Community Voice Musings

Ronaldo to transfer to Clonee United?

2009-06-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

Last summer, a senior citizen was physically ejected from Millennium Park in Blanchardstown when an official from the Fingal County Council parks department deemed it possible that she might “look at a child” whilst in there. The fact that the park was home to a lone magpie at the time did not deter the official on the grounds that, if children were to come into the park, they would run the risk of being looked at by this elderly lady.
Since that time, I have paid careful heed to the Council’s redefining of the old adage about children being seen and not heard. Not wishing to be branded a criminal, if I am ever driving down a street and a child dashes out after a ball, I immediately avert my eyes until I have passed the spot and I would urge all other good citizens to do the same.
Thus it was that as I passed by the green area in the middle of Hazelbury Park recently, I shielded my eyes lest my gaze should accidentally fall upon some of the children that I could hear having a nice, quiet game of football there. And in shielding my eyes, I therefore failed to spot the wayward clearance that caught me expertly on the ear.
I could hear that the players were upset by the incident. Just as some people cannot help but laugh out loud when given a particularly tragic piece of news, I could hear from the whoops of laughter on the green just how much the accident had affected them.
“Sorry mister,” said what sounded like a young boy and as I righted my glasses on my nose, I inadvertently caught a glance at his retreating back as he dribbled the ball back up to the pitch. What I saw caused my heart to palpitate wildly and I did a quick double take. Well, you don’t expect Cristiano Ronaldo to turn up in Hazelbury Park, do you?
But it definitely was him. True, he had blonde, spiky hair, was approximately four feet tall and yelled in a Dublin accent that it was “our throw.” These three facts, allied to his somewhat stocky physique, caused me to question momentarily whether it really was the greatest player in the world who had just tripped over a rather sturdy dandelion to more hoots of laughter, but his Manchester United shirt, with the number 7 on his back and, crucially, his name “Ronaldo” emblazoned above it, put an end to all doubt.
And the way he sat on his backside with his arms outstretched appealing for a penalty simply reinforced the matter.
Of course, now that it was actually Ronaldo and not a twelve year old boy, I was allowed by law to look at him. What I saw merely lent credence to my long-held opinion that television actually distorts reality. The camera may never lie but it obviously has the ability to turn a spiky haired blonde individual into an athletic Latino type. To be honest, he didn’t look a bit like he does on the telly but then, people seldom do.
As I watched him, I thought he looked somewhat out of shape. He controlled the ball about as far as some people can kick it and when he stubbed his toe taking a free kick, I thought that the sooner Real Madrid get him back for pre-season training, the better.
But if the erstwhile Manchester United star had signed for Madrid, then what on earth was he doing in Hazelbury Park? I came to the conclusion that he must have been visiting relatives. There are a lot of new Irish in the area and it is a well-known fact that many people have emigrated from Madeira to Dublin 15, doubtless attracted by the sun and the opulent lifestyle that we are famed for.
But, as I watched in awe as he bore down on goal, that theory went out the window as he was sent crashing to the turf by Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, obviously keen to get in the first blow for the Catalans. Fernando Torres then came along and pushed Messi away, making him cry, before Robbie Keane in his Ireland shirt grabbed Torres by the neck and proceeded to wrestle him to the ground.
The ensuing melee was eventually sorted out by the traditional method of scissors/paper/rock and the world’s footballing elite – with, bizarrely, Kilkenny’s Henry Shefflin in goal - then got back to their training session.
This was truly groundbreaking news, I thought. Idly, I wondered if they were making another advertisement for Nike but there were no signs of any film cameras around. There was only one possible explanation – they were all trying out for Clonee United.
There had been no rumours of this on Sky Sports News, nor in any of the print media. This really was a journalistic coup of the highest order and I could earn myself a nice little holiday if I played my cards right. I mean, what wouldn’t the Community Voice give for a picture of Ronaldo, Messi and Torres playing three and in on a Friday afternoon in Hazelbury Park?
Well, “any money” is probably the answer to that question, as the editor of that paper is a sort of football atheist, preferring to have his dreams shattered annually by a team of fifteen in light blue and navy. But there was always The Sun and The Star and The Sunday Wuddle. This was my passport to a life of ease.
Alas, I have never been in the habit of bringing my camera along when going down to the shops for milk. It has never occurred to me to do so and my lack of foresight was to cost me dearly. However, I did have my mobile phone, which my wife insists should accompany me everywhere in case I have a nasty accident and need to tell her to which hospital they are rushing me.
However, with some more lack of foresight – this was becoming a trend – I had never bothered to sit down and figure out how the camera function on the phone actually works. Desperately I started pressing buttons for functions called Applications, Log and Organiser but there was nothing in any of them that looked like a camera. And then, as I perused Settings, I heard a lady in one of the houses surrounding the green calling in Wayne for his dinner.
To my surprise, it wasn’t the handsomely-challenged Mr Rooney who ran off but Ronaldo himself. Very clever, I thought. Obviously trying to throw any snoopers like myself off the scent and keep this potentially earth-shattering news under wraps for as long as possible.
Desperately I turned back to my phone, flicking through Profiles and Themes and Shortcuts while, one by one, the greatest footballers in the world all ran off for their dinner. As Messi slammed the hall door, so I let a howl of rage and flung my phone onto the tarmac.
My wife told me later that I didn’t have a camera on my phone. It made little difference. I had had my moment and blew it.

What kind of doormat are you?

2009-06-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

I once worked with a man called Matt. People kept walking all over him.
There are people who claim that they can tell what kind of person you are by the food that you eat, by the clothes that you wear, by the pet that you have. There are even those – wait for this – who claim that your personality can be determined by the configuration of the planets in the sky at the time of your birth!
Far more scientific is the study of doormatology, the relationship between the humble hall doormat and the person who placed it there. Practitioners of this art are known as doormatologists, not to be confused with dermatologists, who generally have little or no interest in doormats, except in cases where they might cause skin irritations.
Using case studies and pie charts, doormatologists claim that they can tell what kind of person inhabits a house simply by studying the doormat that sits humbly outside of the hall door. Naturally, this is of interest to us in Dublin 15, well-known, due to the building boom, as the doormat capital of the western world and in the interest of the community, I have been doing a bit of research into this comparatively new science.
Generally, doormats come in two basic shapes. There is the rectangular and there is the semi-circular, although I have come across a rather fetching oval shape in Hazelbury Park and word of mouth tells me that there is an Ireland-shape mat attracting some media interest in Lohunda.
But these are very much the exception. The world, to all intents and purposes, is split into two people – those with rectangular doormats and those with semi-circular ones. The rectangulars outnumber the semi-circulars by about four to one, achieving a comfortable majority that is unlikely to be usurped in the next generation.
The common doormat (doormatus doormatus) generally should have stiff tan-coloured hairs over a rubber backing. Some people occasionally use off-cuts from a carpet but this holds no sway with the true doormat lover, who point out that the off-cut has neither the penetration of bristles to clean a grooved sole nor the rubber backing to stop it moving when it is stood upon.
The most common doormat is of course the plain rectangle, replete with the aforementioned stiff tan-coloured hairs. Functional and strong, the person who owns this is a no-nonsense, down-to-earth practical sort of person, the type who expects nothing more of a doormat than to clean the soles of shoes before the wearer enters the house.
A variation on the above is the doormat where the rubber backing extends around the basic matting, like the black strips around your television picture when one of the kids changes it to 4:3. This sort is no good for going tobogganing as it is built to be immobile. The person who purchased this sort of mat obviously has more of an eye to the dangers of slipping and possibly underwent a traumatic fall sometime in their childhood.
Some doormats have a rubber pattern with the matting inlaid between the black strips. Most commonly of herringbone design, these mats demonstrate a determination by the owner to combine functionality with artistic endeavour, seeing the doormat not only as a shoe-cleaning tool but also as an adornment to the family home. This design is most usually found in the semi-circular or half-moon shaped mat, where the rubber strips form the shape of a fan. Picasso is thought to have favoured this particular design during his little-known Buff Period.
Some mats forsake the rubber backing, opting to have the matting inlaid with strands of wire. This industrial-looking mat has a tendency to curl at the edges, though it is quicker to dry out after a downpour. The house resident is probably a company man, seeking reassurance in the display of corporate strength.
You would think that a doormat adorned with the word “Welcome” would indicate a warm-hearted gregarious person who is happy to invite all-comers through the door. Not so, said Leon Winkelhalter, Professor of Doormatology at Syracuse University, whose 2004 paper Doormats and Sarcasm, caused quite a stir in scientific circles. Winkelhalter maintained that the Welcome mat was in fact highly sarcastic and indicated a desire to keep the world away from the front door. He later famously retracted this view at the Madrid Symposium, after he was hit repeatedly about the head with a rolled-up newspaper by Dr. Wessler of Leipzig.
What is more accepted is the reverse view that mats adorned with “Go away” or “Get Lost” show that their owner is very much a fun-loving person, choosing the doormat to reflect their outgoing personality. Similarly “Beware of the Dog” probably demonstrates a) that the owner has goods worth robbing and b) that the household pet is no bigger than a budgie. However, the possibility that the house contains a vicious Rottweiler should not be discounted by would-be burglars.
Some doormats have little pictures of footprints on them. This seems to indicate that the house owner feels the need to indicate in a flat-pack-assembly-instructions sort of a way what the doormat is intended to be used for. Teenagers in particular seem to have little notion on how to wipe their feet with any degree of thoroughness, so the house bearing this mat probably contains a harassed middle-aged mother of two boys.
It is said that Lionel Richie has “Hello! Is it me you’re looking for?” woven on his mat. The fact that he wishes to remind the world of this particular crime against music would appear to denote a particularly self-delusional personality. Rumour also has it that Lisa Minnelli had “Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome” on hers. Zsa Zsa Gabor was rumoured to have a doormat made of alpaca hairs and inlaid with genuine rubies, a trend unlikely to be copied by anybody in the Dublin 15 area.
However, the simple purchase of a doormat is not enough. There are a few simple rules to be followed in the placement of the item. For example, when laying a semi-circular doormat, it is imperative that you align the straight edge with the bottom of the door if you want to avoid social ostracisation. Also, nothing sets the neighbours’ tongues wagging than buying a rectangular doormat and placing the shorter side up against the door. One prospective chairperson of Laurel Lodge Residents Committee could not find anyone to second his nomination because of this social faux pas several years ago.
So, the next time you approach a neighbour’s front door, take a quick glance at their doormat before you enter. Oh, and wipe your feet.

On the road with Lorcan

2009-06-08T08:20:00.000-07:00

I am traditionally very slow to embrace new technology, displaying the wariness that is characteristic of my generation.
I was the last in the family to get a mobile phone, only succumbing when one of my wife’s hand-me-downs was forced on me, as apparently, and despite my protestations, I need to be contactable at all times of the day and night.
When the DVD player doesn’t do what it is supposed to, I sidle out of the room and gallantly leave my wife to pore over the instruction manual to find out where the problem lies. I am still not sure what an MP3 player is, never mind MP1 and 2. And having only just mastered the art of playing a CD, the whole concept of an iPod is something of a bridge too far.
So far, I have managed to get away with it, arguing that the reason we had children in the first place was so that they could deal with new technology for us when it came along.
However, we have a foreign holiday coming up during which I’ll be doing a lot of driving, so it was decided, (not in my presence, I might add) that we should borrow my sister-in-law’s Satellite Navigation System to ensure we know exactly where we are at all times.
Naturally I protested. When, I argued, had I ever got lost when driving abroad?
Well, came the answer, there was the time I got lost between Disneyworld and International Drive; the time we missed the turn driving into Cologne and had to take three autobahns before we got back on track; the time we took the scenic route back to Girona airport from Perpignan; the time we couldn’t find our way out of a tiny village in the Algarve...
When the contraption arrived, I naturally had to test it out. As I suffer from a particular brand of Attention Deficit Disorder that won’t allow me to read instruction manuals, I got my son to show me the basics, like how to take it out of the box, how to attach it to the windscreen and how to turn it on. So far so good.
I then decided to test it out by typing in an address in the next estate to ours and seeing if it would direct me there. And yes, it worked.
Unfortunately, though, the address I chose, involved an incredible amount of left turns. “At the end of the road, turn left,” intoned Lorcan breezily. (My wife had decided that he sounded like a Lorcan). “Turn left, and, at the end of the road, turn left. Turn left and at the roundabout take the first exit left. Take the first exit left. In 300 yards, turn left. Turn left and at the end of the road, turn left...”
It was only a two minute journey but by the end of it, I was screaming at Lorcan to shut up. And then, very foolishly, I set the instructions to take us back home,
“Turn right,” said Lorcan. “Turn right and at the end of the road, turn right...”
We had to go down to Strokestown in lovely county Roscommon on the Bank Holiday weekend, which would be more of a test for Lorcan, we decided, even though I know the route like the back of my hand.
Surprisingly, Lorcan agreed with my decision that the best way to access the M4 was to head down the back roads to Leixlip, thus avoiding the Friday afternoon traffic on the M50. And once we hit the motorway, he shut up for 68 miles, which was delightful, though he failed to spot the toll bridge near Enfield and made my wife scramble in her handbag for some loose change to throw in the basket.
It was on the outskirts of Longford though that Lorcan and I had our first serious disagreement. The shortest way to Strokestown is to go through Longford town centre, turn left at The Longford Arms and keep going on the N5. I, on the other hand, have an aversion to sitting in traffic, inching through Longford and so I prefer to carry on to Rooskey and then cut cross country.
“Turn left at the roundabout,” intoned Lorcan. I ignored him and continued on straight along the by-pass. The screen wheeled around in disbelief. The readings disappeared as Lorcan obviously tried to figure out what to do next. Eventually, he figured it out.
“In 500 yards, turn left at the roundabout.”
“Forget it. That’ll lead me back into Longford,” I replied. Again, I continued on straight.
“At the next roundabout, turn left,” Lorcan repeated, after a few moments speechless disbelief at my insubordination.
“You’d better do what he says,” said my wife. “You’ll only make him upset.”
I grunted and continued on straight at the third and final roundabout.
“When it is safe to do so, turn around!” pleaded Lorcan urgently. “Turn around now. When it is safe, turn around.”
He kept it up half the way to Rooskey and then decided that he wanted me to turn right, which would have led me north towards Leitrim and Cavan. I suspected that, in a fit of pique, he was just saying the most ridiculous thing that came into his head, because he knew I wouldn’t pay any attention.
To be fair to him, though, at Rooskey, he finally copped on to what I was trying to do, though as we travelled down the road, he tried to tell me that I was in fact traversing a large field, which I could see quite plainly was a big fib. My wife put it down to the fact that we were only ironing out our relationship and he was just seeing how far he could push me.
I think I will use Lorcan sparingly when we go abroad. Possibly I’ll only turn him on when we are hopelessly lost and need a hero to get us back on the right road. Doubtless he’ll be grumpy about being used in such a way but what can you do?
Of course, it’s hard not to feel sorry for the man, sitting up there in a satellite, looking down at my car with a telescope and giving me directions. I still haven’t figured out how he manages to do it on a cloudy and overcast day. God bless his eyesight, that’s all I can say.

Confessions of a political guru

2009-06-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

To the great unwashed, I am just an ordinary voter. The prospective councillors, TDs and MEPs knock at my door and convey to me their determination to stand shoulder to shoulder with me on whatever view I have on the current situation. And I promise them my wholehearted support and tell them they can count on me on polling day for my number one vote and they go away happy and I get back to the washing up.
Few of them realise that the mild-mannered man clutching a tea-towel was once the leading political guru in Dublin 15, the king-maker supreme.
Nevertheless, it is true. I was the Clark Kent of politics in Dublin 15, the puppeteer par excellence. Let me explain.
I was always interested in politics, even as a foetus. Most expectant mothers are thrilled when their babies kick. I used to pretend to shin up lampposts and put up election posters, much to my mother’s discomfort. And when her womb eventually lost patience and expelled me from the party, the midwife held me up and announced, “It’s a cabinet minister.”
Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that my passion for politics was only matched by my complete ineptitude at the art. As the saying goes, every time I opened my mouth, I put my foot in it, an admirable talent for an acrobat in the circus but a fatal flaw for one with dreams of high office. I was completely talentless, the political equivalent of David van Day.
However, I was undeterred in my love of politics and resolved, from an early age, to become a political guru. To this end, I haunted constituency clinics, I made the acquaintance of senators, spin doctors, advisors and chairpeople of local residents associations. Not only did I live politics and sleep politics, I frequently danced, dined and indulged in intimate liaisons with politics, though not necessarily all at the same time. I took night courses in Political Guruism in Hartstown Community School and participated in the era-defining Political-Gurus-against-the-Bomb marches of the late seventies, which paved the way for the safer world we live in today.
Emerging as a fully-fledged guru in the early eighties, I was distressed to find that the bottom had fallen out of the guru market. Throughout the country, gurus were scouring the evening papers looking for jobs that simply weren’t there and lining up at unemployment centres, swapping tips on the horses. Many retrained as accountants and bankers. I have to admit that in the darkest hours, I sometimes felt like following suit, but I had a vision after eating some funny mushrooms in which St. Thérèse of Lisieux advised me to stick with the guruism.
Coincidentally it was a woman of similar attributes that gave me my first big break, though I like to think I helped her just as much as she helped me. At the time, Joan Burton was starting to become somewhat disillusioned with politics and one day over a cup of hot chocolate at the kitchen table, she confided that she was thinking of giving it all up and travelling to America to become one of Lionel Ritchie’s backing singers.
“Joan,” I said, offering her another hobnob. “You have a wonderful singing voice but do you really want to perform “Dancing on the Ceiling” every night for the rest of your life? Would it not be far more fulfilling to be the Dusty Springfield of Daíl Eireann?” I can still recall now the tears of gratitude in her eyes as she reached across for the biscuit tub. She took my advice and the rest, as they say, is history. We often laughed about it afterwards, though not in each other’s company.
Throughout the late eighties and the early nineties, my reputation grew. In those days, of course, gurus weren’t allowed to advertise, but word of mouth was such that a steady stream of political wannabes beat a path to my front door, which was great, as I’d always wanted a path.
I remember one rather senior politician phoning me up in an agitated fashion one night, wondering if he should run for president or not. I’ll call him Brian to protect his anonymity, though that was actually his real name.
“Brian,” I said. “You’ll be a shoe-in and you’ll make a damned fine president. Just don’t give any interviews to Fine Gael post-graduate students and make sure that your recollections are always mature.” He was greatly heartened by this and offered me the job of his election agent but unfortunately Boris Yeltsin had invited me over to his dacha in Yalta to discuss seizing power from Gorbachev and I had to refuse.
In the latter years of the century, I remember opening the door one evening to a young lad in a hoodie and torn jeans. “Heowerya bud,” he drawled. “Are you the geezer what does the political thing, like, y’know? Can ya teach me some stuff, like, cos it seems a deadly buzz?”
I brought him inside and sat him down and gave him a crash course in politics. How I remember his little eyes widening in awe as I explained balancing budgets and the IMF and corporation tax. He looked completely nonplussed, the way Brian Cowen would do years later when I whispered Brian Lenihan’s name in his ear. Before he left, I gave him one final word of advice.
“Leo,” I said. “Do yourself a favour. Buy yourself a nice suit. Oh and maybe take a few elocution lessons.” Naturally, his is the first Christmas card that comes through my door every year.
Some of my best successes have been completely inadvertent, like the time a year or two ago when I mis-addressed two packets that I was sending out. Thus my nephew was somewhat taken aback on his fifth birthday to receive a thirty page step by step guide on how to become President of the United States, while a young senator from Illinois was correspondingly bemused to receive a DVD of Bob the Builder.
I am semi-retired now, content to watch my former seedlings flowering and bearing fruit. Occasionally I get questions from candidates in the local elections, asking my advice on which is their better side for the election posters or should they fly a hot-air balloon above their house to advertise their candidature, but most of the young whippersnappers fail to recognise the political heavyweight that answers the door to them, tea-towel in hand. And that is exactly how it should be.

Shuffling the cards

2009-05-08T09:32:00.001-07:00

(This appeared in Issue 134 but for some reason I forgot to upload it)

Long before Ireland was plunged into this deep, dark fiscal abyss that begins with the letter ‘R,’ I was always very suspicious of cards.
Not, I hasten to add, those adorned with shovels and diamonds and two colours of royalty. Nor indeed those dished out by zealous referees whenever slight contact is made in the formerly physical sport of football. Rather the little folded pieces of stiffened paper that we give each other on the occasion of birthday, anniversary, retirement etc.
I must admit, I thoroughly enjoy going into Birthdays or Easons and gasping in mock amazement at the price of the cards on view, providing of course I am able to decipher the price from the unfathomable coding system they have on display. (Is it too difficult to get card manufacturers to come together at a big summit and agree on a universal coding system for the industry? What would happen if all clothing manufacturers adopted their own sizing system?)
“€4.25 for a bit of card?” I shout, clutching my heart, while my wife edges towards the exit looking for a quick getaway before I get around to informing the world that I could have bought a whole street in Cabra for €4.25 in the old days.
To make things worse, a good half of the card is usually blank. A half-hearted picture on the front and a bit of a verse on the third page and that is about it. And it’s only half-finished – you still have to add your own message to it!
Those that are really posh have a bit of paper stapled to the inside of the card, transforming it from a mere four pager to an eight page luxurious mini-booklet and adding another couple of euro to the price.
Personally, I long ago gave up buying cards for my wife. Cards for husbands can be funny, serious, wistful, romantic. Cards for wives tend to fall into two categories.
Firstly there is the cute little teddy bear holding a little balloon and smiling at a sheepish female teddy bear. This doesn’t really reflect our marital life together. I am not a teddy bear, a cat, a raccoon or a cuddly woodland creature and, the last time I looked, neither is my wife. And neither of us gets a particular buzz out of holding balloons.
The second sort of card is the one with a photo of a big bunch of roses, superimposed with the words “For my darling wife.” Why my wife – or anybody’s wife, for that matter – is supposed to feel grateful for a picture of a bunch of roses is beyond me. And if I ever called her “my darling wife,” she would probably think I was looking for something. This type of card normally has some sort of soppy verse on the inside which I never bother to read and probably wouldn’t make my neck-hairs stand on end even if I did.
Why are there never any funny cards for wives? Are women not supposed to have a sense of humour?
Not that the birthday cards for husbands are ever particularly funny. They normally focus on the recipient’s loss of hair, libido or eyesight, all subjects that the middle-aged man finds uproariously funny. Or else they advise the youthfully-challenged spouse to go out and down copious amounts of beer, without the stock proviso to drink sensibly.
Recently, my wife went out trying to find a card for her mother on Mother’s Day. Despite scouring the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre from top to bottom and despite the thousands of Mothers Day cards on view, there was not a single one addressed to Mother. Mum, yes. Mummy, yes. But none for Mother.
Cards for teenage boys tend to have pictures of cricket bats and model sailing boats on them, rather than hoodies and iPods. Cards for fathers have an antique car driving down a country lane, rather than an Avensis stuck in traffic on the N3. Get well soon cards have more teddy bears with bandages on their arms or over their eyes. And all for the price of a Ryanair flight to Grenoble.
My wife and I have come to some sort of arrangement over giving each other cards for Valentines Day, birthdays and anniversaries. I make a card myself out of recycled cardboard and she gives me the card she gave me the year before, which she has put away for the past twelve months. As she says, the sentiment is still the same one year on and as I have a memory like a sieve, what’s the point in her forking out for a new one?
I do feel a pang of guilt occasionally for poor Mr. Hallmark. Such has been my enthusiasm for self-made cards that I understand that his business has come perilously close to folding (excuse the pun.)
My cards have become veritable works of art down through the years, at least according to myself. My wife merely tuts and throws her eyes to heaven, trying hard to mask her excitement whenever I present her with a new creation.
Normally I stick a funny picture on the front, say a Meer cat, with a speech bubble saying “Watch out! There’s another birthday coming over the horizon!”
On the inside I’ll write a few verses of my own, possibly not quite as romantic as normally appears on such offerings and then perhaps another funny picture if something captures my imagination in the RTE Guide (a phrase that I very rarely use).
Then on the back, I’ll put “Copyright Cheapo Productions” and advise that no Meer cats were harmed during the making of the card.
They say it’s the thought that counts. My overriding thought is always that I can find much better things to spend €4.25 on, rather than a piece of card folded in half. And, of course, anybody can go out and simply buy a card that has been mass-produced in Vietnam. I, on the other hand, slave away tirelessly for a half an hour or more to bring my true love a card that is unique and highly personal. The card is the proof that I am prepared to go that extra mile for her, that she means so much to me that I prepared to work with Pritt Stick and felt-tip pen to give her a birthday / anniversary / Valentines Day card (delete as appropriate) to savour.
And it costs nothing.

Deck of Cards (Updated)

2009-05-08T09:28:00.001-07:00

During the recent Afghanistan conflict, a Blanchardstown soldier was arrested for playing cards when he should have been annoying some people who had different religious and political views to his own. At his court-martial, the charge was read out, witnesses were called and finally the soldier was asked if he had anything to say in his defence. Looking the Presiding Officer straight between the ankles, the soldier replied: -
“When I see the ace, I think of the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre, the number one of its kind in the country and still the only Irish building that 75% of Peruvians could name in a recent survey.
“When the two comes up, I am reminded of the two mighty bridges spanning the Royal Canal at Clonsilla and also the number of cars that are able to cross the old Clonsilla Bridge at rush hour before the barrier is pulled across for the next train.
“The three puts me in mind of the wonderful highway connecting Blanchardstown and the city centre. In my youth it was a long and winding country thoroughfare that seemed to take an age to travel. Now it is a beautiful straight urban thoroughfare that seems to take an age to travel.
“I look at the four and I see the four mighty car parks that surround the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre - the Rapacious Red, the Bustling Blue, the Yawning Yellow and the Gargantuan Green. Like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse these mighty car parks stand guard at the corners of the golden retail citadel, and giggle uncontrollably when people roam around looking for a parking space at 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.
“I see the five and I remember the marvellous Auburn Avenue Roundabout and the time of the evening when it’s best to avoid it like the plague. How I recall all the pleasant times sitting at a green light with an empty box junction beckoning and a motorbike Garda urging me to make his day.
“The six reminds me of November 2002 and the number of hours it took me to drive home from Glasnevin when the River Tolka burst its banks. If only I’d thought to go to the toilet before I set off. Still, the empty crisp packet in the driver’s door came in handy for something.
“When I turn over the seven it puts me in mind of the wonderful traffic aid in Diswellstown, which accurately tells you your current speed, minus seven kilometres per hour.
“When I turn up the eight, I am put in mind of Ravello’s in Clonsilla and what I did to the huge plate of fusilli chicken and mushrooms there on my wife’s birthday.
“The nine, on the other hand, brings me back to the ancient cinema complex of UCI in the Blanchardstown Centre and the number of screens therein. How many happy hours did I spend there in my youth glued to the silver screen? Well, none, actually – I always felt it was cheaper to wait till the films came on the telly.
“As I turn over the ten, I think of the average number of minutes it takes to reach the head of the queue of any of the financial institutions in Dublin 15. Their discouragement of personal banking is not reaping any dividends, for the queues keep getting longer. Still, nobody seems to care anyway.
“The Jack puts me in mind of the pantomime at Draiocht several years ago, when a lazy good-for-nothing climbed some foliage and stole property from a man living alone. In the ensuing chase, the victim was killed yet the perpetrator was branded a hero. Zero tolerance, my foot.
“The Queen reminds me of Joan Burton, the Darling of the Daíl, and whose picture on my locker out here has sustained me through all the hard times. And it also symbolises my best friend out here, Private “Sheila” O’Reilly, but we won’t go into that at this particular point in time.
“When I look at the King, I see an estate agent who, with Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Osborne, achieved record sales in the Dublin 15 area while the Celtic tiger was still roaring. And it also brings to mind the fine purveyors of quality burgers located near the aforementioned UCI.
“The joker brings to mind the route planner in Dublin Bus that decided that the number 39 should visit every housing estate in Dublin 15 before finally setting off for the city centre.
“I spread out the cards and I see four suits, recalling instantly Leo Varadkar and his sartorial elegance.
“The clubs naturally remind me of Verona, Clonee United, Castleknock Celtic, Erin go Bragh and all the other teams of all sports that help to foster a community spirit, often with little help from the Council. May the hedges that surround the pitches be forever watered; the hearts recall the organ of the body that Connolly Hospital has helped to keep ticking for so many patients down through the years, despite the draconian cutbacks annually implemented by the HSE; when I turn over a diamond, I think of Neil Diamond, and how his song Love on the Rocks was written after an uncomfortable experience on the big boulders that lined Millennium Park; and the spades of course put me in mind of all the housing development that has gone on in the area without the proper infrastructure.
“When you count the number of cards in a suit, you come up with the number thirteen, which is the number of trolleys in Tesco that can actually travel in a straight line for ten yards without crashing in to the display of parsnips. There are 52 cards in a deck, which is the average number of minutes that you have to wait to talk to a real person when you can’t see the match on Sky. And if you add all the spots in a deck, it totals 365, which coincidentally is the number of greys hairs that our Minister for Finance has developed since he took over the post just prior to the recession.
“And, so you see, sir, this deck of cards serves me as an almanac, a bible, a diary, a calendar and a pretty Easter bonnet.”
When he had finished speaking, the courtroom was in tears. At length, the Presiding Officer dabbed his throat, cleared his eyes and spoke: -
“That’s a load of codology,” he said. “Take him out and shoot him.”

Great bridges of our time # 245

2009-05-04T11:28:00.001-07:00

The New Clonsilla Bridge, spanning the great expanse of water known as the Royal Canal, can lay claim to be one of the great bridges of our time, though this does not necessarily mean that anyone will take its claim seriously.
It spans the complete breadth of this great waterway, starting on the elegant north bank and reaching, in the best tradition of bridges, the south bank, while the foaming torrent of the inland waterway rages beneath.
Although not as long as the Öresund bridge linking Malmo and Copenhagen, nor as wide as the Golden Gate in San Francisco, the New Clonsilla Bridge, as it has come to be affectionately known by local residents, has a charm and a natural beauty that draws sightseers from all over the world, particularly at rush hour.
The need for a new bridge across the Canal was first mooted in the Middle Ages when several peasants died of starvation while trying to cross “ye olde humpe backe bridge” at Clonsilla. Such was the weight of vehicular traffic crossing to darkest Luttrellstown and beyond that the line of carts stretched “as far as the eye can see and even further, yea unto as far as the eye cannot see,” according to one reliable eye-witness.
With typical efficiency the New Bridge took seven hundred years to plan and discuss in a series of high-level interdepartmental meetings, with transport and environment bickering constantly and finance merely smiling and shaking its head. During this time, many plans were formulated and some even got as far as the drawing-board stage, notably the grandiose design of architect Wolverine de Guinness in the seventeenth century, whose chocolate bridge with liquorice balustrades won popular support from the local peasantry.
The great Isambard Kingdom Brunel came to Clonsilla in 1854 and proposed that a suspension bridge be constructed across the canal with Egyptian obelisks, surmounted with golden statues of furry woodland animals, supporting the chains. However, when the Council disclosed that they had only allocated £5 to the construction of the edifice, Brunel became moody and refused to leave the kitchen.
At Easter 1916, the Clonboyne Brigade of the Irish Citizens Army was apparently thwarted in its attempt to link up with Pearse and Connolly in the GPO by its inability to cross the old bridge on a Bank Holiday and despondently turned around and went home for tea instead. WB Yeats apparently wrote a play about the events but lost it one night in a cake shop.
The statistics for the construction of the bridge are frightening. 140 Norwegian spruce firs were scythed down in their prime to make the lats. 2,000 tons of sand was imported from Bundoran to mix the concrete. Ten men died during the construction, which took nearly seventy years and 10,000 migrant workers from Eastern Europe were involved in some way or other in the erection of this marvellous edifice. A plaque commemorating their efforts was attached to the bridge but it proved too heavy and fell into the muddy waters below like Excalibur disappearing back into the lake.
The new bridge was finally ready in 2008 and, on its opening, it was estimated that three million people crammed into the village to watch Lionel Ritchie cut the red ribbon and to plead with him not to sing Dancing on the Ceiling. A further 750 million watched on television and Diana Ross took penalty kicks as part of the high class entertainment. Charlie Bird’s hushed tones as the Dalai Lama made the first traverse of the bridge will live long in RTE history.
Originally designed as a twelve lane road / rail / aqueduct, Government cutbacks meant that the plans were scaled back at the last minute, leaving it with the capacity to carry fifteen pedestrians a minute north to south. The bridge is constructed in the classical style with 53 wooden slats forming a slight concave upon the grey iron surround.
The railings on either side were constructed to shoulder height to rule out the possibility of a rushing commuter slipping and plummeting to the canal ten feet below. Nevertheless Inland Waterways have installed a full time manned lifeboat station beneath the bridge, ready to push out into the stagnant waters at a moment’s notice, should the unthinkable occur.
One unusual aspect of the new construction is that the approach path is actually longer than the bridge itself as the construction company had a job lot of railings that they wanted to pawn off on the Council.
Many observers have also noted that the approach path also leads up to the bridge from an angle and have wondered aloud at the reasoning behind this. Apparently, (and I have this on good faith from a man I met in the Paddocks the other evening) this is because it was felt that commuters would build up too much of a head of steam if they had a straight run from approach path to bridge and would be unable to stop safely on attaining the railway station on the opposite bank.
The initial plan to prevent this had involved speed ramps but when it was discovered that the company had transferred their ramp-manufacturing business from Coolmine to India, it was decided in political circles that a good old fashioned 60° turn in the path would be a more desirable alternative.
Naturally the bridge has been earmarked as a possible target of an attack by Al Qaeda (full name – Alistair Qaeda) and a crack squad of anti-terrorist marines, disguised as wood pigeons in a nearby tree, hold the bridge under constant surveillance. There is even a rumour that at least one explosives expert is strapped to the underside of the bridge at all times in case Al watches Bridge over the River Kwai and gets ideas.
There are many legends and superstitions associated with the New Clonsilla Bridge. One states that if two lovers kiss on the bridge under a full moon in April during Coronation Street, then their first born child will have red hair, providing of course that one of them is female. And at least one junior minister in the government has been known to come to the bridge in his stockinged feet to pray to St. Attracta of Sligo for help in the local elections.

The Vermicelli Junction

2009-03-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

I had occasion just prior to St. Patrick’s Day to travel down to Wexford which, as we all know, is somewhere over the other side of the Liffey. Unwilling to part with €3 of my hard-earned cash, I treated my family to the splendour of the country drive to Lucan before travelling onwards to the M50, thus avoiding the toll camera that, contrary to the cliché, appears to be quite adept at telling lies.
When I prepared to turn off the N4 onto the M50, though, I encountered a surprise of teddy bears’ picnic proportions. Where once there had been a large and busy roundabout, someone had now removed it (what they plan to do with it, I’ve no idea) and replaced it with dedicated roads that arc and swerve and gently ease you into your desired direction with continental finesse.
What vehicular ecstasy! No more waiting at lights or racing the car beside you to the first bend. Simply get in the right lane well before the junction and the road system cradles you up and deposits you down, kissing you softly on the cheek as it does so.
As I sped off southwards, I glanced back at this marvel of engineering, silhouetted against the sky like the Gwazi rollercoaster at Busch Gardens in Florida, and realised that it wouldn’t hold a candle to the Blanchardstown intersection when it is completed.
Scheduled to be completed next year, the M50 / M3 interchange will be virtually free flow with no roundabouts or lights to impede the progress of the dozen or so Navanites who will still have jobs in the city.
The first job will be to get rid of the two roundabouts belonging to Messrs. Scott and Auburn-Avenue. I expect they will simply dig them up, turn them up on their rims and wheel them down to Collins Barracks, where they will go on display. Personally I think they ought to try to sell them on eBay. There’s bound to be some avid roundabout collector out there who would be only too delighted to add this delightful matching pair to his collection.
After that, the interchange will follow the same pattern as the N4 / M50 road system outlined above with traffic whizzing by in all directions and hold-ups a mere distant memory, except when a truck breaks down or there’s a centimetre of snow, in which case the knock-on effect will be felt down in Tralee.
As it stands, we will have our own Spaghetti Junction. But don’t forget we also have the Maynooth railway line spanning the M50 valley at this point, carrying its cargo of sardines to Amiens Street and beyond. And the canal too, aquaplaning through the vehicular maelstrom like a cuddly cartoon character in a snuff movie. And bizarrely, the footbridge, a long, thin cage that actually used to be the N3 when the world ended in Blanchardstown but now gives the health-conscious walker lethal levels of lead poisoning when crossing from Castleknock to Blanchardstown. Spaghetti, pah! This will be a veritable Vermicelli Junction.
Oh what a wondrous sight this will be when it all comes to pass! It will resemble the internal combustion engine or the intestines of a cow with valves and arteries looping around carrying a mass of metal-encased humanity in all directions.
But why stop there? Why not phone the Guinness Book of Records man and really put Dublin 15 on the map?
A few bold strokes of the architect’s pen and we could have the eagerly anticipated Metro West joining the fun. As an added attraction and to boost ticket sales, I suggest that at the very vortex of the interchange, it performs a loop-the-loop to the delight of everybody aboard before continuing on its merry way towards Swords.
What about cyclists? Has the National Roads Authority even considered them? They can hardly be expected to compete with cars and trucks at such a busy junction and so for health and safety reasons alone, as well as for sheer divilment, there would need to be dedicated cycle lanes for those wishing to access the inner city in a more environmentally friendly manner.
And sure, while we’re at it, we could build a new Ryanair-only terminal for Dublin airport on the landfill site at Dunsink and construct a unique runway that starts somewhere in Abbotstown and straddles the M50. As an incentive to Mr. O’Leary to bring his considerable business to Dublin 15, we would of course offer him the use of this facility absolutely free of charge, with just the usual handling fees and charges.
Seeing that we are creating a hub of transport excellence here, we might as well build a helipad and possibly a rocket-launching site in preparation for when Dublin 15 joins the space race, though we would have to insist on close cooperation between air traffic controllers and ground control. This will be Vermicelli Junction with a side-plate of shredded octopus.
Of course, this massive feat of logistical planning will bring its own brand of tourism to the area, with millions of transport enthusiasts flocking from far and near just to watch the operation from specially constructed vantage points. A miniature railway, possibly operating on a cog system – funiculi funicula! - could be built to bring these hordes of people around the site with headphones and commentary in six different languages. A series of chairlifts could be constructed bringing tourists to the apex of this vast construction from the entrance of the underground station. Did I not mention the underground?
Of course, there will be a few problems when this modern wonder of the transport world is built. Despite the hi-tech technology that will be used, there is still nobody working in the transport system in Ireland that is able to devise the integrated system of ticketing that would doubtless be required for such a junction. Maybe we could send some of our councillors on a fact-finding mission to Cocoa Beach to find out how a combined ticket works.
There will also doubtless be protests from the Union of Comely Maidens at the erosion of their natural habitat – the crossroads – possibly accompanied by a mass sprightly jig and reel from O’Connell Street to the Daíl. However, an enterprising Minister for Culture could easily nip this in the bud by offering them free use of the Scott and Auburn Avenue Roundabouts in Collins Barracks instead.

An open application

2009-03-17T04:20:00.000-07:00

Dear Sir / Madam,
My name is Peter Goulding and I would like to apply for the position of Writer in Residence at Farmleigh.
I am roughly the same stature as the last incumbent, Dermot Bolger, though possibly I have a few pounds on him in the midriff department. Furthermore I have come across his footsteps in the field opposite the estate and believe that I could very easily follow in them.
My qualifications for the post are impeccable. I am a writer and my preferred location for writing is in a residence. I have been writing in my own residence for quite a while now and feel it is about time I branched out and wrote in someone else’s.
When I say “writer,” it is true that I may not well be able to bandy words about with the loquacity of Mr. Bolger – in fact, I agonise over “What I Did on my Holidays” - but it is generally accepted within the family that I am a good speller, even to the point of pooh-poohing the spell-checker on my computer on occasions.
I have won many awards for my writing. You may have seen in the papers that I received a gold star for my story of Twinkle Bee in senior infants, the first of many such accolades. My repetitive poem “I must not throw cubes of jelly up at the ceiling” written during detention when I was a mere thirteen year old, drew gasps of praise from all those who read it and I believe my small ad in the Evening Herald attempting to sell a slightly faulty umbrella is still being lauded for its use of stark imagery.
Currently, I am working on what I hope will be the definitive Irish novel of our generation. Without wishing to give too much of the plot away, it is a tale of love, war and famine, set against the backdrop of League of Ireland football. I have already had a tentative inquiry from a Mr. S. Spielberg about the film rights and Johnny Depp has reportedly put his holiday in Bundoran on hold, such is his interest in playing the role of Macker, the one-legged centre-half, who finds love in the strangest of places.
I am also a poet of some renown and my epic sonnet “Open your bleedin’ eyes, linesman” narrowly missed the cut for this year’s Leaving Cert syllabus, unjustly overlooked in favour of some scribblings by a guy called Philip Larkin. I have heard that Seamus Heaney has commented very favourably on my ability to rhyme “cockily” with “broccoli.”
Visiting Farmleigh with its backdrop of the Phoenix Park, I have been struck by the beauty of the surroundings (though I would suggest that someone cut down a few of the trees as they tend to block the view of the rest of the park.) I feel sure that the ambient surroundings of the writer’s cottage would definitely help me complete Chapter Two of my novel, in which Rocky “Rock” McBiscuit, the Scythechester manager, stumbles across an illicit and erotic game of headers and volleys in a field outside Rouen.
On a more general point, I believe the solitude and peaceful surroundings of Farmleigh would definitely aid my writing. You’ve no idea how hard it is trying to concentrate when you have a garrulous canary whistling down one ear and two adoring children looking for money in the other. How much better I could write in a peaceful little cottage in the Park, disturbed only the night owls screeching, the wood-pigeons cooing, the security guards barking instructions on their walkie-talkies and the American Ambassador playing his Lionel Ritchie CDs at full volume.
I understand that with the post of writer in residence comes the almost exclusive use of the Farmleigh Library, which is far-famed throughout the western world for its fascinating collection of first editions. Can you tell me if it has the new one by Elizabeth George? I have been trying to get it in Blanchardstown Library for a while now and am dying to know whether Havers and Inspector Lindley finally get it together.
On the application form it requests that I submit “names and contact details of two authorities in your field who know you and your work.” I am afraid that I do not own a field, nor am I ever likely to. It seems a rather strange requisite for the post, if you don’t mind my saying so. Maybe I could rent one for a short period of time and entice two authorities in to it?
I see that I am also required to list a description of the work I intend to undertake if I am successful in my application. To be honest, I hadn’t intended to do much work. Of course, I’ll sweep the kitchen floor occasionally and may even give the skirting boards a lick of paint if I have a free afternoon but other than that, I intend to spend most of my time writing.
There is also a requirement to provide samples of my writing, which is not a problem. I still have a recent letter of complaint to Bord Gáis on my computer and my collection of adjectives now extends to almost two pages. Would this be okay? Sadly my note to our life assurance agent, detailing that we had just popped out and would be returning forthwith, was blown away by a sudden gust of wind and so this literary masterpiece is now lost to posterity.
Can I ask if Mr. Cowen intends to take up residence at Farmleigh during the summer? I only ask because I’ve heard he’s a bit of a hip-hop freak and I’d be a bit perturbed about all that thump-thump music at three o’clock in the morning when I’m trying to watch The Shopping Channel. Maybe you could have a word in his shell-like? Of course he’s welcome to come around an odd evening when he needs a bit of advice on the economy but not when “Ireland’s Got Talent” is on.
Before I officially submit my application form, I would also like to enquire about the official view of sub-letting the property at Farmleigh should I be successful. As you know the cottage is located in a highly-desirable location with easy access to the city centre, yet set in the exclusive surroundings of The Phoenix Park. I feel I would have no problems at all finding a tenant to move in, even on a short term lease. With the rent money, I could then enjoy an extended holiday in Coco Bay, Antigua, doing invaluable research in the resort where Macker’s childhood sweetheart spends Chapter Four improving her prowess as an assistant referee.

The mountain and Mohammed

2009-02-27T13:57:00.000-08:00

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve dug this government out of a hole. In previous issues of this esteemed newspaper, I have solved the problem of our parlous transport problem in Dublin 15, argued for the creation of a blue flag beach at Abbotstown, proposed the notion of adopting the leaf as our national currency and pushed for the reintroduction of hedge schools. My suggestions, sadly, have not been taken up by those in power, which leads me to think that the time to break away and form an autonomous enclave here in Dublin 15 is getting ever closer.
However, I am nothing if not a fair man, and I will give the powers that be one final opportunity to redeem themselves before we launch our glorious revolution.
The proposed M3 Motorway. The Navanites are pushing for it because they want to get down to Blanchardstown and spend their money here as quickly as possible. The environmentalists are against it because its route scythes through, or at least near, the one defining symbol of our ancient royal heritage – the Hill of Tara.
Personally I’m surprised John Gormley can’t see the obvious solution. I’ll be looking for a higher calibre of minister when we finally form an autonomous government.
We move the Hill of Tara down to Kellystown.
Yes, I know it’s a brilliant suggestion and solves everybody’s problems but I’m not looking for plaudits or even a free holiday to the Bahamas from two grateful Councils. (Though if the subject came up, I do believe the people ought to be allowed to express their gratitude.)
Let’s get down to brass tacks. There is a huge big mound of earth – technically known as “a hill” – which, with complete lack of foresight, the ancients located on the route between Dublin and Navan. There are diggers and bulldozers standing idly by, waiting to spring into action and start building the brand spanking new M3 super highway that will enable folk from Navan, Kells and beyond (yes, apparently there is a “beyond”) to access the City Centre gridlock much faster.
The only people standing in the way of progress are the environmentalists, who claim that the Hill of Tara is such an important part of Irish history that to build a road anywhere near it is tantamount to blasphemy. This is particularly true, they claim, when a much less destructive route to the capital could be had by going through Athlone.
So, here it is in a nutshell. Would it not solve everybody’s problem, if we just loaded the Hill of Tara onto a fleet of dump trucks and transported the whole lot en masse to Kellystown? The commuters would be happy as the motorway could go ahead. The environmentalists would be happy because the Hill of Tara would be saved for future generations. And the archaeologists would be pretty thrilled too as the JCBs would throw up remnants of Niall of the Nine Sausages for them to drool over.
Of course we don’t want to make the same mistake as an American millionaire in 1968 who bought London Bridge, believing it to be Tower Bridge. We will need to have a team of stock-checkers both in county Meath and at Kellystown to make absolutely sure that we are getting the genuine article and are not being fobbed off with any old hill by our neighbours.
During the excavation, we would also need to have a team of spotters around the area, keeping a vigilant eye out in case Tony Robinson and his pals from Time Team try to gatecrash the party.
When the Hill is completely re-located, we can then start to maximise its full potential. Frankly, Meath County Council’s idea of leaving it to go to seed and putting a bit of a souvenir shop at the foot of it goes along away to demonstrating why the Royal County will never be a beacon for holidaymakers from around the globe. Who’s going to want to fly ten thousand miles just to be blown to bits on top of some hill?
In my vision, the Hill of Tara Theme Park would attract tourists in their millions. Roller coaster rides up and down the Mound of the Hostages; an artificial ski slope down the Rath of the Synods; the Banqueting Hall turned very appropriately into a Burger Arcade; the House of Cormac turned into a huge underground aquarium; scary characters dressed up in Brian Boru costumes having their photographs taken with frightened children for €20 a shot; the Tuatha Dé Danann selling ice-cream and candy-floss; musical entertainment nightly by Queen Medbh and The Druids – what a cash cow we would have on our hands!
It would also be a picturesque place for the family to go on a Sunday afternoon. In fact, a signposted track around the site could be labelled a High King Trail. Stalls could sell High King Boots, weddings could be arranged in special Hitch High King ceremonies – the possibilities are endless.
Of course, legend has it that Tara was the dwelling place of the gods and the gateway to the Otherworld. It is an exciting possibility that during the transportation of the Hill, we may in fact discover this gateway and thus gain free and easy access to the Otherworld as a major holiday destination. Dublin 15 would be the hub for millions of tourists wanting to try a holiday with a difference and of course being outside the EU, a whole duty free industry could be set up around this portal.
As well as that, the opening of the gateway could also attract holidaymakers coming the other way, many of whom would have been buried with lots of lovely gold sovereigns. This would further boost the economy of the local area as hordes of excited, if long-dead, spirits swarm out of the Otherworld on ethereal coach tours.
Of course there may be some up in county Meath who might object to the loss of their national heritage site, however underdeveloped. While one might sympathise with them for their Council’s lack of business acumen, it must be said that they would now have a brand spanking new motorway by which they could come and visit their beloved hill whenever they wanted – for a modest admission charge, of course.

Whether to stand...

2009-02-22T23:58:00.001-08:00

The local Council elections are just around the corner, veering from kerb to kerb like a bad dream on wheels and I’ve still not decided if I should stand or not. Time is not only running out, it is turning around as it does so and sticking out its tongue.
Most of the other prospective candidates have already thrown their hats into the ring, which I secretly consider a waste of good headgear. It may be that I am too late already and that lost ground, like that in Kellystown, cannot be made up. On the other hand, I could always say that natural modesty debarred me from standing but that I have reluctantly agreed to go forward following strong representations from those in the community.
The problem with the local council elections is that most people tend to vote on national issues. If you stopped somebody in the street and asked them to name our eight local councillors, they’d probably ask you if they could get to the footpath first before answering.
I would of course be standing for the Independence for Dublin 15 Party. This will give me the perfect opportunity to lambast the Government for their mismanagement of the area over the past number of years and also condemn everybody else for their weak and ineffectual opposition. Independents will also get short shrift as without a party machine behind them they will merely be a lone voice crying in the wilderness.
The candidate who gets his name out there in the community stands a great chance when polling time comes around. If you only recognise one name out of a list of twelve, it has to be an advantage. If I do decide to stand, therefore, I will have to join the other candidates in letting the constituency know that I exist.
The first thing to do will be to produce a newsletter and get it distributed. I will call it The Goulding Report, as this will imply a regular communication from myself to the community that I profess to hold so dear, even though I have only latterly shown an interest in events beyond my hall door. If I also call it Volume 2 Issue 27, people will think my commitment to local issues has been ongoing for a number of years.
In the newsletter, I will select various issues from around the constituency (having of course scoured the Community Voice first) and give my two hundred word view on each of them. It is important that I do not concentrate on one particular area as this will restrict my vote-getting.
My views on each topic of debate will of course not depend on the rights and wrongs of the issue. Such an attitude may be praiseworthy but it will not get me elected. I will naturally side with the residents as they are the ones who will put their X on the ballot paper, not the issue itself.
Where the residents are up in arms, I will naturally launch a “scathing attack” on the authorities. Scathing attacks are always good for votes as they demonstrate real commitment. During this scathing attack, I will “call upon” the Council / the Government / the Gardaí to act swiftly to put an end to this “lamentable situation.” Again, calling upon people is a winner, even if those in authority have no idea who I am.
Where a resolution has been reached, I will “applaud the decision,” whatever it may be, despite the fact that nobody has asked me for my approval. I will also “monitor the situation” very carefully and “liaise closely” with the residents, if I can find out who’s in charge.
I will also dress up in a suit and tie and travel around to different areas and have my photograph taken there. This will show how hard I am working for all the residents in the constituency. I will not make the mistake of one previous PD candidate who simply superimposed his photograph onto the platform of Coolmine Railway Station, making him appear taller than the train beside him.
It is also vital that I organise at least one local meeting for people in my local community on whatever issue is most likely to be uppermost in people’s minds. Transport is always a good one. This will allow the riff-raff to come along and tell lurid tales of having to get up at 5am in order to be at their office by 8am. It is important though that I bar other candidates from attending the meeting, in case they muscle in on this nice little group of potential voters that I have assembled for myself.
At the meeting, I will stand up and launch a scathing attack on Dublin Bus and the local authorities, calling upon both of them to put an end to this lamentable situation. I will promise the residents that I will monitor the situation very carefully and will liaise closely with residents on the issue.
It is also advisable to shake as many people’s hands as I can, as this conveys trust, and when I am approached at the end, I should cradle my chin in one hand and nod my head vigorously, thus indicating empathy with whatever they are waffling on about.
After the meeting I should write a letter to Dublin Bus, calling upon them to immediately allocate another 25 buses to the area. When the inevitable apology comes back, I will then distribute both epistles to the community, thus demonstrating how hard I am working on their behalf.
Sometimes an issue might be so contentious that I might not be sure what the view of the majority of the residents is. In this case, it is a good idea to hold a rough straw poll of those entering the meeting. A quick tot up of the figures will easily show me where my sympathies should lie and I will come down unequivocally on the side of the majority, even when they are wrong.
Writing letters to the local paper is also a good way of raising the profile. I simply need to find an issue and then launch another scathing attack on the powers-that-be. Editors will be reluctant to withhold the letter in case they might be accused of political bias, so it’s a sure-fire advertising coup and if the letter is long enough, he might feel obliged to add my photo too.
Sadly, I would also need to spend a lot of money on election posters. It is a widely known fact that the more posters a candidate puts up, the better equipped he is for the job. “Oh, he must be a great man – he has a poster on every lamppost” is a comment widely heard at election time.
I probably will not go as far as one candidate in the last elections who flew a huge hot air balloon over the locality advertising his candidature. Not only did it create a hazard for bemused pilots making their final approach to the airport, but it also demonstrated to the community that some people have more money than sense and it failed to garner him enough votes to get him elected.
Between you and me, though, the thought of spending a lot of money is one of the main reasons why I am unsure about standing. True my commitment is deep and whole-hearted but I need to think about this year’s holiday to the Algarve too.
So if there is a local benefactor out there in the community who would be willing to sponsor my candidature, I would feel duty bound to consider acceptance, for the good of the community. The sum of €50,000 would go a long way to delivering a real voice for the people but of course I would not be able to entertain any rezoning requests my benefactor might make.
God forbid!
.
This was written for issue 131 but my wife didn't like it. She felt I was getting at too many people, she felt the article was disjointed and lacked structure and that without local councillors, the political system would fall asunder. As her views on my writing are of necessity more objective than mine, I didn't submit it.
PS. Three months later, Fergus asked me to do an extra political musings for Issue 137. I am ashamed to say I took the easy way out and submitted this piece, which appeared in issue 137.

The terror of 2/2

2009-02-14T23:39:00.000-08:00

Photo by the inimitable Vincent Cahill

Three days that shook the world!
Many of us who lived through the terrifying ordeal that began on February 2nd 2009 (or 2/2 as it has come to be known) will be impatient for our offspring to beget further offspring, so we can sit our grandchildren on our laps and tell them the blood-curdling stories of the Terrible Snow.
It began on the Monday morning as a terrified populace awoke to a world that was completely shrouded in white, except for the bits that weren’t. As is the wont in times of crises, the peasantry turned to religion, and rosary beads were clutched and Hail Marys recited in response to the world turned upside down during the hours of darkness.
Slowly, fearfully, people began to appear from their houses like survivors of an apocalyptic attack, wondering if it was safe to go outside. You immediately sensed something was wrong when teenage girls, well-used to venturing out in the harshest of weather wearing but a string top and a mini skirt came teetering back in on their high heels “to put on another belly-top,” hoping to goodness that nobody would see them.
Radios were tuned to RTE and every item of information was gleefully relayed to other family members hugging each other in fright. “Tailbacks on the Navan Road inbound.” “Truck has hit a hedgehog on the M50.” “Food parcels being dropped by the army on parts of Corduff.”
In our estate, hundreds of cars were coughed into life and left idling on drives and grass verges in an attempt to clear windscreens of the strangely cold white stuff that was obliterating the view. An enterprising joy-rider could have had his pick of Toyota, Nissan or Hyundai, had he chanced down our street that first morning. It is a good job they mainly work evenings.
But despite the traumatic events, a spirit of the blitz still prevailed. Grown men nodded knowingly to each other as they tiptoed down their drives with kettles of water. Schoolgirls’ spirits were raised considerably by the fondness of their male counterparts for throwing snowballs and they laughed joyously as they ran the gauntlet. And everyone did their best to stifle laughter when somebody slipped on a particularly treacherous bit of ice.
Reliable estimates put the thickness of the snow at between four inches and several miles. Apparently it was at its worst in the estate of whoever you were talking to at the time. “You should have seen it around our way...” began a thousand conversations in workplaces all around the Dublin 15 area.
Lurid tales of hardship began to emerge. Grown men had walked nearly a mile in freezing conditions to get into work, dressed only in thick woolly clothing, five pairs of socks, a hat and scarf. Shackleton’s Heart of Antarctica was made to seem like a stroll in the Phoenix Park in mid-July as red noses became “the first stages of frostbite.”
Motorists spoke of dices with death, relating how their wheels had skidded on the ungritted road surfaces and only their quick thinking in righting the steering wheel had prevented a nasty accident. Women spoke in horror at how their shoes had been destroyed by the slush. For the first time in history, children actually asked their mothers for a carrot, before dashing back out to the garden, yelling the puzzling words “I’ve got his nose!”
Of course, there were some who struggled into the workplace on those three calamitous days who weren’t impressed. Depending on their age, it wasn’t half as bad as the snow of 1982 / 1963 / 1947 (delete as appropriate), all coincidentally times of recession. In those days, they averred, people were tough and had walked sixty miles in bare feet through snow of ice-age proportions, done a 22 hour day and then walked back.
Motorists, advised by AA Roadwatch only to make journeys that were absolutely necessary, decided that it was absolutely necessary to venture out on the treacherous surfaces so they could relate how bad it was. The Navan Road became totally blocked, reminiscent of the Terrible Floods of 2002 or the Terrible Earthquake of 1984 or the Terrible Bit of Cloudy Weather of 1996. Traffic and travel helicopters buzzed overhead, relating in joyous terms that people should turn around at Scott’s Roundabout unless they wanted to freeze to death.
And still the snow kept falling.
On the second day, people started to build arks and shelters, worried that the Day of Atonement was at hand. With the exception of the East Europeans, who strolled breezily into work in shirt sleeves wondering what all the fuss was about, very few people actually made it into their place of employment, and those that did arrive, some time in the mid-morning, stared gloomily out of the window for an hour before declaring that they’d better head off or they’d never get home.
Grief counsellors were called in by distraught mothers, as schoolboys wept bitterly at the news that school was out and they’d have to go and play in the snow instead. Many had to be physically restrained from donning their school uniforms and heading out in the raging blizzard, determined to get their daily fix of Irish and sums.
It wasn’t only the humans that suffered. A fat little robin, completely perplexed by the alien environment, chirped merrily on our washing line for an hour until he realised his feet were stuck fast. Not wishing to waste the opportunity, my daughter did some quick sketches that she intends to send off to Hallmark in time for next Christmas, before de-icing him with some flat Coca-Cola.
At night time, temperatures dipped to -40, according to my five year old neighbour. Planes bound for Arrecife and Sharm el Sheikh were left sitting at Gates 78 and 80, as panicked airport officials debated over endless cups of coffee how best to tackle the unprecedented white stuff that covered the runway. Matters worsened when nobody could find the key to the shed where the broom was kept. Fine Gael blamed the Government. IBEC blamed greedy workers. The Greens blamed The Whites.
And then, on the third day, it began to clear. As we peered forth from our bedroom windows, we scarcely dared hope that the worst was behind us. In the morning, we threw our canary out of the window. He came back five minutes later, giving out about the cold.
At midday, we threw him out again. This time he stayed out for a half an hour before returning empty-beaked.
And then, when we released him a third time, he came back with an empty bag of Tayto. And we knew that we were saved.
And we hugged and vowed to be good to one another for evermore.

Improving your home

2009-02-14T23:37:00.001-08:00

The housing market, they tell us, is depressed. Rumour has it that it has been seen bawling its eyes out in the bar of the Clonsilla Inn whenever a Dean Martin song comes on the jukebox.
As a result, people are understandably wary of committing large sums of money to property, in case they get into something called “negative equity,” which, according to my online dictionary is a black treacly substance akin to molasses. Unspent SSIA money lies in banks, earning anything up to 50c in interest every six months, and people naturally believe it should be working harder. As moving house or upgrading may represent a dodgy option, many people are looking to improving their existing home, figuring that any type of improvement will count towards increasing the price of the house, when the upswing comes skipping gaily around the corner.
In our house, this topic of conversation has come up more than once, though I have always tried to discourage it, as it combines my two pet hates – spending money and work. However, my wife’s determination to do something with our home is increasing daily and my attempts at prevarication are correspondingly weakening.
My cause has not been helped by the plethora of house hunting programmes on the television, all demonstrating what wonderful things can be done with a jack hammer and a bit of plasterboard. On every channel, enthusiastic amateurs are sawing and plastering their way to beautiful homes for very little outlay. My argument that these reality programmes are in fact, scripted soap operas performed by actors, lacking any basis in reality, is falling on deaf ears.
Many people, it seems from these frankly unbelievable programmes, have opted for converting their attics and my wife seems keen on this idea. I have argued that religious beliefs, even those of attics, should be respected and we should not approach the subject in an evangelical frame of mind but my wife merely gives me a withering stare. The fact that our attic contains a web of cross-beams like the security lasers used to protect the bank vault in Oceans Eleven does not lead me to believe that this is a job that can be completed before lunch. But I have to grudgingly admit that it could earn extra rental income for her when she finally kicks me out.
The subject of a conservatory is also one that is rearing its ugly head with increasing frequency. It would be a lovely place, I am told, to sit in on warm summer’s evenings and read. I have countered that anyone waiting on a warm summer’s evening in Dublin 15 would need the patience of a saint and she has reluctantly admitted there is some truth in this.
I have always maintained there are two types of people in this world – those that like to split the world up into two types of people and those that don’t. Or those that like conservatories and those that don’t. Personally I am in the latter camp. I think this stems from a traumatic occasion in my childhood when I was informed that a sinister figure called Colonel Mustard had once strangled somebody in a conservatory with an elastic band (we believe the rope ended up in the Hoover.) Besides I have always been doubtful that a wicker chair would be able to support my bulky frame.
How about decking, she asks? To be honest, I’ve never really understood decking. What is it supposed to do? Does it protect your concrete patio area in case you wear it out? Why do we need something perfectly flat to walk on? I think the thing that puzzles me the most is why anyone would feel the urge to woodstain it every summer, given the proviso that they found a dry day. If I got a fine day, I’d want to sit in the middle of my lawn in a patio chair with a crate of Stella Artois, not toil over a never-ending decking system with a brown brush.
With the new energy rating certificate for second hand homes coming in very shortly, it would be a good idea, in theory, to make our home more energy efficient. Solar panels in the roof would probably be a good investment, though I’d have to see figures to prove that the amount of sunlight we get in a year would be enough to boil a kettle of water. The addition of a porch would certainly stop the draught coming under the hall door but, to me, an old jacket, is a much cheaper, if slightly more awkward alternative. Trying to follow my wife’s example, I have tried to make the colour of the jacket match the colour of the walls of our hall.
But of course, the whole area of home improvements does not necessarily mean gangs of workmen in hard hats pointing to architects’ drawings and shaking their heads sadly. It can be simply redecorating or adding little accessories that can transform a room. And the easier and cheaper they are to do, I argue, the more satisfaction you derive from them.
It is a fact of life that zeal for doing home improvements declines in direct relation to the length of time you have occupied the house. When we moved into our house with millennial excitement all those years ago, I was up and down ladders, painting walls like a kangaroo on a trampoline. Nine years on and I grudgingly admit that it is time the walls were all done again but my enthusiasm for the task has waned ever so slightly. The fact that my wife keeps bringing home colour charts and asking me whether I think concubine honey would look good in the hall, stairs and landing does not give me any great hope that the work can be put off for much longer. Spraining an ankle or feeling a twinge in my back would really only be putting off the inevitable, so I suppose I’d better bite the bullet and get on with it.
I’ll start with the window sill in the downstairs toilet.

Still traumatised after all these years

2009-02-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

There are pivotal points in every person’s life when you know that things will never be the same again. For some, it is the birth of a child or the death of a loved one or the release of a new Lionel Ritchie album. For some people, and my wife was probably one of them, it was the day they walked into the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre and saw that the name Debenhams had replaced their beloved Roches Stores.
To paraphrase The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, well I remember that terrible day when the tears drowned the seats round the fountain. Women sobbed uncontrollably and fumbled in their handbags for tissues, while helpless husbands, uncertain how to act in the face of such a cataclysmic trauma, murmured “There, there” and patted them ineffectually on the shoulder.
It was not as if we spent a lot of money in Roches. Being staunch green followers of St. Bernard, we never shopped for groceries there, although they saved my brother-in-law’s life one time, when they still had two jars of brandy butter on the shelves at 5pm on a Christmas Eve.
Rather it was a store where “the discerning shopper,” as my wife likes to describe herself, could browse happily for hours. “I’m just popping into Roches. See you on Friday,” she would call to me. There was a rumour that one enthusiastic shopper actually collapsed in a Roches one time through starvation and had to be weaned back to health on liquid foods, though this may be just an old discerning shopper’s tale.
Roches, you see, was pitched at just the right level for a department store. It wasn’t cheap and cheerful but it wasn’t exorbitantly expensive like some other shops where you need to take out a loan from the credit union to buy a colander. It was the best place for lampshades and gift items and vied with the also-now-departed All Rooms for household utensils. It had curtains and picture frames and vases and bathroom scales and toasters and whatever you’re having yourself.
Basically it was great for gifts that you didn’t want to spend a fortune on but wanted to make it look as though you had. “A little bit of luxury at affordable prices” is how I would have described it if I had been charged with coming up with an advertising slogan.
And when they had a Sale, my wife often asserted, (and who am I to argue?) it was a Real Sale. None of your €10.00 jumpers imported as a job lot from Indochina. They reduced everything in the store and brought nothing in on special. This was a genuine, no-holds barred, everything in the store sale.
The staff were obviously chosen for their customer skills, rather than for their ability to work a check-out. They didn’t tend to employ eighteen year old young wans who chewed gum and discussed last night’s sexual activity with their fellow members of staff as they served you. Granted, they weren’t always the quickest at taking the order and wrapping up your bathroom scales but you didn’t really mind because the salesperson was personable and attentive.
It was the kind of store where they called you Sir or Madame, the staff obviously undergoing training to differentiate between the two. And you felt that if you accidentally smashed a vase, the manager would apologise to you for displaying the item in such a position where you had no choice but to knock it over.
Roches was always the store that you looked in if they didn’t have it in Dunnes. I often think my wife was secretly glad when she couldn’t find a suitable winter jacket or potato peeler or pair of curtains in Dunnes because then she’d have to go into her belovéd Roches and spend blissful hours sauntering through the departments.
I have to admit I didn’t quite share her enthusiasm for Roches but then again I have an antipathy to most retail outlets. I go into a shop knowing what I want; I buy it and then leave. I don’t do ‘browsing,’ believing that shopping is a purely functional exercise like driving to work or brushing your teeth and is therefore a chore to be completed with as little fuss as possible. Nobody brings the wheelie bin out and meanders with it up and down the drive for an hour or more, I argue, to little avail.
Thus on that fateful day when the Roches sign was seen no more, I sat with her and made earnestly sympathetic, if totally insincere, noises of commiseration. It would have made little difference if I’d recited the Koran – she was inconsolable.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll have a look around – it mightn’t be too bad.”
Now if Debenhams had opened in some other part of the centre, it’s entirely possible that my wife might have liked it. To my untrained eye, it had similar sorts of things, if slightly more expensive than Roches, and might have served as a reasonable alternative. But the fact that it occupied the same unit as Roches – as of course, it had to, as it bought them out – meant that poor old Debenhams never stood a chance.
It was like your favourite football team going out of existence and another side coming in and playing on the same ground. She didn’t like the lay out, the uniforms, the stock, the tannoy – nothing was right, she said. Why couldn’t it just go back to the way it was?
I believe a lot of people feel the same way. The very sight of the Debenhams name conjures up memories of Roches. It is as if they are resentful towards the new for the demise of the old, as if the evil Mr. Debenham ousted the old and genial Mr. Roche in a vicious coup d’etat and they can’t find it in their heart to forgive him.
A major part of the problem is that there is nowhere for the grieving shopper to come and mourn. There is no headstone saying ‘Here lies Roches Stores – RIP,’ where one can come and lay flowers and say a decade of the rosary. There is no plaque on the wall or a shrine or a garden of remembrance. Shoppers like my wife received no counselling and have had to learn to live with the loss alone.
Feeling strongly that these poor forgotten members of society need a focal point for their grief, I wrote a letter to Cork County Council, asking them if it was in their estimates for 2009 to provide an interpretive centre where pilgrims could go and relive the halcyon days of Roches Stores. They could have video presentations and the girls could dress in that stripy green and navy uniform. I even went as far to suggest that the best place to stage this would be at Roches Point, next to the lighthouse.
I am still awaiting their reply.

Usurped

2009-01-11T05:53:00.001-08:00

Pets, particularly those with legs, tend to run in families.
My father (and his father and his father’s father, yea verily back unto the time when the Gouldings first crawled out of the swamp four generations ago) took the view that pets a) cost money and b) take a bit of trouble looking after and were therefore to be discouraged at all costs.
This trait was inherited by myself and all through my children’s childhood I remained impervious to their teary-eyed pleadings for a puppy, knowing too well that the animal would be a one week wonder and that their promises to walk it in all weathers and clean up its pooh were not worth the breath they were uttered with.
Magnanimously, I allowed my son Neil to adopt a snail that appeared on our drainpipe one day. With a logic unique to six year olds, he named this gastropod Nibby and it even moved house with us, remaining a cherished, if exterior member of the family for nearly four months until it either crawled away or was nobbled by a starling.
It was with something of a sense of irony, then, that with the children grown, my son arrived into our house in July with his girlfriend Amy, a birdcage and with what looked like a shoebox with holes under his arm. (That’s just the shoebox that was under his arm – the other two were under no such constraints)
With unerring perception, I guessed that there was something inside the “shoebox” and I doubted it was a pair of shoes. Neither a shoebox nor its habitual contents is normally associated with a birdcage and, whereas the juxtaposition of the two might make an interesting concept of modern art, I doubted that my son recognised this.
“There you go, ma. Happy Birthday,” he said, releasing into the cage a tiny yellow canary that fluttered nervously between the two perches, regarding the four of us with obvious mistrust.
I eyed this unusual birthday present suspiciously. Maybe it wouldn’t be too expensive to keep, I reasoned, and it wouldn’t take that much looking after. It probably wouldn’t smell and I wouldn’t have to bring it for walks. Then again, I acknowledged, I had absolutely no say in the matter as this was a gift from Neil and Amy to my wife and my opinions on the new arrival were completely irrelevant.
The birthday girl was completely taken by this little creature, adding that the black spot beneath his wings added a touch of individuality to his persona and did not indicate, as I maintained, that he was destined for Davy Jones’ Locker. She named him JoJo, which was at least an improvement on Nibby, and whenever he approached the front of his cage, it gave me the opportunity to say “Get back, JoJo” until I was told to shut up.
Sadly, we have no idea whether JoJo is male or female. We toyed with the idea of getting him / her a mate for a bit of company but we were warned that two birds of the same sex would knock the spots off each other, while if they were of different sex they would just squabble and bicker like a happily married couple. This knocked my wife’s idea of getting a second canary and calling him / her Loretta.
I have come to regard JoJo as male and refer to him as “he.” In the absence of any visual biological evidence, the only thing we have had to go on is the rather unscientific maxim that “if he sings a lot, he’s probably a male,” unlike humans, where men normally lead a downtrodden, miserable existence and singing is the furthest thing from their minds. I have pointed out that in JoJo’s case, it is more “whistling” than “singing” as no discernible words can be recognised when he’s in full throttle, but it’s still better than Lionel Ritchie.
The first decision to be made was where to put JoJo. In my very limited experience of pet birds, the cage either sits on a stand taking up half the space in the room or hangs from a rusty nail high up on the wall. However, Jojo’s mischievous habit of flinging his seeds all over the place, meant that neither option was viable. (Incidentally, the bird’s arrival coincided with our daughter Louise’s departure for Hawaii on a three month J1 visa – in effect we replaced one messy little article who throws her stuff all around the floor with another.)
Of course, if my DIY skills remotely touched mediocre, I would have put up a large square shelf in the kitchen on which the cage could repose, with an ample border to collect far flung seeds. As such an attempt would probably have brought down the connecting wall, not to mention hitting a water main, it was decided that the cage should reside on the kitchen table, with an old tablecloth under it to catch his detritus.
And there he remains, this scrawny little yellow grasshopper of a bird, who puffs himself up into a yellow tennis ball when he goes to sleep. He sits there, watching everything and ruling the roost so to speak. I am admonished if I come in from work and do not say hello to him, even though I maintain he never acknowledges me.
Naturally this new addition to the family lording it over the kitchen table has meant that our family habits have altered somewhat. You can’t eat your dinner with a canary lobbing caraway seeds onto your mashed potato at regular intervals and so we’ve gradually ceded the kitchen table to him for good.
This was never more apparent than at Christmas, when the kitchen table in years gone by always came in handy for mixing stuffing, carving turkeys, whipping cream and opening wine. This year the head chef and her helper competed, sometimes aggressively, for space on the worktops around the sink and at the cooker, while Little Lord Muck whistled at us disparagingly from his pride of place. In reply, I told him that we would be fattening him up for next Christmas and received a sharp rap over the knuckles with a wooden spoon for my troubles.
And naturally we’ve spent a fortune on him, getting him a bigger cage and mirrors and ladders and cuttlefish bones and all the other essential accoutrements. And yes, I have to clean out his cage and wash the pooh off his perches and step carefully around him as he struts about the kitchen floor on his temporary release. And it would seem that I have been totally usurped in the household pecking order.
But, even though I would never admit it, he’s starting to grow on me and it would be hard to imagine the house without him.

Newsflash!!

2009-01-09T09:15:00.001-08:00

Just to let anybody know that the first five years of Musings, plus a few added extras have been collected together and are available to order in a 284pp book from amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones. Rough price is £6.99 Sterling plus p and p.

An unfortunate Christmas

2008-12-20T00:19:00.000-08:00

“Ah-ah-ah-choo!”
It was Christmas Eve and Santa had come down with a heavy cold. He couldn’t believe it.
“I don’t believe it,” he said to himself. You see.
He picked up a passing elf and wiped his nose on him and then got back to packing the sleigh for his annual trip around the world.
As he loaded on the final present, his wife appeared in the doorway.
“Ho, ho, ho, Mrs. Claus,” he said, demonstrating his remarkable ability to remember names.
“Ho, ho, ho, dear,” his wife replied. “Have you seen the weather outside? It’s raining polar bears and penguins and you know that old sleigh doesn’t have a roof. And you seem to have come down with a very bad cold.”
“Ah, don’t worry, my love,” replied Santa, picking up a calculator for a good little boy in Castleknock called Brian. “It’ll take more than a few drops of rain to put Santa off!”
“I know, but would you not consider taking the mini-bus? Or maybe the Jeep? I just don’t think you should go out in the rain, dear.” And she ran off giggling back into the house.
Santa sighed and loaded up the last of the presents, which just happened to be a batch of Lionel Ritchie CDs for some very naughty boys in Porterstown.
“Rudolf!” he called. “Get your nose over here! We’re just about ready to start.”
“He’s in The Jolly Igloo,” remarked Prancer moodily.
“Since November 12th,” added Dancer.
“Why do you think his nose is so red?” asked Chancer.
“Really?” said Santa, somewhat shocked. “I always thought it was an evolutionary illuminatory appendage designed to light my way around the world on foggy Christmas Eves.”
“You flatter yourself,” said Comet. “Nope, he’s in there telling all the elves how much he really loves them and buying them all pints.”
Santa thought for a while. “Okay,” he said. “Plan B. We’ll just have to use the eight of you and forget Rudolf.”
“You mean, go back to the way things were before the Great Nasal One barged in and took all the limelight?” said Blitzen. “You want us to dig you out of a hole after you’ve kept us as bit-part actors all these years? Dream on, buddy. Pints, lads?”
And with a roar of high spirits, the eight reindeer trouped out to The Jolly Igloo.
“What would three gardeners do if they came across a patch of weeds?” asked Mrs. Claus, popping her head around the workshop door.
“Hoe, hoe, hoe,” answered Santa but he didn’t feel particularly jovial at that moment.
In the end, there was nothing for it but to hitch the sleigh up to the minibus. He had tried contacting the local employment agency but the answer-phone informed him that it was Christmas Eve and they were all in The Igloo.
“You’ll have to drive,” Santa told his wife. “I’m still on a provisional. If I’m caught, I’m really for it.”
“Of course, dear,” answered Mrs. Claus. “We can’t let all the boys and girls down, can we?”
Santa sprinkled the minibus with his magic powder and off they set to Norway and the Philippines and down to Australia and Venezuela and all across the world. Mrs. Claus turned out to be quite a good driver – “I should be,” she said, “considering all the endorsements I’ve got” – and managed to land on all the rooftops without careering over the gable wall. While Santa baled down the chimney, she’d check her SatNav and punch in the coordinates for the next good boy or girl on the list.
All was going well. They’d done every country in the world bar one and were just coming to the end of Ireland. There was only Dublin 15 left to do and the sun was starting to come up on Christmas Day, when all of a sudden nine reindeer landed on the roof they were currently delivering to.
“Santa!” yelled a particularly vocal reindeer as a soot-encrusted figure emerged from the top of the chimney.
“Ssssssshhhhhh!” whispered the other eight quadrupeds at the tops of their voices.
“I love you, Santa,” sobbed Rudolf, throwing two hooves around the portly gentleman’s neck.
“Shanta, we were...hic!..bang out of order,” said Donner, wobbling unsteadily on the rooftop. “And we’ve come to help.”
“Ah, lads, I’m very grateful, so I am, but sure we’ve only Dublin 15 left. Mrs. Claus and I will have it finished in a jiffy,” said Santa nervously.
“No, Shanta, we inshisht,” spluttered Rudolf, starting to unhook the sleigh from the minibus.
“Three cheers for Santa!” roared Vixen, hoisting a bottle of Paddy’s to the sky.
“Ssssssssshhhhhhhh!” shouted everyone.
“Watch out for the sleigh!” called Mrs. Claus but it was too late. Still laden with several hundred presents, the sleigh slid noiselessly down the roof and disappeared over the edge.
There was silence for what seemed like a minute but was in fact only sixty seconds and then eleven heads peered soberly down into the yard below.
There were presents everywhere, scattered far and wide, in hedges, in ponds, in flower beds. Most had become detached from their labels and had become unwrapped. A Tibetan terrier scurried down the road clutching an X Box.
A church bell sounded. Then another. The sun poked its nose above the horizon, sniffed and then went back down again for another five minutes.
“Come on!” yelled Santa. “The children will be waking up soon. We’ve got to get this last lot delivered!”
“But we don’t know who owns what!” wailed Dasher.
“Never mind,” said Cupid. “The important thing is that the children get some sort of present, so they know that Santa hasn’t forgotten about them.”
“Gosh yes!” agreed Santa. “Do you remember that time we forgot that little boy and Nat King Cole had a field day?”
And so they all set to work to gather up what presents they could find and tore around, delivering them at random. In some houses the children were already up and searching for their presents and they had to pretend to be a hat stand to prevent discovery.
It was touch and go but they did it! Every child got a present and the magic of Christmas still remained for all the girls and boys throughout the world. It was nearly noon by the time the party arrived back at the North Pole and, while Mrs. Claus cooked the turkey, Santa and the reindeer celebrated Christmas in The Jolly Igloo.
And that, dear children, is how you came to get a clockwork mouse from Santa this Christmas and not that WII Fit that you had been asking for. It was simply an unfortunate accident.
Nothing to do with the recession at all.

Doing it with tiles

2008-11-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

As I have said many times before in this column, DIY is not my forte. I have no idea what my forte is (and whatever it is, it’s nearer fifte anyway) so by choice I am more a GSETDI man myself. (Get somebody else to do it)
Things simply don’t get fixed in our house. The towel rail has been hanging off the wall in the downstairs loo for the best part of a year now and the extra shelves I promised to put in the corner kitchen unit when we moved in eight years ago still haven’t materialised.
Its not that I am lazy. The spirit is strong but the know-how is lacking. My father hadn’t a clue about how to fix things about the house and so I never learnt anything. I blithely blame him for my lack of knowledge of all things practical.
About two years ago, on holidays in Roussillon, my wife put her eye on these enamel house number tiles which were going for a veritable chanson, she claimed. “That’s fair enough,” I said, “but where are you going to put them?”
She gave me a withering stare. “I was maybe going to stick them up on the landing, next to the picture of the men carrying a boat on their heads,” she declared.
So we bought the tiles and even before we flew home I was starting to get palpitations about putting them up. Such a simple thing, lots of people have them. But what do you use to stick them up?
“You’re the man. You should know these things,” my wife said, when I idly pondered the conundrum out loud. Obviously she hadn’t a clue either.
At home, in post-holiday mode, the tiles of course got put away in a drawer for safekeeping. After about three weeks, I was reminded “not to forget the tiles.”
Now for me, DIY is a pastime best practised on your own. Not being terribly sure of anything I’m doing, I prefer making a hames of the job on my own, so I can tidy it up before she gets home and then pretend I hadn’t got around to it in the first place.
One Saturday she decided to go to the Blanchardstown Centre to buy a pair of boots, which I knew from experience could easily take up to eight hours. With a hammer, I delicately removed the old number plaque adorning our front wall.
I then took down my Rovers biscuit tin, which I laughingly call my tool-box, and emptied it out on the kitchen table to see what “things-for-sticking-up-tiles” I had. Well, it was a toss up between a well-worn tube of superglue – how come it doesn’t stick to the inside of the tube? – and something called No More Nails, which I had bought once for some long-forgotten and probably fruitless purpose.
I plumped at first for the superglue which, in my experience is great for gluing up the sole of your slippers when it comes loose. Sadly though, such was the accumulation of dried glue in the nozzle that the remaining glue was trapped inside forever.
I checked the instructions on the tube of No More Nails. Apparently this was brilliant stuff and stuck everything from custard to Uranium 238, apparently rendering the manufacture of nails quite superfluous. The fact that it failed to mention either tile or brick among its lengthy list didn’t deter me and I applied a healthy coat of the white toothpaste-like goo to both tile and wall.
I must have held the four tiles pressed solidly to the wall for around thirty minutes, (though in all probability it was more likely nearer two) before I nervously released some of the pressure. The first one dropped immediately and as I stooped to catch it, the second one dropped. And then the third. And the fourth. Somehow, none of them smashed as they hit the ground but lay there mocking me. From around the world, I could hear a large collective sigh of relief from nail manufacturers.
I had plenty of time to tidy everything away before my wife arrived back from the shops with a handbag and jacket but no boots, though of course she immediately noticed the missing number plaque from the front wall.
Naturally I told her that I’d taken it down only to find that I had no suitable adhesive to stick up the new tiles.
“What about the cement and sand in the shed?” she asked.
I’d forgotten about those– they were the remnants of when I’d laid an unintentionally rustic path up to the garden shed years ago and I’d hung onto them in case they might come in useful.
Of course, time passed. Without a house number, our poor postman was totally confused, being unable to figure out that our number must lie somewhere between the numbers on the houses either side. We got a spate of wrong deliveries and god knows where half our post ended up.
Eventually my wife again went shopping for a pair of boots and I proceeded to the shed. Now it is about 25 years since I’ve worked as a labourer for a couple of plasterers but 4:1 resonates somewhere in the recesses of my brain as being a good ratio of sand to cement. So I grabbed an old paint pot and measured out three trowelfuls of sand, figuring the more cement there was, the stickier it would be, and one trowelful of cement and then slowly added water from my Rice Krispies mug.
To be fair, it looked like concrete. Only problem was, not only would it not stick to the wall, it wouldn’t stick to the tiles either. Another disaster, though it did leave a nice pale rectangle on my brickwork.
After that episode, the tiles again were forgotten about for months, until my wife came across them one day, even though I thought I’d hidden them quite well.
“What are we going to do about these tiles?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to stick them up with. Sellotape? Back to back stickers?”
She picked up the phone and speed dialled her brother-in-law. “He says to cover the wall and tiles with PVA glue and then use tile grout to stick them up,” she said. “Think you can do that?”
We bought the PVA glue and a small tub of tile grout, despite the fact that we searched Atlantic high and low and there was no tile grout for outdoor use to be found.
Naturally I had to wait until my wife once again went up to the Centre to buy a pair of boots before I could tackle this mammoth feat of DIY. Sure enough, two weeks ago, off she went and I set to work.
Of course it took me 45 minutes to figure out how to open the PVA glue (pierce the cap with the prong of a fork) and having negotiated that little technicality it was plain sailing except for the PVA glue running down the wall like spiders abseiling down a cliff face.
When she came home, clutching two tops and a pair of trousers, the tiles were up and pretty solid they seemed too, even though I say so myself. Now I was a handyman, a genuine DIYer, though I resisted the temptation to ask if there were any other little jobs she wanted doing around the house, just in case she took me up on the offer.
Strangely, my wife seemed unimpressed by my handiwork.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Have I put them too high or too low? They seem solid enough. It’ll take a jack hammer to shift them now.”
“Oh, they’re solid enough,” she said, with one of her famous looks that can kill a man dead at forty paces. “Trouble is, we live at number 89, not number 98.”

In the money

2008-11-07T01:57:00.000-08:00

Recession? What recession?
Like everybody else in Dublin 15, the R word had invoked a sea change in my attitudes. Instead of refusing my children’s requests through sheer laziness or miserliness, there was no need for me to choose my words carefully.
“Sorry, I can’t give you a hug. There’s a recession on.”
“Sorry, I can’t give you a hand doing the washing-up. Haven’t you heard about the recession?”
In addition to this, it also provided me with the perfect opportunity to bore the pants off them with lurid tales of how we survived the last recession “way back in the eighties,” informing them in a superior and patronising way that they didn’t know that they were born. Of course, my wife raised an eyebrow when I regaled them with stories of barefooted urchins queuing outside soup kitchens on street corners, whilst portly bankers twirled their gold pocket watches and strolled merrily by, but I think they got the gist.
However, I have just received some exciting news that has totally banished the R word from the Goulding household. While the origins of the email that I received are very much shrouded in tragedy, it appears that there is a silver lining to events that will safeguard our future during the austere fiscal times ahead.
I was contacted by a Reeter Khobe from Sierra Leone, who is obviously still very distraught at the death of her husband General Khobe during the civil disturbances there. Quite how Reeter got my email address is unclear, though possibly she saw the online version of this paper and recognised me for the fine, upstanding gentleman that I am.
Apparently, the late General managed to deposit US$15.7 million with a securities company before he died. Obviously the military in Sierra Leone are paid much more than our poor impoverished soldiers, though it appears that our’s tend to survive civil disturbances better.
Anyway, poor Reeter just needed a foreign bank account to transfer these hard-earned funds into, as domestic legislation presumably precludes her from waltzing out of the country with it in a bum bag. She therefore contacted me in her hour of need, simply requesting my bank account details, pin number etc, which of course I was happy to provide. In return, she has promised me 20% of the account, which my calculator informs me works out at a cool US$3.1 million.
US$3.1 million. Yes, read it and weep, suckers. I have already put my eye on a lovely six bedroom Georgian villa in old Castleknock and am just waiting for poor Reeter to get back onto me with final details of the transfer of funds.
And if you are currently turning green with envy, you will doubtless turn bright puce on hearing that the following day, apparently, my email address was electronically selected out of more than 250,000 addresses worldwide in the Coca Cola grand lottery in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion. Yes, more than a quarter of a million email addresses from “every continent” – presumably including Antarctica – and I just happened to be one of the ten lucky ones to scoop GB£2 million.
Apparently there are a few legal niceties that have to be gone through first before my prize can be claimed. Naturally I must reply to Mrs. Joy McKenzie at her Zambian email address with details of my bank account, pin number etc, which I am only too happy to do. I have heard of Coca Cola, so I am satisfied that this is a genuine communication.
Armed with this further increase to the Goulding bank balance, I am considering buying the four bedroomed Georgian villa next door to my six bedroomed house and converting it into a kennels for the Labradors that we intend to breed.
And of course, when you’re on a roll…
Today I received notification from a Dr James Ubani of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation that a special account had been set up in my name under the instruction of the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The fact that such an important letter was entrusted to someone who cannot find the lower case on a computer worried me slightly but Dr Urbani’s urgent entreaties that I only had two days to verify my account with my own bank account details, pin number etc meant I had to act quickly to safeguard the fortune contained within.
To be honest, I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure out why the International Court of Justice should be favouring me in this way. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps it has something to do with Slobodan Milošević, whom I interviewed once about the shortfall of funding for the Mulhuddart CDP. Maybe he remembered me in his little cell in the Hague and willed me most of his estate before he died?
I am now thinking of buying up the rest of the street and flattening it for croquet practice. I have also contact Boeing about the provision of a private jet.
My only concern is in the ability of the banks to cope with such straightforward transfers of funds. I mean, they really seem to be a stupid lot. Why, only last week, I got notification by email from both Abbey Bank and Lloyds Bank that they feared that my account may have been accessed by an unauthorised third party.
In order to protect the security of my funds, they asked me to verify my bank account details, pin number etc, as they felt there may be some unscrupulous people out there who would actually try and defraud me. Laughable, I know, but with my new-found fortune, I can’t afford to take any chances.
The ironic thing was that I do not have an account with either of these two financial institutions and quite thankful I am too, what with all those breaches in their security. Naturally, I replied to them both to inform them of this and also furnished details of my actual bank account, pin number etc, so they could see exactly where their error had occurred.
I fear though that I am doing some disservice to Lloyds and Abbey though, for disappointingly my own bank appears to be experiencing some logistical difficulties of its own. Obviously the system cannot cope with all this money flowing in because my bank manager keeps phoning me and claiming I am overdrawn.
No wonder the banking industry is in the state its in.

The office Christmas party

2008-10-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

Cartoon Fergus Lynch

I am not gregarious by nature.
I work best on a one-to-one basis or in small groups. Put me in a room full of people – even those I know well – and I feel overawed and withdraw into myself.
Alcohol has a similar effect on me. Whereas it tends to break down people’s inhibitions and loosens the screws at the back of the tongue, I tend to get progressively quieter the more I consume.
All in all, I am not the best person to ask to a Christmas party.
This does not deter them however from asking me. I am sure they feel they are doing me a great favour by cajoling me into going and they do not take my protestations that “I would sooner be trampled underfoot by rampaging oxen” seriously.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy – a right barrel of laughs if ever there was one – the author takes a trip to Hell, remarking on the different degrees of tortures prepared for sinners according to their depravity on earth. I was surprised to find no mention in the odyssey of the wretched beings forced to attend an office Christmas party in perpetuity as a punishment for their worldly wrongdoings.
It is a long time now since I ran out of excuses. There are only so many uncles that need to be buried just before Christmas. It is unlikely that my ears would need syringing three Christmases on the trot. Missing the bus and not being able to find a matching pair of socks are excuses that have both been viewed dimly in the past.
Nowadays I just go, on the proviso that I’m determined not to have a good time.
As a professional curmudgeon, I think the thing that horrifies me most about the Christmas party is the camaraderie on show. It may well be a time for peace on earth and goodwill to all men but I find it hard to reconcile the manager who is unapproachable and dismissive for fifty weeks of the year with the New Age reveller who keeps slapping you on the shoulder and telling you to call him Tom.
I think it is an order thing. I know where I stand with this particular individual and react accordingly. However when the lines become blurred and Mr. Burns suddenly metamorphosises into Ned Flanders, life assumes an unreal quality that I find deeply disturbing.
I am at an age now where, to the younger staff members’ disbelief, I do not equate pouring copious amounts of alcohol down my throat in record time with enjoying myself. I watch my less restrained co-workers gleefully pronounce that they are “going to get locked” and hark back to the good old days when I would do the same. Nowadays I know that the following day will be a complete wash out if I follow suit and do not judge the cost to be worthwhile. In short, my hair is not long enough to let down any more.
And then there is the girl – it normally is a girl – who spends the evening taking photographs of everybody and getting other people to take photographs of her. These photographs are then passed around the canteen the following day to those poor souls who were unfortunate enough not to attend. “There’s me and Sheila with a drink.” “There’s me, Sheila and Donal with a drink.” “There’s Donal and me with a drink.”
“It looks like you had a brilliant time,” I remark on these occasions, wondering whether she actually did anything at the party apart from taking photos of various permutations of fellow workers with bottles of drink.
Of course, the one big advantage of being a miserable old sod and observing, rather than participating in, the general mayhem, is that you never get that cringing feeling when you wake up the following day and remember what you said to that girl that you never really noticed before but who had scrubbed up pretty well last night. There can be few tortures currently in use by CIA that are more dreadful than the period between waking up after a Christmas party at which you’ve made a complete ass of yourself and the sheepish and crestfallen entry back into the workplace. During that time, all possible options from emigration to resignation invade your head, for you know that everyone will be talking about you and your lurid antics and what little respect you ever had will be lying on the floor along with the pine needles and bits of tinsel.
Of course, it’s never quite as bad as you feared as most of your co-workers will have been too intoxicated themselves to have noticed your little indiscretions.
Except for me, that is. That’s when I come into my own.

Reaping nature’s windfall

2008-10-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum, which to me seems a strange thing to get het up about. Labels that stick into the back of your neck, umbrellas that turn inside out when you look at them sideways, the hit record “Dancing on the ceiling” – these are all subjects that I could wax vehement on for hours. Vacuums, I have no particularly strong feelings about either way, which shows that, in this regard at least, I am not really “at one” with nature.
Where my thinking does coincide with that of nature is in our joint abhorrence of waste. At least I assume that nature abhors waste, though I’ve never actually heard her mentioning this fact personally. Bushes grow berries, bird eat berries and spit out the seeds in disgust, young birds grow, new berry bushes grow – it is all what Elton John was rabbiting on about in “The Circle of Life.” Nothing in nature, it seems, should be wasted.
I got to considering this fact the other week whilst striding down to Dunnes in Ongar to see if they had any Werther’s Originals, for which I have developed a sudden and unaccounted for craving, despite the sudden onset of the recession. I found myself pondering the now nearly-naked young trees that lined the Littlepace Distributor Road and the vast array of brown and yellow leaves that adorned the pathway.
Leaves. Millions of them. If I were Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man” I would have counted them but I’m not, so I didn’t. Just lying there on the road, the path and the black strip that we assume is the cycle path. Never mind what becomes of the broken-hearted – what becomes of all the leaves that nature annually discards at this time of year? Where do they all go to? They don’t gradually decompose and enrich the tarmac, that’s for sure.
I assume of course that in the great circle of life in years gone by, this latter scenario would indeed be the case, when the leaves would rot into the soil, forming compost and so on. But nowadays, it just seems such a waste for these leaves to fall on stony ground, like in the parable. Nature doesn’t seem to be adapting very quickly to the new blanket of tarmac that has smothered our landscape.
When you come to think of it, though, discarded leaves have very few uses apart from the aforementioned composting, which is disappointing, because a leaf is a thing of beauty in itself. When you hold it up to the light and view the veins and the colours and the shapes, it is a work of art that cannot be reproduced by the hand of man – it is natural art, like the Giants Causeway or bobbly sheep’s droppings in Connemara.
The only good thing you can do with leaves is to shuffle through them, when they have drifted up against a wall, or maybe kick them in great quantities around the street. The problem with this is that there is not much money in it. My Uncle Balthazar did this for a living for five years before his wife left him.
As a young man in a bedsit in Ranelagh, I gave 99% of my wages to my landlord and Arthur Guinness and had very little left for luxuries like food. One day I did indeed try to make a homemade soup out of leaves that I picked up in the street. Let us say it was not a complete success and I was obliged to stay within sprinting distance of the toilet for a week afterwards.
Similarly, though striking examples of natural beauty, the leaves do not make good wallpaper. I tried it once on the wall of the kitchen when my wife was away at her sister’s and though it initially looked very striking, as the leaves dried and became wrinkled, the effect deteriorated. In the end, it just looked like a load of leaves stuck on a wall. And be warned, its murder trying to match up the pattern.
I have tried to think up a way of gainfully using all these leaves but the only thing that I can think of is that we should abandon the Euro and adopt the Leaf as our unit of currency. I realise that my grasp of how world currencies work rivals that of Idi Amin (“The country’s broke? Then we’ll print more money”) but there would be enormous benefits if we were to follow the Green Pound through to its natural conclusion.
Firstly, it would encourage people to plant more trees, which would help to counterbalance the effect of all those greenhouses that are heating up the sun. If you are literally being paid to go green, then that can only be beneficial to the health of the world. More trees equals more carbon dioxide equals more ozone layer or something like that, so we could save the world and get rich doing it. Of course, we would need to enlighten the populace on the difference between deciduous and evergreen and which of them would provide a regular source of income.
Secondly it would get rid of banks and their constant ripping us off. There would be no need to keep our leaves in financial institutions as there would be more than enough to go around for everyone. Just go out into the street if you’re getting a bit short. It would also be a fallacy for parents to admonish their profligate offspring with the words, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”
Of course, we would have to tighten up our customs and excise operation to stop people smuggling large quantities of leaves into the country and devaluing our currency. We could employ sniffer giraffes at docks and airports, though naturally you’d have to slip them the occasional five leaf note to keep them happy.
Back gardens in our leafy suburbs would become veritable jungles of shrubs and small trees as we all wait for the autumnal windfall. Farmers would employ Securicor to collect their harvest, though doubtless they would still demand subsidies from the government for doing so. Medical costs would plummet as whole families would get fit by going on long forest walks with big sacks.
But of course, all this will probably only happen in a post-apocalyptic society when the few survivors emerge from bomb shelters and gaze around at the devastation outside. It will be like the dove returning to the ark with a leaf in its mouth or maybe the coast of Greenland being discovered by Leaf Eriksson.
Come on, Brian! You know it makes sense.

The joy of strimming

2008-10-05T05:43:00.000-07:00

One of the unforeseen consequences of global warming that doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in the Kyoto agreement is the fact that people’s lawns now grow in the winter. Whereas before, you could safely pack the lawnmower away at the end of September and know that you wouldn’t have to clap eyes on the damned thing again before April, these days the sprouting jungle both back and front is a constant nagging reminder during the winter months that you really should get the finger out.
Being a traditionalist when it suits me, I put even the vaguest thoughts of lawn cutting out of my head and make up spurious excuses why a trip to the shed to retrieve the lawn mower should be shunned. The ground will be too wet, I maintain. The grass needs to grow and breathe for a while without being ruthlessly scythed down every couple of weeks. I feel a twinge in my back.
It was therefore with great satisfaction last week that I cut the grass for the final time in 2008. Due to the inclement weather and a bout of sheer laziness, it had not been done for a month previously and, despite the fact that it hadn’t rained for five days – surely some sort of national record – the ground still resembled Strangford Lough at high tide.
But I persevered, squelching through the mashed grass and finally finding a use for the brown bin which had been put out empty for the recycling people the last few times.
Finally I took the strimmer – which had come free when we purchased the lawnmower eight years ago – and proceeded to laboriously unravel the flex which had somehow become tightly woven around the body of the strimmer like a thin python asphyxiating a sausage dog.
The strimmer.
Surely this model of modern technology has to be the most useless invention ever devised by man? Is there anybody in history who has managed to cut five yards of edging without the bit of cord snapping off?
Sure enough, as I began, I knew that a particularly sturdy looking dandelion three yards away was going to cause problems. There was no escape. We had to go into battle. I whispered a few words of encouragement into where I imagined the strimmer’s ear should be, shouted “Death or glory!” at the top of my voice, startling a jackdaw on my cotonaster, and ploughed into the fray.
It was all over before it began. The green cord was no match for the soft juicy flesh of dandelion stalk and, after the all too familiar “zip” and the change in tone of the strimmer, the two inch green strip went sailing into the hebe further down the herbaceous border, as we fancifully call the few miserable plants straddling the lawn. (My garden is littered with two inch green strips of strimmer cord. One day, I am going to go around collecting them all and construct an astro turf football pitch out back)
I uttered the word that is worse than “feck” and turned the strimmer upside down, tutting impatiently while the rotating bit of plastic slowed to such an extent that it wouldn’t take the skin off my fingers. As I removed the cap, the tightly wound coil of cord sprung out at me like a joke toy and I sighed and commenced re-winding.
It was then that I glanced up. Declan, my neighbour from two doors down, was similarly engaged. As was the man with the white van further up the street. And the man with the dog further down. It seemed that a good fifty per cent of the street was at that moment engaged in trying to thread the required two inches of green strimmer thread through the tiny hole in the base and a blue haze hung malcontentedly over the estate as expletives punctuated the afternoon balm.
Suddenly I realised what a brilliant marketing ploy it had been to hand out a free strimmer with every lawnmower. Yes, it would have cost the company millions but they would have made a tidy profit in the intervening period with all the spools of strimming thread sold to disgruntled lawn cutters who saw the cost as a necessary extra.
Now we like to think of ourselves as a modern society at the cutting edge of the technological revolution sweeping the globe. I work for Intel and their level of expertise is so great that I have no idea what they produce. We can split atoms, whether for profit or simply for amusement, and we have devised machines that can actually tell you that you have just taken a wrong turning and I told you to turn left at that petrol station, you dumbkopf.
Would it be possible, I meekly enquire of our budding inventors and teams of research scientists nervously wondering if they are the next for the dole queue – would it be possible for someone to come up with a strimmer cord that didn’t actually break in hand to hand combat with a thistle or a daisy or a dock leaf? One that flashed brightly like a scimitar in the hands of a crowing Mongol, scything down all that stood up to it?
Maybe – and I am no scientist, so I am open to correction – the material used in the strimmer cord is not up to the job? Perhaps if tungsten steel were used instead, or at least something that didn’t give up the ghost when confronted by something thin and botanical?
Naturally there would need to be limits. We wouldn’t want one that knocked down your garden fence when you tried to decimate the sprouting grass springing joyously up against it or sliced through the breeze block that your shed is standing on but surely there must be some happy medium?
Personally, and I realise that I am abandoning all my principles of snapping up free gifts, I would be happy to pay a modest amount of my hard earned cash for a strimmer if I didn’t have to perform a cycle of running repairs on every circuit of the lawn.
Anyway, all you budding inventors out there, you have until next April.

Junk mail

2008-09-27T13:54:00.000-07:00

The other morning a slip of paper came through our letter box, not, I hasten to add, of its own accord, but thrust there by person or persons unknown.
I bounded down the stairs three at a time in a state of high excitement only to discover that my wife had leapt up from her armchair and dashed out of the sitting room before me. As she read the contents quickly I hopped about from one foot to the other, as though bursting to go to the toilet.
“It’s only a flyer for blinds,” she said, handing me the paper and returning to Fair City.
My face fell. I suppose you are either a curtain person or a blinds person and I am the former. My experiences of blinds is limited to holidays in Kerry or Sligo, where I quickly found that I don’t have the necessary hand/eye coordination to operate them successfully. When I’m trying to raise them, they lower further and further or else I end up with one side up and one side down in a very art nouveau but impractical way.
Consequently I trooped out to the kitchen and placed the flyer in the empty cornflakes box that stands by the back door. The box saves us having to go out to the green bin every time we have a piece of green recycling. When the box is full, we bring it out and empty it. (This ingenious invention has actually been patented by my wife and is under copyright. Bill Dyson is said to be raging that he didn’t think of it first.)
Not all junk mail goes straight in the recycling though. If the flyer is of the non-shiny sort and is blank on one side, it is added to the bundle of scrap paper in the drawer held in place by an elastic band. This is handy if I need a piece of paper to work out why the taxman has taken so much money off me or if I need to write a note to my wife to tell her that I’ve gone out to buy the new Lionel Richie album.
The point that I am making, very long-windedly, is that it doesn’t require a lot of physical effort to transfer one small piece of paper from the front door to the green bin. There is no need to hire a hand trolley or a fork lift, unless you are very feeble, although admittedly there is a need to walk six yards from front door to back. However, this unnecessary trip can be obviated by leaving the flyer at the foot of the stairs until such time as someone is going into the kitchen.
I have no problems with junk mail. The green bin truck comes around every second week now and we never find that our green bin is overflowing. I am sure that the nice men in the recycling centre get quite a buzz out of reading all the leaflets they receive every day.
We do not often eat out but if a new establishment opens in the neighbourhood, a flyer would remind us to “give it a bash.” I do not need any handy jobs done around the house, as I simply close my eyes and work around the problem. I am not thinking of buying or selling a house in the area, nor am I thinking of buying a new Peugeot, though I am sure they are very nice cars.
I do not need my shirts ironed and, as my youngest is twenty, I do not need a childminder, though at times I’m not so sure. I will glance through Lidl’s catalogue to see if they have anything “on special,” and do the same for Aldi, even though I can’t be bothered to travel to Maynooth to pick up a pair of retractable garden shears. Nor am I likely to join Leo Varadkar’s blue-shirted army in the near future. Sorry Leo.
Probably the only piece of junk mail I object to is the one that asks me if I want my lawn cutting. Without knocking on my neighbours’ doors, I am unsure if I have been specifically targetted for this leaflet because of the length of my grass out front or if everybody on the street has received it. I suspect the former, as I never receive this type of flyer when my grass has been freshly cut.
But although 99% of junk mail holds little or no interest to me, I will defend to the death the right to deliver it to my door. (Well, not quite “to the death” – more “till I get bored” really. I have no deep desire to be martyred for this cause and become the patron saint of junk mail.)
Junk mail is produced, in the main, by local businesses trying to promote a service to the local community. They have used a bit of initiative and gone to the trouble of producing a flyer that, they hope, will attract more customers and I applaud them for that. I am sure there are less stony ears than mine out there in the community and I hope their efforts are successful. More customers equals more jobs, as I’ve been trying to explain to Brian Lenihan.
It saddens me therefore that a few people are feeling the urge to put little “No junk mail” signs on their letter boxes. Despite what people maintain, we are hardly burdened down by the weight of junk mail pouring through our letter boxes. We don’t need to call out the fire brigade when we return from holidays to help us force open the front door. At most, what do we receive – three, four pieces of junk mail per day? It is hardly back-breaking work to cope with all of it.
It also raises the question as to what constitutes junk mail. Does notification of evening classes fall under this heading? Public information leaflets? The Community Voice? Census information forms? Warnings of an imminent nuclear attack? Does junk mail have to be trying to sell you something?
One letter box in the vicinity is adorned with an essay threatening prosecution under the Litter Act to anybody who dares to drop a leaflet, a menu or a newspaper through it. This person seems very angry. The only explanation I can come up with for this litigious fury is that perhaps there is a baby in the house who is constantly being wakened by the sound of the letter box clattering.
Of course, I feel he is missing out because of this. I have often had the urge to rifle through my green bin and post out all the previous fortnight’s flyers to him in one large A4 envelope. This way he can show support to his local community without the baby being constantly woken.
But I jest. I accept that some people might find the task of transferring junk mail from front door to green bin onerous in the extreme. I am consequently considering offering my services in this regard, calling out to people’s homes to perform this task for them for a nominal sum.
In order to promote this piece of entrepreneurship, I will be sending out a flyer to all houses in the near future.

Reclaiming the game

2008-09-14T02:24:00.000-07:00

Pic by Pizzapie

This morning I listened to a conversation in work between two very loquacious groups of colleagues. It was in essence the same conversation that has taken place every morning since time began and went something along the lines of “Liverpool are muck, United are great, Liverpool are great, United are muck, hurray, boo, hurray, boo.”
Among the Wildean repartee, there was, as usual, the tendency to refer to the football club of their choice in the first person plural. “We’ll stuff you when we meet you next.” “We need to sign a striker.” “We are the greatest.” Call me a cynic, but I doubted very much whether the persons uttering these claims have obtained the necessary permission from their respective clubs to speak on their behalf. However I decided not to intercede.
Of course, the ‘we’ is indicative of feeling a part of this entity called a football club. They are the supporters, the faithful, from the day they are born until the day they die. Blue and true, or red and true or pink and true or whatever. True football supporters one and all.
The only problem with this little scenario is that football is a sport played in three dimensions. Nay, I jest not. In the real world, football consists of real people, the smell of deep heat, humorous crowd chants and a need to take evasive action when the left black decides to boot the ball out of play in your direction.
The other sport, about which the workplace arguments revolve, is a sort of virtual football called The Premiership. It is a soap opera for (mainly) men, featuring a cast of thousands from around the globe, all earning the kind of money that Matthew Perry and Courtney Cox could only dream of.
In a sort of “Who’s your favourite Desperate Housewife” kind of way, the very young are peer pressured into deciding which Premiership team they will buy into for the rest of their lives. Then they are encouraged to purchase the shirt and buy the Sky package and follow their team in the print media and the two-dimensional screen whenever it might appear.
This is actually not very different from what real football used to be like. There would be peer pressure also from a young age to go and follow the local team and buy the shirt and follow the team in the print media and the three dimensional arena whenever it might appear.
Of course, with the meteoric rise of the Premiership, there has been a corresponding decline in interest in real football. This has happened globally and now kids from Vietnam to Venezuela play in the streets in their Manchester United shirts, while down the road Ho Chi Min City and Caracas Casuals play to half-empty stadia.
Whenever I mention the subject of League of Ireland football, I am informed that it is rubbish, or words to that effect. To back this up, they tell me that they went to a match once and it was dire. When I point out that they have just been lamenting how awful their team was on the box last night, I am regarded with pity. I am often asked which Premiership team I follow, which is akin to asking me for my favourite member of the Royal Family.
By claiming that they don’t follow League of Ireland football because its rubbish, Premiership fans – and we are really talking Big Four here – are really admitting that they only follow a team because they win trophies. Why else are Celtic so popular and Hibs, who are much older and just as Irish, ignored? Why don’t they follow Middlesborough or Aston Villa in such numbers? Dublin fans will never win anything, yet they don’t all go off and support Kerry.
Shels will never win the European Cup and even the League of Ireland looks out of bounds for the foreseeable future. Yet I am convinced that winning our first League title for thirty years in 1993 and beating Hajduk Split at Tolka in 2004 gave me far more pleasure than United fans here had on winning their 800th trophy last year.
It is estimated that by 2012, half the world will be of Chinese extraction and 47% of the global population will claim to support one of the Big Four in the Premiership. In England there is a campaign called Reclaim the Game, which aims to promote real football with mud and crowds but they are small and pitted against Murdoch’s billions.
This season Sporting Fingal joined the League of Ireland. They play in Morton Stadium, Santry and unfortunately are doing rather well in their first season. I say unfortunately as I am a Shelbourne supporter and they stymied our push for promotion recently.
Most Shels fans dismiss the club as a sporting franchise, a Fingal County Council plaything and, based in Morton Stadium in Santry, they are hardly ‘local’ to Dublin 15, despite Fingal’s attempts to make us all feel that we belong to their little empire.
They do however play real football, sometimes badly, sometimes well, but it does actually exist in the real world. You can actually go down to a match, pay your €12 in and actually shout at players and officials in a situation where they can hear you. Sometimes they will even answer you!
Now I am not advocating that everybody climbs down off their barstool and goes and watches Torpedo Fingal. I’d prefer if they came and saw Shels. Or Clonee United or Verona or Castleknock Celtic or some team that is putting a huge amount of time and effort into representing the local community, whether they are good, bad or indifferent. But at least go and watch a real match! You can still follow your soap opera for the rest of the week!
In my confirmation class, I once had the temerity to ask if you could be a good Christian and not go to Church. In reply, I was told the parable of the boy who wanted to be a boy scout (this was back in the mists, when Baden-Powell infamously promoted Scouting for Boys!) He purchased the uniform, practised his reef knot and bowline until they were perfected, lit campfires from two pieces of flint and sang all the campfire songs. Yet he never attended a meeting. Could he claim to be a real Boy Scout?
In the same way, a true United follower can tell you how many goals Giggsy has scored and how many they beat Valencia by the last time they played them and how much shopping Rio Ferdinand bought on the day he was supposed to take a drugs test.
But if he never goes to a match, is he a real football supporter?
Support your local team.
Reclaim the game.

Sunrise, sunset

2008-09-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

So there we were in southern Crete, in an idyllic little town on the coast and somebody suggested we book an evening meal in the village above on the mountain “and watch the sun set.”
Okay, a bit yuppie but it seemed like a good idea. We ascended the steep winding path at around 7.30pm and got a steep, winding table for eight on the terrace with fabulous views of the bay below. And it was warm and the food was delicious, even the olives, and the company was great, but the sunset? The sun was like an aspiring actor that has waited all his life for his big part but then proceeds to fluff his lines. It showed no desire to turn luminous red or paint the skies with fantastic oranges and purples but simply sank with a bit of a groan behind the headland to the west. When it had gone, a little strip of cream bordered the headline for a while and then all went black.
I remember sitting on my balcony in Tenerife with a bottle of beer and watching the sun (it was the same one – I recognised it) set over the sea. I was prepared for the spectacular and again was roundly disappointed. Far from crashing into the dancing sparkles of the ocean in a cacophony of colour, the sun never actually made it to the horizon. It became enveloped in a kind of a haze three inches above the sea, shrugged its shoulders dispiritedly and simply petered out.
Now Crete and Tenerife have great advantages over Dublin 15 in many areas, particularly the weather. You may not have noticed but the last couple of summers in this part of the world have been a little on the moist side. However in other parts of the continent, the weather has been veritably Scorchio, to borrow a phrase. One would have thought that entry into the EU would have resulted in some more equal distribution of weather but it appears that this is still a long way off.
But where Dublin 15 wins out every time is in the quality of its sunrises and sunsets. For the benefit of any teenagers reading this, sunrise occurs in the early morning when the sun ascends above the horizon. In our case, the horizon is somewhere over Damastown and some of the most spectacular sunrises I have seen have emanated from behind the large beech tree in Littlepace Woods.
A few weeks ago, the sun was about to burst forth upon a world that, while not unsuspecting, was largely asleep. There was a large grey cloud that looked a bit like the island of Madagascar (without the lemurs) hovering above the Spar and the hidden sun illuminated it in oranges and greys, so that it looked like a stream of molten lava or those hot coals that very silly people run across in the South Seas. This was set off by an absolutely pure pale blue that the whizz kids at Dulux can only dream about, which stretched from the N3 to almost overhead, where it gradually became darker until merging with the night sky above Beechfield. On the far side of the N3, pinks and creams were splashed on this magnificent canvas in what was a veritable riot of colour.
Sunsets can also be quite spectacular, with flamingo pinks and dusky oranges sometimes covering up to a third of the sky. Red clouds, isolated and seemingly on fire, are commonplace and must have terrified prehistoric Dublin 15-ers, before they figured out what they were.
It is very likely that the history of the art world would have been very different if Paul Gauguin had decided against Tahiti and come to live in Blanchardstown instead. What a world of colour he would have tried to recreate, sitting at an easel outside Mace at six o’clock in the morning and gazing in awe at the panorama above Corduff!
In Channel 4’s recent programme “The World’s 100 Greatest Sunrises,” hosted by Brussel Rand, Dublin 15 had seven sunrises all told and three in the final ten. Critics may argue that the eventual winner (the very first sunrise after God created dark and light on the Fourth Day) was somewhat of a bizarre choice as there exists no photographic evidence to back up its claims of brilliance, save for some rather grainy black and white snaps, which prove nothing.
Similarly the morning after the Krakatoa explosion in 1883 may well have produced a fantastic sunrise but solar commentators all agree that this was due to particles of molten ash in the atmosphere and cannot be attributed to a merely naturally produced luminary phenomenon.
For those of you who have difficulty struggling out of bed at such early hours, the Sunrise Channel (number 834 on your digital box) broadcasts repeats of the best ones throughout the day for those of you who missed it first time around. This is normally accompanied by some atmospheric music such as the panpipes or Slade’s “My Friend Stan,” to further enhance the effect.
Of course, you don’t get good sunrises or sunsets every day. Certain criteria have to be met in order to produce a multi-coloured extravaganza such as I have been talking about. The time of day is important. Very few sunsets take place in the middle of the afternoon or at nine o’clock in the morning, so timing is essential.
Also, a good scattering of cumulo-nimbus clouds seems to augment the show, which of course is where the likes of Crete and Tenerife fall down so badly. These sun-kissed islands don’t appear to have the ability to produce good, sunlight catching clouds and frankly, they are the poorer for it. Of course, the mere presence of clouds indicates the possibility of rubbish weather but every cloud has a silver lining, so they say.
Just as Hollywood attracted film-makers with its brilliant blue skies at the turn of the last century, so I feel that Dublin 15 could easily become the sci-fi capital of the world. The alien skies above this portion of the capital would save millions on film sets and push back the boundaries of what is possible in the world of cinematography.
I have written to an Bord Fáilte, suggesting to them that they come to Dublin 15 and record some of our sunrises and sunsets. Then they can play them in audiovisual rooms in Blarney Castle or the Burren Interpretative Centre, with a diddley-i-doh soundtrack and encourage rich Americans to come and sample the delights of Carpenterstown and Mulhuddart. We could establish sunset interpretative centres, where we could explain the complicated astronomical dynamics involved in sunrises and sunsets, with little models and an interactive video game and perhaps an adventure playground.
So far, I have not had a reply but I feel it can only be a matter of time.