely the fact that city Guinness is served so cold?
Whatever, I must savour it slowly as I’m driving, so this sweet creamy tulip of lurrrve can be my only drink.
My fish and chips arrive, and as I eat I look into the mirror behind the bar, and espy the reflection of an older gentleman. We are, in effect, sitting next to each other, each side of the wooden bar divider, and as I watch him in the mirror, slowly but deliberately eating his steak and chips, I wonder if I’m looking straight into my future.
Will I be that bloke when I’m old and grey?
At first I feel a slosh of sadness inside me at the prospect, but immediately know better.
Who am I to assume that he is lonely and sad? The barman knows his name, and their exchanges are witty and polite.
Could do worse. Could do a lot worse than feel a part of a community like this. Anchored to the edge of the Atlantic ocean, folk here know their own ways and are served dinner in the local pub by a barman who knows everybody’s name.
Himself the barkeep is evidently the hub of the place. One by one all the regular customers come up to him, dropping off keys, having a wee chat, as he flies around, smiling, calm and so on top of things that he even has time to ask me a couple of polite non-invasive questions, just to make me feel noticed and welcome.
Some out there seem to think that this recession has brought out the best in us; that now that our jobs are on longer secure, we are acting ‘nicer’ to help our struggling businesses do better.
I think that notion does us all a terrible disservice. It’s not like we’ve spent the last five years running around in togas, drinking wine from bladders, falling on top of each other in naked orgiastic heaps. Just like in every so-called ‘boom’, a few people became very rich indeed, and the rest of us found life marginally easier to get through for a few years.
We are not now modifying our behaviour because we got soundly slapped down for being too greedy and decadent. No, we are able to behave more humanly now because we have reverted to type: humans are good, generally.
Money, in itself, is never the problem. Having had the pleasure of hanging out with the Duke of Bedford and Lord Montague of Beaulieu, I found the old blue bloods as down-to-earth and grounded as you or me. Daft as brushes and twice as fruity, just like the rest of us, but fine human beings who know how to handle their dosh, because they were born to it.
Here the trouble came, as ever, with new money. The Irish suffered predictably from their first taste of affluence, and have doubtless learned from the experience.
Damn, that Guinness is nearly gone, but I daren't have another. Some text that’d be to the Snapper as she arrives at Shannon Airport:
‘Sorry love, pissed in Lehinch. Get a taxi here or home and I’ll catch you tomorrow.’
Hmm. No. Self control, Adley.
“How was your fish and chips?”
”Great! Lovely, thanks very much!”
“No problem. No problem at all!”
says he, as he swings into the kitchen to ferry another load of grub to punters, a smile of sweet pride spread over his lips.
Yes indeed, the Irish are back to being their old selves again, and
“No problem at all!”
is as good as it gets.
There are so many unique ways that the Irish have made the English language their own. Through everyday giants like ‘Mighty’ and ‘Grand’ to the guilt-laden depths of the word ‘Shame’, the Irish have superimposed their culture, religion and souls over the words of the Old Enemy.
But with their ‘No problem’ the Irish have nailed their history to their vocabulary. Everywhere I have ever been in the world, food, goods and services are delivered with something akin to ‘It’s a pleasure’; ‘Thanks’ ; ‘You’re Welcome’ or ‘Enjoy!’
Here in Ireland they evidently decided that they’ve suffered enough. No longer subjugated, they adamantly refuse to feel they must serve anybody, an atitude which can cause problems in the service industryI
By twisting the customer/server relationship until it is a mirror-image of itself, their ‘No problem’ makes you, the punter, feel inordinately lucky to have been given anything, so the very least you can do is pay for it.
I give you money.
You give me beer.
What part of that might ever be a problem?
But then my mobile phone rings and it turns out to be the woman from Hibernian Aviva, calling about the car insurance.
She just wanted to let me know that the Underwriters had authorised her to go ahead and give me my refund retrospectively!
I am momentarily dumbfounded. A couple of weeks ago I had mentioned to her that I might be worthy of a refund, but I never really expected to hear from her again. Yet behind the scenes, for absolutely no profit to Hibernian Aviva save goodwill, she has been beavering away on my behalf and just saved me €80.
I thank her profusely.
“You’re very welcome!” she says, “It was my pleasure!”
Fantastic, splendid and, of course, bugger.
Shows just how wrong I can be.

Is Jury’s car park a Testicular Priority Zone?

2009-03-24T16:40:00.001Z

One of the great things about walking into Galway City is that you never know exactly what might happen. If you look straight ahead and do not engage with the rest of the world, there’s a chance you might get everything crossed off your list and be back at the car, job done, nifty nifty.
There’s also the chance that, even if you send out the ‘don’t come near me I am a dangerous predator’ vibes, the sister of the bloke your mate went out with will suddenly feel overcome by the desire to walk over and say hello, and even though you haven’t a clue who they are, they seem nice and sure, let’s go for a coffee, and before you know it four hours have passed and you have to dash home and liberate the kitty from the clutches of the hamster.
All very possible, as long as your car is not in a Pay and Display spot, because then you’ll only have two hours to do everything, see everybody and get back to your motor.
So I go to Jury’s car park, because there I get a ticket which is payable upon leaving, leaving me free to enjoy Galway as long as I want to. A typical example of the late 20th century multi-storey, Jury’s car park has sharp bends, steep ramps, and white-lined parking bays that are just wide enough to squeeze yer family saloon into, using both side mirrors. But once your motor is safely ensconced in Jury’s, you are free to linger in town or leg it out, do a runner sharpish, depending on whether you bump into friend of foe.
Unlike anywhere else in town, your time in Galway is not dictated by the time on your ticket.
But the Snapper, by her own admission “doesn’t do Jury’s car park”, and neither does Angel’s wife, and nor do several other women of my acquaintance.
Much as we men are constantly reminded by ye women that we are useless at multi-tasking (and me here right now all typing, thinking, blinking and breathing, simultaneous and co-ordinated despite dangly bits between the legs) you are surely fairly willing to accept some limitations in the arena of spatial aptitude.
We know that women are safe drivers, because insurance companies are interested only in making money and they rate women drivers as better risks than men, but is there something about all those twisty-turny first gear climbs and manoeuvring into tight-squeezed spaces that puts the wind up the fairer gender?
Is Jury’s car park a Testicular Priority Zone?
Before you start plunging your lubed Rabbits into my jugular vein, take a deep breath and realise that I’m only asking. Of course there are some females who use Jury’s car park, but many don’t, yet not one bloke I know would hesitate to swing in there and enjoy its temporal benefits.
So let me know if you’re a woman who uses it, enjoys it, and also, could you please tell me if any of you stop using Jury’s during your PMS days?
Is it possible that like the adult arachnophobe who was once a six year-old who suffered a scary spider in his sandwich, some of the women who refuse to use Jury’s car park were traumatised by their first attempt, which unbeknownst to them happened to coincide with a dose of Pre-menstrual syndrome?
Believe me, I’m well aware that my hypothesis at this point looks ridiculously obscure, preposterous and irrelevant enough to score a massive funding grant from some high-blown academic research institute, but it has long been accepted that during the pre-menstrual days, there is a pronounced drop in the level of a woman’s mechanical and mental efficiency, causing impaired reactions and judgement.
And why do I give a damn? What have the workings of a woman’s inner sanctum got to do with this lowly scribbler?
Nothing personal, ladies. I’m just curious.
At this point I cite the case made by the American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator Alan M. Dershowitz, in his 1994 report: ‘The PMS Defense, The Abuse Excuse, and Other Cop-outs, Sob Stories and Evasions of Responsibility’ in which he describes an incident involving a female orthopaedic surgeon who was pulled over by a US state trooper on Thanksgiving night, after he saw her swerving her BMW.
When the trooper asked the driver how much she’d had to drink, she identified herself as “a doctor” and told the trooper that it was none of his “damn business.”
The trooper then asked her to place her hands on top of her head, but instead she tried to kick him in the groin, yelling: “You son of a [expletive]; you [expletive] can't do this to me; I'm a doctor. I hope you [expletive] get shot and come into my hospital so I can refuse to treat you, or if any other trooper gets shot, I will also refuse to treat them.”
After being arrested, the driver kicked the Breathalyzer machine, before failing the test and being charged with drunken driving.
The driver’s lawyer argued that women absorb alcohol more quickly during their pre-menstrual cycle and that women with PMS became more irritable and hostile than other people.
Amazingly the Virginia judge figured this made a lot of legal sense, and acquitted the woman. Needless to say, the doctor and her lawyer were ecstatic, but my point is this:
As the first-known instance of a PMS acquittal, it may well prove to be a test case, serving as a precedent for future cases.
As a bloke I am the least-able person to judge whether a woman suffering from PMS might be safe behind the wheel, or an insanely raging hormonal death deliverer in charge of a fast-moving lethal weapon.
According to the above court of Virginian law, a women suffering from PMS is also the least-able person to judge her own driving. If she can’t even control herself when talking to a copper, how is she meant to keep to the Highway Code?
Even though I can already feel your female fury bubbling up as I scribble, there is no hint here of sexism.
Simply, if you’re a woman driver who frequently uses Jury’s car park in Galway, please let me know if it feels more challenging parking in there when you’re suffering from PMS, and if so, ergo, do you think you are safe to drive?

Meanwhile, back in the Bank branch, I’m trying to be nice and remain calm!

2009-03-17T13:26:00.003Z

It’s official. The word ‘iconic’ has just become iconic. It’s an iconic word. Pure iconic.
Our 21st century culture craves ultimates as if there indeed is no tomorrow. The God of Greed no longer sits up high on Mount Olympus, so you need to find a new inspiration, seeking hyperbole and exaggeration where adjectives and a varied vocabulary used to do a fair job. It’s no longer sufficient for anything to be unique, special, vital or extraordinary.
If it’s not iconic it’s not worth a busted light bulb.
In the past few days I have heard Salt and Vinegar being described as an iconic crisp flavour; Granny Smiths declared an iconic apple variety, and Charlie Haughey referred to as an iconic leader.
Tell me pray, where does cheeky Charlie’s iconic photo fit on the iconic Irish dresser? Somewhere between the Pope and Jacks Kennedy and Charlton?

****

Rain or shine, rich or poor, every time I undress I have always emptied any change in my pockets into my coin jars. The €1 and €2 coins go into the Jameson Twelve gift-set bottle holder, and all the smaller ones clish-clash into the regular Jameson bottle holder.
Living as I do on a 24 hour financial cycle, as soon as I have notes in my wallet I break them into change, which I empty into my jars like a man possessed, or to be truthful, like a man who knows only too well how quickly those crisp notes disappear and how great it is to have a replenished coin jar when the cash is no longer flowing in.
I dip daily in and out of the Euro jar, but never ever touch the change jar. When that is full it's mine to use as a special treat, maybe a meal out with the Snapper or a new pair of walking boots.
So it was with a smile and a spring in my step that I set out to the bank to swap my carefully-counted coin bags for lovely fresh folding notes.
Thankfully the bank was really quiet. I always seem to be the bloke in queue stuck behind the bloke with the bloody bag full of coins that need sorting, and that day I was that bloke with the bag of coins, and didn’t want to hold anybody up.
But cushty, straight up to the counter and having established that it’s okay to swap coin, I put my bags on the counter, a thrill running through me about the €163 about to fall into my eager palm.
The teller was a 50 year-old woman who I think was having a bad day. Hey, I’m a compassionate guy, and well aware how hard it must be working in a bank these days. As the major point of contact between the bank and public, tellers have been subjugated to abuse from punters who need to vent their anger at the banks’ greed and ineptitude.
I knew this, and have worked many years in retail, so I sympathise with the workers’ plight. I smiled and engaged the woman, like
“...oh yes I must say we really seem to be into Spring now the evenings are drawing out and the mornings well it’s so light so early now...”
kinda thing, d’ya know, to ease her load and show her I’m not angry with her at all, because I never kill the messenger, and am sure that her worst crimes concern a fleeting kiss with Mikey round the back of the barn when she was 22 and going out with Seanie and should have known better, and awarding herself an extra 25 points when she was playing Scrabble with her sister-in-law who she just cannot stand, sure isn’t it terrible, but she just can’t seem to stop herself thinking she’s a conniving cow that one is, so she is, not even close to worthy of her brother, so she isn’t.
An evil investment banker who has fraudulently robbed millions she was not.
But for once my smile and social skills failed miserably.
As the teller turned to look at my coin bags, the first words out of her mouth were:
“That one is short. Hmmph, and that one looks more than a tenner.”
Having sat for two hours at my kitchen table with aching back, blackened fingers, pen and pad, I felt pretty sure my bags were all correct, but nevertheless my heart sank. Yer wan behind the counter was way more experienced at spotting errant coin bags than I ever could be, so maybe it was all about to go horribly wrong.
But no. All the bags were taken off, weighed and counted, and she came back and stated simply:
“Perfect.”
Sadly and rather embarrassingly, this made me feel instantly and ridiculously proud and as happy as if I had just been awarded the Nobel prize for Literature.
I had made the miserable teller eat coin bag, and now she was going to give me three €50 notes, a€10, a and three €1 coins.
“Now, that’s €163, less €2 charge, so €161.”
“Oh, when did you start charging?”
“We always have charged if you are not lodging.”
“Oh well, in that case I must have enjoyed a great deal of goodwill up to now, as I have been doing this about once every six months for years, and nobody has ever charged me before.”
And then came her weird and basically nasty reply:
“Oh, you never got caught yet?”
Caught? Pardon me? I’m well aware that the task she just performed took a little time, and that the bank made nothing from the transaction, but well, bloody hell, pubs don’t charge you for a glass of water, do they?
It’s just seen as common decency. I was a simple bloke emptying his coin jar, hoping that the bank would swap coins for notes, on a non-formal non-commercial level.
I wasn’t a robber, or a criminal pervert, or god forbid, a banker!
Let’s face it, right now banks surely need to learn some Public Relations skills, drastically and massively. Where is Max Clifford when you need him? Goodwill as ever comes from the banks in the form af accusation, impatience and disrespect.
Meanwhile back in the branch your colyoomist was trying to remain calm.
Be nice.
Don’t seethe.
Don’t curse.
“No, madam, I could never have been ‘caught’, because I wasn’t trying to get away with anything!”

Three pubes on the bed said ‘Good old Ireland’ is still the home of ‘Bad old Ireland’!

2009-03-10T08:47:00.002Z

I’m heading north up the N17 to visit the Whispering Giant of Derry City. It feels good to be on the road, and even better to stop in Ballindine and wonder where I’m going to spend this extra night that I’ve allowed myself.
Dude, I’m all open-minded and free of spirit.
Well, as full of all that fallutin’ tootin’ hippy stuff as I can be, having planned this moment of ‘pure spontaneity’ several weeks ago.
A few minutes later I realise that I have never had a Breakfast Roll. All that I have ever had is something I though might be a Breakfast Roll, but was only in fact a roll crammed with sausages and rashers and sauces of many colours.
All the lads in front of me are asking for breakfast rolls, but they follow their orders with specifics that I cannot make out. I can just ask for a sausage and bacon roll, but as I’ve just explained, in my ignorance that was what I then believed a Breakfast Roll to be!
Ever eager to be one of the lads, I ask her for a Breakfast Roll, and then she asks if I want everything, and I say yes, please.
And then I stand back, silently impotent (oooerr) as she proceeds to overstuff my baguette with so many differing and unlikely items I wonder if this really is the famous/notorious Irish Breakfast Roll, or whether I am in fact on Candid Camera, or simply having the piss ripped out of me because she’s had a bad night and I look like I deserve it.
Sitting down to eat, I feel a rush of admiration for all the lads out there who live on these things, if this thing is truly their thing.
Impossible to eat as a sandwich, I pick out the mushrooms, onions, olives, Albanian Goatherd testicles and deep-fried cat nipples and basically proceed to shnarf a Full Irish breakfast in my fingers: bloody lovely, but lads, seriously, time to hit the Benecol.
The radio spouts dire warnings of a major weather system coming in off the Atlantic. Expect flooding and structural damage.
Yippee, think I! Quite apart from the Rory Gallagher connection, I’ve always wanted to go to Ballyshannon, and tonight the place will be whipped good and proper by that storm. Nothing like sitting in a cosy pub on a winter’s night with half the Atlantic ocean being thrown onto the roof. Lovely!
North of Sligo, opposite the imposing Ben Bulben, I swing into Yeat’s Pub for a break, cup of tea, hmm, nice.
Well, er no. Not nice. Bland grey glass steel and stone, modern and anonymous. As soon as I walk into the bar I wish I hadn’t. I desperately hope nobody sees me, but they do. Sad pale customers, a scattered few, helpless and forlorn, look over at me plaintiff, as if their souls have been sucked out and might only return if I rescue them from this antiseptic godforsaken place. The barperson looks over smiling, but it’s too late. I’m out of there before you can say ‘Waiting Room For Hell’.
Give me a wooden pub with a fire, three old fellas and a dog dribbling on the carpet: lovely. If you’re naming something after an Irish poet, then let it be a tiny bit lyrical and Irish. Otherwise just call it the Munich Bar or the Dallas Inn, and be done with it.
As it turns out, it’s just as well I don’t take a break, as the weather is really kicking in. Trees are bending horizontal, and I’m mighty pleased to pull into the hotel car park in Ballyshannon.
The three ladies in reception quote me a price which sounds pretty steep, but so tired am I and aware that this is my one night away on my own, that I accept and make conversation. As soon as they discover I live in Salthill, and so am no longer an English tourist, the price suddenly drops by 20 quid for the night.
Whoopee! Up the Irish! Up the English!
Right up.
My room is spacious, clean and lovely, but colder than a day-old polar bear peeper, so I call down and ask ever so politely what time the heating might be coming on, please?
The lady is gushingly apologetic, and acts immediately to counteract the storm that wants to share my room.
Fair enough, can’t do better. Except, perchance, heat two or three vacant rooms, on the off chance of customers?
Then off into the howling gale rain-lashed Ballyshannon night, where I find a tiny wooden bar with two fellas, a woman and no dog, but I am home. The gents are conversing about their days. Himself didn’t get up ‘til midday. De other fella woke up at 10, had a fag and a cup of tea, and took himself back to bed.
I grew up in England and will never cease to admire the brazen lack of work ethic in parts of Irish society. Back in Blighty these lads would have to sound either apologetic or extremely appreciative of their lie-ins, yet here it’s just seen as a way of getting through the winter, and ah sure feckit.
The next morning, going to breakfast early, i find the lights on in the restaurant but nobody home. I can hear a cook in the kitchen behind the door, but nobody knows I’m here.
After sitting like a sad solitary plonker for 15 minutes I knock on the kitchen door, whereupon the cook calls the waitress.
Far from apologising, she basically tells me off for not having walked past reception, to alert the woman there that I wanted breakfast.
“Oh, so are you that woman on reception?” I ask.
“I am!” she declares, walking into the kitchen to chat with the cook.
When I check out the same lass is back at the reception desk. I tell her that the room was lovely, save for the three big fat black pubes I found on my sheets as I turned down the bedcovers.
She covers her mouth with her hand and splutters
“Oh no! That’s disgusting!” through her splayed fingers.
But that’s all she says. There isn’t going to be an apology or, (dare one dream a little?) a discount.
Ballyshannon was great, but as ever good old Ireland is still the home of bad old Ireland!

The time has come to stand in the streets together and be counted!

2009-03-02T09:19:00.001Z

I’ve been trying really hard not to write about the financial crisis blah recession blah economic downturn blah blah, because if you’re anything like me, you’re fed up to the back teeth with it. If you lost your job or can’t find a new one, the only thing you need less than the sight of failed bankers and corrupt politicians talking at you from your tele is yet more printed matter running past your eyes going oooh errr isn’t it awful.
Yeh, you’re probably as bored of all the excreta that has already been dribbled about this banking crisis as I am, and yet there’s one gripe inside me, like a mental tapeworm, niggling my thoughts, growing off my annoyance, biting into my anger, becoming gigantic gorging on my outrage.
The only way I can stop this parasite popping its head out of my mouth and sinking its chomping great fangs into my head is to dump it on you, so here goes.
Did you hear the one about Paddy O’Reilly? A few years ago, at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom, Paddy wanted to start a business, so off he went to his bank and filled out all the forms, after which he was given a whacking great loan.
Trouble was, Paddy’s inflatable pineapple business went down the pan. Exhausted and depressed, Paddy applied for another loan, got it, but instead of using it wisely, he proceeded to blow the money on fast cars and slow women. Unable to make the repayments, Paddy went to see his bank manager, asking for money to pay off the loan.
His bank manager said that the bank would be delighted to give Paddy all the money he needed. The bank would pay off the loan, no strings, and in fact, the bank would add a bit extra, like, do ya know the way, like, to make sure that Paddy could get back on his feet after all his troubles, maybe buy the missis a nice day at the spa.
Paddy was over the moon. He walked away debt free, with a wad of cash in his pocket and a present for the wife.
What was that you said? You didn’t hear that one?
No?
Well no, neither did I, because it never happened.
Coming soon to an Inferiority Complex near you: ‘Robin Hood Through the Looking Glass’, a classic tale of robbing the poor to pay the rich. From the makers of Recession, directed by people who told you that you lost your job in the name of efficiency, comes the sensational idea that to boost the economy, governments need to rob the public and give their money to banks.
You can try to blind me with financial science; twist my brain with explanations of short selling; contort my consciousness with talk of derivatives and send me hoolallly noony trying to justify hedge funds ‘til you’re blue in the face, it’ll make no difference.
We get it. We understand. We know that we, in good faith, gave banks our money, which they gambled greedily and lost. We know that our money doesn’t really sit in a vault at the back of the branch. We know that banks don’t even own the money they loan as mortgages, which begs the question: how are they able to repossess our houses?
What’s more, we now know that there is no real money at all, but instead electronic signals that rise, fall, or sink without trace at the drop of a noodle in Tokyo, or a flash of sunspot activity.
We know that if we lived our lives budgeting in the same way as governments and banks, we’d all be broke, jobless and licking the pavement for something to eat.
So given all that, here’s the niggling thought that has eaten me up for months:
Why do we have to give up our heard-earned wages to save failed banks? When did banks become more important than people? Why do we need to be the medicine? The idea of them doing the same for us, of banks being there for us normal human beings when times get tough, is as ridiculous as Paddy O'Reilly's tale.
We know how it works with banks. When you’re in the money they love you, and send you stuff in the post all the time, encouraging you to become beholden to them by debt as quickly as possible.
When you haven’t got money, or when times are hard, banks don’t want to know.
‘You should have been more prudent when you had that cash!’ they tell you.
‘Come back and see us when you have some collateral or capita!’ they say.
‘Why not start a savings account, and try to build up your financial base?’ they ask.
Basically, get lost poor boy, we don’t want to know.
And now, having behaved worse than a bunch of drunken gambling addicts on speed and Daddy’s yacht, they expect us to give them our money.
Many people seem to think that the welfare of banks is more important than that of we, the people. If you know what I’m missing here, please let me know.
In the meantime, I’m wondering if it’s not time for our worm to turn. Why should you be jobless just because some tosspot in a button-down collar decided to short sell your company’s shares? Why are our wages going to pay for the bankers’ bookies bills? What chance would you have turning up at your local bank branch with a failed betting slip from the 3.45 at Punchestown Races, and insisting they give you the money that you would have won if your horse had possessed a leg at each corner. Yes, you admit, you backed a horse that had three legs, but the odds were astronomical, just too good to resist, so give me the money.
Of course it’s absurd, yet no less absurd than banks expecting the same favours from us.
At what point do the downtrodden masses decide that we are as mad as hell and not willing to take it any more? The French, as usual, were first to scent revolution, marching disgruntled (as only the French can) through the streets of Paris, protesting about the way the people were being made to suffer for the sins of the bankers.
Maybe this is the big one. Maybe it’s time to stand in the streets together, and be counted.

Is that a nicotine inhaler or a sin of the flesh?

2009-02-23T09:39:00.004Z

The first line of the leaflet that comes with my ESB bill tells me that the Commission for Energy Regulation has approved an average price decrease of 0.6%.
Yippee, I think, maybe.
But hang on a mo. Oh blimey, they’re messing with my mind, momma! Their mad doublespeak ways are sending me Loco di Laurentis in the noodle.
Below the initial good news comes swathes of bullshit tidied into thrusting red bullet points... ‘proceeds from sale of certain ESB generating plants’... blah blah blah... ‘an increase of 2.7% in electricity unit charges’... blah blah blah... ‘identified on your bill as a ‘PSO related rebate’... blah blah blah, and somehow you know that at the end of all this crap, that lovely young price drop will have turned into a lumpy old brute of a price increase.
Sure enough, the price of the domestic 24 hour rate has gone up from €0.1597 to €0.1640, and the NightSaver Day rate (pure doublespeak itself!) has risen from €0.1706 to €0.1752.
That’s all I needed to know. I’m just a punter on the ground here, trying to work out how much I owe and how much I earn. If I was making a take-over bid for ESB, I might need to know more, but I’m not and I don’t.
Do they think we’re stupid? Don’t go telling us that prices are going down if really they’re going up, PSO related rebate or no PSO related rebate.
Off I go to Hibernian Aviva to renew my car insurance. Despite the fact that I’ve made no claims since Noah let go of the dove, my premium’s still somehow gone up over last year.
“Oh yes, insurance is up across the board,” explains the helpful Hibernian lady.
I point out that maybe just maybe my premium had gone up because Hibernian had spent billions hiring Bruce Willis, Ringo Star and any other celebrities they could find who had changed their names to appear in a massive TV ad campaign to share the tumultuous news that Hibernian was changing its name to Aviva Hibernian. Or is it Hibernian Aviva?
Why stop there? Why not get the Pope and Postman Pat? We all know that Pope hasn’t always been his real name, just like we know he’s not allergic to a little bit of rewriting history. As for Postman Pat, not many people know this, but the wholly fictional animated character’s real name is Bernard. His middle name is Padraig, from his mother’s side, and he uses it to show us all he’s a good lad who loves his mummy.
We’re not stupid. We know Hibernian isn’t really a bunch of hearty lads sporting crazy curly beards in rough knit jerseys sitting in a crusty bog house on the West Coast, trying to insure their mates’ fishing boats. We know that it’s part of a multinational conglomerate, because sadly, corporate styling works, and look, see, the Norwich Union have the same brand colours.
All they needed to do was to send one simple card through the post to existing customers saying they had changed their name. Maybe even an email.
But not this ridiculous TV campaign, which I’m now paying for on my car insurance. I don’t want to sponsor their commercials. This adbreak spectacular starring a whole bunch ageing overpriced A-listers comes to you thanks to Charlie’s Premium, because he’s a customer who really cares that you know the right name for us.
Meanwhile Chorus aka UPC aka ntl clearly want to dump the entire concept of basic cable and turn us all onto digital. When I signed up for the basic package it cost €19.99, but ntl have gradually upped the price to one euro less than the digital package, and if we upgrade they’ll throw in a digital video recorder free of charge. Oh, and they’ll send Mary round to do the dishes three times a week, and Jim will pop over on the last Thursday of the month to tidy up the garden a bit and do any odd jobs, d’ya know the kind of thing.
Thanks ntl, but I am not stupid. The basic cable is no longer good value for money, so yes, for the sake of quality channels like Film 4, BBC 3 and 4, I probably will fork out the other quid and upgrade, thereby ending up with reams of mindless channels I don’t want, never did want, but will absolutely inevitably become distracted by and end up watching, telling myself I am fascinated by their inanity, that I’m not really dumbing down, but watching all this shite as a socially anthropological experiment oh look the donkey ate the ice cream ahh, thus naturally missing the excellent movie on Film 4 or the fascinating documentary on BBC3.
Meanwhile, Hibernian Die Hard Aviva are moving in for the kill. I don’t qualify for their ‘Match More Make More’ offer, because even though my car and health insurance is with them, I insure the house contents with Quinn, because they offer cover for rentals, which Hibernian Indiana Jones and the Fabulous Four Aviva do not.
But that doesn’t stop them. All I really want in the mail is my health insurance membership cards, but instead I’m bombarded with letter after letter about their wonderful ‘Match More Make More’ offer, if only we’d please register for it online, pretty please with a cherry on top.
But I don’t qualify, so there is no bloody point. Then I find a message on my mobile from someone in Aviva Rocky Meets The Parents Hibernian asking me to register online for the offer.
Enough.
I call them and tell them what they can do with their offer and will they please stop stalking me.
Doublespeak drives me mad. There’s the petrol that’s ‘better for the environment’, rather than just ‘less bad’, and now, in the best doublespeak I’ve ever heard, there’s a Nicorette ad on TV offering ‘a therapeutic dose of nicotine’.
Working on the premise that anything which makes you feel better is ‘therapeutic’:
‘This isn’t an ordinary syringe. This is a sanitised hypodermic syringe. This isn’t just heroin. This is a top grade therapeutic dose of Afghanistan’s finest.....’
But my absolute favourite is the voiceover for the Nicorette Inhaler ad:
“Satisfies your urges, and keeps your hands busy.”
It had to happen: if you leave 24 advertising agency monkeys alone for long enough, they’re bound to come up with a replacement for masturbation!

“England? Is that some little island somewhere?”

2009-02-16T10:54:00.001Z

When I was a young boy I used to be dead proud of the British Empire. Oh yes, this drippy-dippy do-goody drenched liberal anti-racist politically-correct socialist used to sit and stare in awe and admiration at his atlas.
I just couldn't help myself. Aged six in 1966, no notions of social justice, political ideology or moral relativism existed in my head. England had just won the World Cup, beating those pesky Germans yet again.
Sometimes my brother and I played Cowboys and Indians, but mostly we just re-enacted what we thought were great moments from the war our parents had just lived through. Mostly these battles were spawned from the pages of Commando comics, where ingenious Tommy never failed to come up with a cunning ruse to foil evil Fritz.
So England was the best country in the world in my infantile mind, and upon being given my first ever atlas at school, I gazed upon the world map with disbelief.
England was tiny, absolutely minuscule, but huge swathes of the world map were coloured red, which meant they were ‘Ours’. The whole of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, India and quite a few sizeable chunks of just about everywhere else all showed that little boy that they had been beaten by ‘Us’.
There was no doubt at all that we were the best, and blissfully happy in my prepubescent ignorance, it never occurred to me that any part of it might be a bad thing.
Everything I read seemed to back me up, and oh boy, did I read! Under the covers late at night, Ladybird books were devoured by the dozen, reinforcing my youthful prejudices. It didn’t matter who the book was about, each and every one laid more foundation to the notion that the English seriously kicked evil-doer’s arses, whenever and wherever they appeared.
Sir Francis Drake was a brave explorer and a supreme tactician, seemingly defeating the Spanish Armada single-handedly; Sir Walter Raleigh was fearless explorer and a great scientist, as well as the perfect gentleman. Charles the First was a good lad, and Oliver Cromwell was also a good lad. Even when they hated each other and started civil wars, all the English lads were good lads.
Nobody told me anything different, because victory over the Nazis was only 20 years past, and what’s more, Geoff Hurst scored a hat trick against the Hun in the final at Wembley, in front of her Majesty the Queen, and if that didn’t put God on our side, well, God must just be a very silly billy indeed.
Two World Wars and One World Cup, Doo Daah, Dooo Daah.
That was as far as my historical knowledge and political awareness went before my age hit double figures.
Burdened as I am now with all the boring detritus of a social conscience and half an education, there lurks still a tiny but eternal part of me that is extremely proud of England for giving the Luftwaffe such a hammering back in 1939, and for keeping out the Nazis against all the odds, alone for years before America entered the fray.
It would be a rare Irishman who agrees with me, but I’m sure that had the English lost the Battle of Britain, allowing Hitler to launch his ground invasion, Ireland would have come under German occupation.
So in a revision of history that would make Ladybird books and Holocaust denier David Irving proud, there’s an argument to say that the British saved the Irish from being colonised by a brutal foreign power.
Funny old world, innit.
Anyway, as regular colyoomistas know, my opinions are no longer quite so right wing. My brother introduced me to socialism when I was 13, and I embraced the chance to rebel against my Tory parents. Quite possibly, part of me still does. Mind you, after travelling the globe as an Englishman for many decades, you don’t half get browned off bearing the cross of times long gone.
Wasn't me mate! I wasn’t there!
Thankfully, my inflated perception of what put the ‘Great’ into ‘Britain’ took a short sharp kick in the goolies when I first left Europe in 1984.
Lost in wonder and excitement upon arriving in New York, I felt I’d finally arrived in the modern world. Eager to play, I first needed money, so entering a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank, I asked if I could change some Travellers Cheques.
The woman took my passport, looked at it and then showed it to her colleague, who shook his head. Several minutes later, having consulted half the staff in the bank, she came back to me, pointing to the words:
“The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
“Yeh, that’s it! Great Britain! United Kingdom! You know, Queenie and Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard and all that? Err, let’s see, erm, Winston Churchill? Bobby Charlton?”
Oh good god, I was starting to sound like a Spanish tourist lost in Piccadilly. But this was New York, and surely here, just the other side of the pond, they knew about England, didn’t they?
Most probably they did, but ‘England’, the one word missing from my passport, was quite possibly the cause of the confusion.
Resisting the temptation to point to the old-fashioned writing on my passport’s inside cover page, that arrogantly stated how ‘Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires Johnny Foreigner and Donny Dago to do whatever this wonderful English person might want of them...” I smiled and pleaded until she nodded, gave me the money and handed me back my passport, asking:
“Is this some little island somewhere?”
At this I paused, thought for a little bit, then laughed out loud, agreeing with her, my patriotism finally laid to rest.
“Yes, yes, that is exactly what it is. A little island somewhere!”
“Have a nice day now.”
My rehabilitation to a reasonable global perspective came many years later, in a pub near Timoleague, Co. Cork. As an Englishman travelling with his German girlfriend, we made an odd couple, and received many raised eyebrows, but none so brilliantly minimalist and wholly damning as the one delivered by the pub’s landlord.
As he lopped the tops off our pints of Guinness, he looked over at us and calmly quietly slowly stated:
“So you are German ... and he is English ... hmmmm ... (long pause) ... well, I don’t have any particular problem with Germans.”

“Sorry, I don’t speak Irish!” “But I’m talking English, ye eedjit!”

2009-02-09T09:55:00.004Z

“You on holiday?”
All I’ve done is say hello to a bloke in a tiny shop in Galway City. Do I look like I’m on holiday? It’d be nice to think I looked as relaxed and happy as an aimless tourist, but I don’t. Sorry, but today I decided to leave my Kiss Me Kwik hat back at the house, oh and call me crazy, but in Ireland I prefer to wear my Union Jack underpants inside my jeans.
No, he doesn’t think I look like a tourist. He just managed to spot a funny accent.
And so for the eighty three billionth time, I run through an exchange that has been so practised and prepared over the last 17 years it now feels like yet another performance of a short play.
“No, I Live here.”
“Oh, do you?”
”Yep, arrived 17 years ago. Born in London, lived all over the place.”
“Oh, because I didn’t really detect any London in your accent.”
“Well, there’s all sorts mixed up in there. A bit of cockney, Yorkshire, California, and if I’m drinking too much whiskey and talking to a farmer from Carna, Connemara as well.”
“Oh! I see.” he says, dropping his eyes as if slightly embarrassed, and who could blame him? I’m not proud of the way my accent wobbles with the wind, but there’s precious little I can do about it.
Somewhere deep in my noodlebox lurks a powerful insecurity that tells my voicebox to make the same noises as those talking around me. I don’t know if it’s linked up to the Jewish gene that seeks to aid my survival by keeping my head down, not being too visible, loud or different in any way.
Hmm, cancel that thought, seeing as I’m spouting away in this Noble Rag, and there’s that photo of me up at the top of the page.
So if it’s not about assimilation or survival, maybe it’s just my rather pathetic attempt to be liked.
As far as my conscious mind is aware, I feel no need to talk like you, but oops, I did it again! I can hear myself turning into an American as I chat to the backpackers in the pub; there’s an Ulster crescendo coming out of me as I talk with my friend from Fermanagh; posh plummy public school tones tumble forth as I speak to my mum in the phone; my Norf Lundern credentials gurgle through the beers as I talk footie with my old Chelsea mates from over there.
After three months of working with down-to-earth lads in a garage in Australia, my Pommie accent had all but disappeared. Home-grown taxi drivers have long been the greatest arbiters of their nation’s identity, so when one of Melbourne’s finest turned round to me and exclaimed
“Chroist! Ya don’ saaarnd loike a Pom!”
I was truly taken aback. Like the Irish, Australians are rarely in a rush to pay an Englishman a compliment, let alone acknowledge them as one of their own, so I knew my mimicking skills must be in overdrive.
It’s not a particularly admirable skill to have, but there are benefits to this subconscious vocal vacillating, not the least of which is a heightened ability to spot how people react to different accents.
Even though Americans invariably think more highly of the Irish than they do of the English, upon hearing a posh English accent their jaws drop, their saliva glands shoot into surf mode, and their eyes look up longingly, imploring you to take them back to your country estate and rescue them from their humdrum existence.
Strangely, the Irish also respond in a positive way to the most polished of English accents. Over the years, I’ve noticed that if I have a favour to ask of an Irish stranger, I’m much more likely to be trusted if I come over all rather splendidly gushworthy and lardi-dar blue blood, than mix it up wiv a bit of Eastenders street blag, innit.
I remember being shocked to the core a while back, whilst food shopping in Dunnes, when some geezer who sounded like the bastard son of Prince Philip and Winston Churchill came over the supermarket tannoy to advise Irish shoppers of the week's special offers.
Why? Why on earth would the Irish want price advice from somebody who sounds like the evil absentee landlord who burned their great granddad's barn to the ground?
Accents evolved so that we might easily identify our kinfolk, but they don’t seem to help others identify us back. While I lived in California, my English accent was constantly mistaken for Australian. It made no difference if I gave it London Large and came over all Phil Mitchell, they still thought I was a sad bad very physically-challenged surfer from Sydney.
When I got back to Ireland I made a terrible mess of things. Sitting on a barstool chatting with a charming barmaid called Kerry, I thought it reasonable to ask her if she came from the Kingdom. Raising her eyebrows with shock and disdain, she put her hands on her hips, threw back her head and with pride announced that she came from Texas, that I should never forget it, and that maybe I’d drunk enough.
Trouble was, y’see, finding myself suddenly back in the Haemorrhoid Hisle, I mistook that strong seam of the Irish within the American accent for the real thing!
Mind you, that tale withers in comparison to the cock-up I made when I first moved to Connemara. Eager to establish myself at the local pub, I sat at the bar for many hours drinking, I er I mean investing in my rural future.
Anyway, all around me I heard an alien language, voices peaking troughing laughing and shouting words I understood not a bit.
I felt sure that given time, I’d pick up the local lingo, and knew from experience that if I sat there long enough, with a smile on my face, some kind soul would reach out and engage me in conversation.
Sure enough, a few pints later, one of the older farmer gents turned to me and asked what sounded to me at the time like:
“Didjagh kafoolly higheeloor jubblish?”
To which I replied as politely as I could:
“Sorry, but I don’t speak Irish!”
Instantly came the reply:
“Neither do I ye feckin eedjit. I’m talking English to ya!”

Once more life is like my Chelsea - brash, brazen and unpredictable

2009-02-03T16:05:00.004Z

This Sunday, live on Sky TV’s Super Sunday Match Of The Decade All New Must See Exclusive Major Television Event, my beloved Chelsea will travel to Anfield to take on Liverpool.
Will we win? Will the mighty Blues come out as one fighting unit and bury the reasonable doubts raised over the past few months? Will the players be ready to fight and die for Luiz Felipe Scolari? Or will we Chelsea fans be treated once again to the heart-chilling sight of a bunch of overpaid eccentric selfish egomaniacs having a bit of a lackadaisical kickabout, only to finally relinquish the result and fail to attract future employers?
Strange as it might seem, I’m delighted to say that I haven’t a clue.
In what is turning out to be the best Premiership season for many years, I have got my Chelsea back. I can’t say I’m loving it, because to be a true Chelsea fan is to suffer forty-fold for every moment of glory or joy, but at least my world is back where it belongs.
During the Jose Mourinho years, everything was ridiculously predictable. We had a manager who was not only handsome compared to other football managers (mind you, a shaved pineapple singing ‘My Way’ would walk away with the best-looking bird at the Premiership Managers Ball) but also so cool and charismatic that along with American Express, every woman in the world and half of the men wanted to own him, have him use him for their own depraved ends.
But all Mourinho wanted to do was to inspire the ‘Group’, and for a few brief years Chelsea metamorphosed into the antithesis of all they had ever stood for as a club.
We couldn't not be beaten at home. We won league titles, and picked up domestic cups as if they were birthday presents, ours by right each year.
Everybody hated that Chelsea, and even the most true Blue fans such as my sad self could not pretend to enjoy the remorselessly effective football that pulverised opponents. Like watching a glacier grind a mountainside, it was always impressive, yet not great spectator sport.
Now that Chelsea have returned to normal, everything can go wrong and invariably does. Manchester United didn’t just beat us, they destroyed us, and the egos in the Blues dressing room are bouncing around like a teenager’s testicles.
Scolari is clearly an intelligent and pleasant man. Having won the World Cup with Brazil, he’s a cross between Gene Hackman and Garfield the cartoon cat. Larger-than-life, whilst still cuddly and cute, he might not be the perfect man to manage a Premiership-winning side (Sir Alex is undoubtedly the blueprint for that), Scolari represents the purest essence of what a Chelsea manager should be.
He thinks that everybody loves him, even when it is clear that most people thinks he’s lost the plot, and never had a sub-plot to turn to in emergencies. Despite a massive improvement in is English, I watch him on tele, wondering how inspiring his pep talks can possibly be to players such as John Terry and Michael Ballack, whose skills represent, shall we say, the more utilitarian and less beautiful side of football.
When Big Phil goes:
“Today is game is ver’ ver’ himportan’, because we do not go boom boom, but bap bap bap and then pip pop on the left and yesterday in training must not be again, never never again, because I want you all to love Chelsea and never not give hup!”
do J.T. and Frank Frank Super Frankie Lampard understand what their manager is after at all, or do they just nod, smile and go
“Yeh, right boss, we’ll put the boot right in, good and proper!”
So now my football team once more reflects the way I see life, wherein victories are precious and unpredictable affairs to be cherished, while losses and draws are accepted with nobility and humility, learned from and then forgotten.
Even though I deeply suspect that Manchester United will once again win the league this year, I live in hope, and in the meantime take great delight in watching our rivals losing their minds.
Each year Raffa Benitez and Arsene Wenger look and sound less like classy intelligent football managers, and more like characters out of a Samuel Beckett play: ‘Waiting for Chewy’, in which a Spaniard and a Frenchman sit on a bench, ranting and raving in paranoiac and unintelligible outbursts either side of a silent gum-chewing Scotsman.
Away from mad managers there are always the players, those bastions of sanity and wisdom who crash their 2 day-old quarter million pound Ferraris into walls without raising their heartbeat, and know no more about the price of eggs than a chicken does about taking penalties.
Back in the bad old days of Chelsea’s inglorious past, we had characters on the playing staff that make the indubitably talented pretty boy Christiano Ronaldo look like the vacuous pompous and pimply little twerp he truly is.
Blond striker Teddy Maybank first played for Chelsea in 1975, but is best remembered for an appearance on Cilla Black’s TV show, ‘Blind Date’. Everything went well on his romantic weekend away with his TV date, but he really should have told his wife, who watched the show on tele and kicked him where no stud should ever stray.
The wonderful Mickey Thomas had many successful years at Chelsea in the 1980’s, but in 1993 he was coaching Wrexham, and passing forged £10 notes to his own players. After he was nicked good and proper, Mickey had the presence of mind to ask in court “Anyone got a tenner for the phone?”
This verbal genius from the same source of pure Chelsea humour who when asked to comment on high player wages, responded:
“Roy Keane’s on a 100 Grand a week. So was I until the police found my printing machine!”
Win lose or draw, I’ll stay Chelsea blue to the end. Manchester United might win more championships and trophies than Chelsea, but their records are marked only by what they fail to achieve. There is precious little joy in their victories, only feelings of failure when they are beaten.
Now that Chelsea are back to their unpredictable worst, I’ll celebrate each Chelsea goal as it comes along, aware that like each breath I take, it might be the last!

If I was ‘Delayed Indefinitely’, am I still there?

2009-01-26T14:52:00.002Z

Back in the days before digital doodads, the Departures and Arrivals boards in airports used to display information on ladders of plastic slats, and when a plane left or landed, the whole gismo would suddenly go shufty-shufty-shifty, shufty-shufty-shifty, shufty-shufty-shifty, as the slats flew around to assimilate the new information. The whole effect was quite trippy and hypnotic, because the names and numbers appeared to flow upwards, like the waters of a river, as the sign updated itself.
25 years ago I was sitting on a seat in Auckland airport watching just such a sign. As was my youthful travelling way back then, I’d slept in the airport to save money, patiently waiting to take my first step towards Australia, via Noumea, or New Caledonia, as the imperialists would have it.
I didn’t really want to go to Noumea at all, but to score the cheap flight to Sydney, I had to travel with an airline called UTA, the less well-known Pacific branch of Air France. All the young travellers flew UTA around the Pacific Rim in those days, despite the fact that the French cared for the airline just as they treated the people of their Polynesian colonies: with contempt, neglect and disregard for health.
With the now common exodus of young people on Round-The-World trips, I’m sure that standards have risen enormously, but then, among we few travellers, UTA stood for ‘Unknown Time of Arrival’, with flights invariably delayed, overbooked or cancelled.
But boy, were they cheap! Even though UTA pilots always seemed to plot a course across the Pacific Ocean through every lightning-flashing thunder-crashing storm, I flew them all the time, simply because without them I couldn’t afford to travel.
My flight to Noumea had been delayed for a few hours, but it was estimated at 09:30, so I shuffled off to the bathroom to wash and make myself feel almost human. It had been another long wait, but as long as I’m ready and have everything I need, this control freak can do all the waiting that’s out there.
But it would be good to move on. I’d enjoyed an unbelievably wonderful few months, hitching around New Zealand, but after the relative solitude of the road I was eager to reach Australia, to see old friends who had decades before left England.
But I had some reservations about this trip to Noumea, if you’ll excuse the pun. There was a civil war going on there, especially notable as a triangular conflict. There were the colonial Caldoches, the native Kanaks and the regular French (if anyone can really be called ‘regular’ when operating in a country as far away from their own as it is possible to go in this world), all having a go at each other over an island rich in nickel.
There’s always a natural resource in the mix somewhere. War follows natural resources as poopers follows peepers.
Having scraped the detritus of another rough night’s sleeping off my teeth and tongue, I threw my blue bag over my shoulder and walked with vigour towards to check-in desk. Passing the Departures board, I threw it a cursory glance, more out of habit than interest, and off it went, as if propelled by my very own eyes:
shufty-shufty-shifty, shufty-shufty-shifty, shufty-shufty-shifty.
shufty-shufty-shifty, shufty-shufty,-shifty shufty-shufty-shifty.
The ripple of slatty movement arrived at the slat with my own flight on it, and whoooshhhh! It was off, moving around, who knew if up or down...
shufty-shufty-shifty, shufty-shufty-shifty shufty-shufty-shifty.
shufty-shufty-shifty, shufty-shufty-shifty shufty-shufty-shifty.
My feet were frozen mid-stride as I waited for the plastic flow to settle.
And there it was.
UTA flight to Noumea: ‘Delayed Indefinitely’.
Delayed indefinitely? What did that mean? I have seen all manner of delays; every possible reason any airline or airport might give to delay a flight, but ultimately, always either ‘Cancelled’ or ‘Estimated at...’.
Only UTA could come up with ‘Delayed Indefinitely’.
No. No no pleeeeeeeaaaaase no. I was here all bloody night and everything was okay until I went to brush my teeth and then there was the bad shufty-shufty-shifty and now what? Some kind of existential holding pattern?
Was I meant to sit there for the rest of my life?
And what of that plane? Had it left L.A. or not? If it hadn’t, then when was it going to, and if it had, how was it delayed indefinitely?
A gaggle of emaciated sunburned young things were crowded into the tiny UTA office by the time I got there, so I heard from several over-excited youthfully exuberant types that our plane had come down on Vanuatu; had been hijacked in Tahiti; had crash landed into the ocean; had an engine on fire and had to turn back...
To this day I still don’t know what happened to that plane. Instead, void of Kiwi dollars and resigned to my fate, I waited another 24 hours in that airport, trying to enjoy and learn from the experience of being delayed indefinitely.
Bring on the æons.
Delay me for epochs, see if I care, declared the control freak inside me defiantly.
I’m not sure if I really learned my lesson that day, because I am still a passenger on my very own Control Freak Express, departing Freedom City daily, stopping at Anxiety, Stress, Exhaustion and all stations to Self-Inflicted Misery.
Still, the delay meant that I had only three days to get through on Noumea instead of four, and then I would be in Australia at last. Three days on a tropical island? How bad could that possibly be, compared to being stuck, ‘Delayed Indefinitely’, in an airport?
Well, quite bad, as it turned out. The Scouser lad that sat next to me on the bus from Noumea Airport to the hotel decided it was would be a great idea - “Crackin’ “ - to get out his huge camera and take lots of photos of all the military planes and tanks lined up in the fields outside.
He was promptly arrested and yanked off the bus, never to be seen again. Suspected of being his companion, I was placed under house arrest, unable to leave a tiny room for the entirety of my stay.
One minute I’m delayed indefinitely, freed from everything but progress for all eternity.
The next I’m imprisoned, stuck for a finite time into a tiny space.
Life’s wee tricks, eh? No wonder I’m a control freak. Sod it, if that’s the worst of me, I came out okay.