Chancing My Arm

äppärät yeah!

2012-02-21T00:42:00.001Z

Chancing My Arm is now available to all my readers in snazzy mobile device form! Everyone else has had their blog available in this format for fucking ages, you say! I know! But I'm still excited! I'm even writing this post on a mobile device! I'm so modern I'm next week! Back soon with a post about depression! If I can be ringed!

of course i've had it in the ear before

2012-01-15T13:43:00.000Z

This is a post I handwrote in late October 2009, a few weeks after I'd been (temporarily, but indefinitely) laid off from my teaching job. I'm not sure why I never got around to typing it up, but a visit to my grandfather on Friday night reminded me to do so.

My grandfather calls me at about 10.30 in the morning. I'm relieved that he doesn't seem to realise he's just woken me. He asks if I'll meet him for lunch later, and I happily acquiesce. I'm delighted to have any excuse to leave the house at the moment: three weeks into unemployment and I hate that it now doesn't matter whether I get out of bed or not. Lunch with a man of wit and dignity is as good a reason to do so as I've heard. It's over a year and a half now since my grandmother died and he's wearing it well - better than I could possibly have imagined.

We meet on the steps of the Dining Hall in Trinity College. I'm late, sodden and flustered. He's punctual and characteristically pristine, as though the rain wouldn't be so insolent as to try. The man is effervescent, and frequently taken for my father. He looks me up and down in bemusement and greets me warmly. He fumbles with his key to the members-only door for alumni and staff and we head in. I was in there only once before, for coffee and a chat with a senior lecturer. He wasn't grooming me, it was for a chat about my dissertation. I spent five of the last eight years in Trinity and I don't really know anyone here. Despite it being over twenty years since he retired from working here my grandfather seems to know everyone, and they're all pleased to see him. "George!" says one chap enthusiastically and expectantly. My grandfather looks somewhat blank.

"It's Henry Winter. You don't remember me, do you?"
"Of course I do, Henry - a fine, handsome young fellow like yourself!"

Henry is about 45 and not particularly handsome at all, but beams with the compliment. We bid polite hellos and goodbyes and move on briskly. "I've no idea who that fellow is, or what he's about," confides my grandfather in tones of disappointment and relief.

It turns out that the magic door leads us to the same eating area as all the proles and students use. But they're barricaded out of the place for a little longer and we get superior eating options. I end up with a three course meal in front of me, owing to his generous encouragement and my reluctance to admit that I only horsed my breakfast into me half an hour ago.

During the meal I spot a blogger* whom I recognise from pictures beside his journalistic work. I like what he does and, being on his blogroll as I am, I imagine he'd be only fucking thrilled to meet me. So I contemplate going over and saying hello, but decide that it's bad form to interrupt a chap over his lunch. and besides, I'd feel compelled to explain to my grandfather why I'd gotten up from the table to introduce myself to some bloke who had no idea who I was or what I was about, and I don't feel like explaining what blogging is to an 84 year-old.

A few minutes later he makes a casual reference to some bishop or something in cork landing themselves in a bit of trouble by whinging about someone on Twitter and having that whinge read by the person in question.
"Sorry, did you just say Twitter?"
"Yes, Twitter. It's like blogging but with more back and forth, as I understand it."
"Uh, yeah...I suppose it is."

Later, over coffee, he asks out of nowhere whether I do any writing to occupy myself while I'm unemployed. I end up telling him about this blog, about the piece i wrote for Homepages, about the couple of piss-takey pidgin Gaeilge columns I've written for the Irish language magazine Rosie contributes to, about my painful, stunted attempts at short story writing.
"I'd never make a career out of it, though" I say, lest he or, worse, I start getting big ideas.
"No, but it's good you're keeping active."
So the conversation moves on to what i might make a career out of, given how hard it seems to be to land a teaching job right now. He's fascinated to hear how much I enjoyed my time in South Korea a couple of years back, and I regale him with a few anecdotes from there. I don't think it's anything I hadn't told him in the immediate aftermath of my trip, but I'm enjoying telling it again.
"And would they know you in the Korean embassy here?"
"Well, I think was only there briefly a couple of times to sort out my working visa before I went, so..."
"I think it would be a good idea for you to go in there and ask to speak to someone significant and explain that you're someone who has spent time in their country and has very positive things to say about their country and that you could be useful to them."
I ponder the fact that the only use the Koreans would have for me is as a spokesman for soju.
"Mmm, sure, I might do that sometime."

I love his career ideas for me. Previous ones have included sourcing Polish food for all the expats here (he was shocked to here that the supermarkets have been all over that for some considerable time now), and opening a language school with Rosie where I teach English and she teaches Irish. They beat the hell out of "put your name on the teaching substitution register and maybe get a job in Tesco in the meantime", which is probably exactly what I should be doing.

He calls an abrupt halt to our time together, as is his tendency. He presses an envelope with a very generous cheque inside into my hand as a belated birthday present, and hurries off towards Dawson Street. I feel a certain twinge when I realise that this 84 year-old has more pressing engagements to attend to than I have, and wonder if I'll manage to get my shit together before he starts losing his.

*In my original draft I had named the blogger and intended on providing a link, but in the subsequent couple of years I have encountered him once or twice and discovered that he's a bit of a prick, so anonymity would serve him better now.

Beasts of no nation?

2012-01-03T02:21:00.000Z

When I was eleven or twelve some knacker walked up to me on the street, said something in Cant that I didn't understand, and punched me in the stomach. It was ideal, really: it didn't hurt very much but it allowed me not to feel bad about referring to Travellers as 'knackers', and to lustily join in with every badmouthing of them that I was every privy to. I learned quickly that, despite everyone and their dog understanding the term to be pejorative, it was nearly always completely socially accepted. Usage in front of teachers and other adults would, at worst, be met with a mild frown - the same one you might get if you said 'crap'.

I don't know how many times it took being punched by settled people for me to write that one childish tap in the gut off as part of life, rather than symbolic of the values of an entire ethnicity. I don't know exactly when I grew out of using the term 'knackers' (I suspect it was shamefully recently), but I did.

Last Saturday I read a piece in the Irish Times about the rugby players Denis Leamy and Rory Best. A puff piece, in fact, that had little to do with sport and a lot to do with the fact that the aforementioned are now 'Bushmill Brothers' (there's a remarkably similar piece in The Examiner - it seems that the edict from the marketing people was to use words like 'brothers' and 'bond' prominently, and mention the brand name at least once. Tacky. One can only hope Messrs. Thornley and Lewis got a nice case of whiskey or five for their trouble). But what was jarring was not the thinly-veiled-infomercial nature of the piece, but the part where Rory Best is asked about his BFF's playing style and says he is "a complete knacker on the pitch, as you can imagine."

Does Rory Best mean that Denis Leamy is in the habit of finding old horses on the pitch and turning them into dog food and glue? He would undoubtedly claim that he's using the word in the other sense - that of a person behaving anti-socially or thuggishly. Some say that it's an entirely separate meaning, with no reference to Travellers at all. Bock does (or did, I'll allow for the fact that that post is three years old). But most of the times I've heard people use the phrase "some knacker..." in the middle of an anecdote they will inevitably have to clarify whether they are referring to a scumbag-knacker or, you know, a knacker-knacker. The etymology of any term is a complicated thing, but there seems little doubt that its origins are connected to Travellers. The term is still heavily connected to them, in my experience.

Rory Best has always seemed like a decent enough skin, but he might want to think again about publicly using a term that is highly offensive to an entire culture, even if a lot of people use it freely. They used 'nigger' freely, too, once. If he must use it in the context of Bushmills Brotherly Bonding Banter, then perhaps the Irish Times might think a little more carefully about publishing it, and potentially perpetuating its use among the thousands who will have read that article. Twenty percent would deny citizenship to them, remember, lest we claim that Ireland doesn't have a problem with Travellers. Perhaps they'll redact it later, as they do.

Bad Santa (Part 2)

2011-12-22T01:28:00.001Z

A few years ago I wrote this post, all about one of my experiences of pretending to be Santa Claus for other people's amusement, I mentioned at the start of it that there were going to be four parts to it but, like so many of my good blogging intentions, they never happened. That post just flaps in the wind there now, still frequently visited by naughty people trying to stream the movie 'Bad Santa'. But I've just read it again, and was surprised to find that it's actually pretty funny, and that there were elements to the story I'd entirely forgotten. So here, more than three years later, is my stab at a second part:

PornoSanta

During my third year of college I lived in a part of Finglas that the landlord pretended was Glasnevin and compensated for the lack of a social life that I simply couldn't afford by doing a bit of volunteering at a homework club in a refugee centre, where shared the title of 'volunteer co-ordinator' with a far more enterprising and imaginative person than I who went by the name of Sinéad. It was our job to help teenaged asylum-seekers who'd come to Ireland without their parents do their homework, and ensure that there were enough volunteers to meet the demand for it. It was a huge amount of fun and I felt bad whenever anyone commended me on the work, as I it was far too enjoyable to be considered in any way worthy.

Sinéad, being an enterprising and imaginative person, was out and about one day single-handedly organising the Christmas party for the centre while I was suffering through all the added workload that being one year ahead of her in college brought by gawping at pretty girls in the library.
She called me:
"Andrew, would you dress up as Santa for the party and give out a few presents?"
"Ummm...are they not a bit old for Santa?"
"C'mon, it'll be fun and they'll love it."
"Do we have a suit?"
"I'm just about to buy one."
"Do we have the budget for that?" (First and only time I've ever uttered those words.)
"Yeah, it's grand, it's only three euro."

The three euro part should have been the warning, in all honesty.

This costume lacked the musty antique shop elegance of my previous Santa garb by being more of a small, thin two-piece red suit, rather than a glorious crimson robe that could house any trousers I wished, along with many a pillow for full jolly-fat-bastard effect. I just about forced one small cushion under the jacket, before making the decision to keep my jeans on under the flimsy drawstring trousers. Skinny fuckin' jeans they were, grey ones, for I was almost a skinny enough fucker for them back then.

The students, from all over Africa, were indeed thrilled by the sight of me and my big sack of presents, and laughed long and hard. Once again, I felt like a rockstar. A present or two distributed, the laughter became even more uproarious - screeches and hoots everywhere. I was starting to become bemused by just how funny these guys thought the whole thing was. It was only me in a red suit, speaking in a deeper voice than usual, after all.

"For god's sake pull up your pants, man!" exhorted a young man beside me, who has subsequently gone on to slightly make a name for himself as a slightly-known comedian. I looked down to see that the flimsy drawstring trousers had, shockingly, failed me and were now sitting pooled around my ankles while the protective layer of my skinny fuckin' jeans now resembled grubby fuckin' longjohns. I looked at my chest and the corner of a cushion was poking out of the the intersection at the breast of the jacket, like some sort of floral-patterned cotton Janet Jackson.

After I'd waddled back to the toilet cubicles and begun changing back, wishing I had something else to put over the now-shameful skinny jeans, I overheard one of the Nigerian kids having a blistering barney on the phone with his girlfriend from school, who wanted him to meet up with she and her friends, while he wanted to hang out at the party for a bit longer. I think it was only then that I began seeing the asylum seekers as citizens, rather than guests of the nation.

Bilharzia

2011-11-30T21:39:00.000Z

The other day I pounced on a novel set in Tanzania called 'Exile' by Jakob Ejersbo, a Danish writer. The author had, like me, done some of his growing up there and I was thrilled to think that I might see some of my experiences reflected in the writing of someone good enough to do it professionally. That the book looked rough and cynical and was by the author of 'the Danish Trainspotting' boded even better. Mentions of places I spent time in, the view of Kilimanjaro in the morning and a liberal sprinkling of Swahili words took me back, right enough, but it was the simple word 'bilharzia' that tipped me into a full vat of reminiscence. Bilharzia was the reason why our mothers told us we could never swim in any of the lakes we encountered in central Tanzania, though some older guys I knew claimed that they often did it, and you just needed to make sure your feet never touched the bottom. I doubt many of the lakes were more than four foot deep.

I tended to trust my mother on this, as I did when it came to scorpions, jiggers, green mambas and most other issues of health and safety. I was never stung by a scorpion, jiggered by a jigger or bitten by a green mamba. I never really even knew what bilharzia was, just that it was to be avoided. I don't think I had ever seen it written down before and can't say I recall hearing the word once since we came back to Ireland, nineteen years ago. Nor did I think about it much. Turns out it's caused by Schistosoma parasites*, which burrow into your kidneys, bladder, rectum and any other private, precious parts you can think of and cause you to bloodily shit yourself to death.

Nostalgia is a rum beast.

*The Internet tells me that they swim freely in open water, which means that those older braggards were either full of shit or, y'know, minutes away from violently shitting themsleves. Ha!

What Others Were Feeling Like Today #17

2011-11-07T17:56:00.000Z

1951

One wonders how a nation's intelligence resists the radio. Moreover, it does not resist. The radio is a faucet of foolishness. The only thing I can bear listening to is the sports reporting. The high-speed precision of the speakers. They are forbidden stupidity. Which exists only in the fact that some men are kicking a ball around a field and the whole world is excited by the fact.

Cesare Pavese

It's been over a year since I put one of these posts up, and the previous entry was also from Cesare Pavese (whom I had never heard of before). One can only assume that sixty years ago Cesare and his contemporaries didn't have to suffer through the phenomenon known as 'the co-commentator'. Driving home the other day I caught the end of Liverpool v Swansea City on Today FM. As the home side pushed for a winner Dirk Kuyt thought he had scored, only for it to be ruled out by the offside flag. "Ooooooohhh, I don't know about that," piped up Ronnie Whelan " and it's the female official over the far side, too, so let's just see if she's got it right."

She had, though that is neither here nor there. Being female is not an obstacle to understanding the offside rule, having it explained to you by someone who doesn't understand it either, is. I can forgiven the flagrant abuse of grammar and meaning by football pundits, we've all got used to it. But the sexism makes me squirm for you, Ronnie, you faucet of foolishness.

sometimes i feel like i'm over and out

2011-11-04T17:38:00.000Z

It is one of the oddities of Dublin life that if one is fortunate enough to live close enough to one's place of work to only have to pay a €1.20 fare on the bus every morning then there is no other way to pay one's fare but by having that €1.20 counted out in exact change.* This morning, I finally succumbed to the eternal battle with change by not having any of the fucking stuff. So I hopped into Freddie's cornershop on my way to the bus stop and bought an 80 cent packet of chewing gum and a €1 scratchcard with a twenty, providing me with the requisite change. I was still on time for the bus and my scratchie showed three little €2 symbols, meaning I had covered the cost of the scratchie, endowed myself with minty fresh breath and netted a tidy profit of 20 cent.

Some days I swear I am invincible.

*Unless, of course, there is. I am open to correction on this.

October, quickly

2011-10-25T22:15:00.000+01:00

I turned 30, I went to Edinburgh, I listened to the taxi driver banging on authoritatively on the way to the airport about how Edinburgh had been bombed to the ground during the war, though this was patently untrue.
I drank a lot of whisky, I drank a lot of whiskey, I hated football and preferred rugby, I hated rugby and preferred football, I came in a cup, I bonded with my new almost-niece, I thought about the meaning of legacy.
I disturbed myself by enjoying the Qathafy* videos, I shuddered at every sight of Martin McGuinness, I did a bit of yoga, I felt better for it.
I saw Drive, I wondered what was wrong with the people who didn't like it, I didn't read much I liked, I saw dEUS, I rocked out gently whilst discovering whole new ways to hate Ticketmaster.
I felt I had to seek out my own information on the referenda, I remained unsure, I retained a healthy distrust for anything the government try to sneak through, I wondered whether the torrential rain and flooding was all just another cunning plan to kill Dana. I then remembered that she may be one of the few remaining people who entirely believes that what we call 'an act of God' really is an act of God. The floods were really only meant for the gays and the abortionists. I realised everyone would vote in a Fianna Fáiler reality TV star anyway.
I resented the impending time change, looked forward to November anyway, I vowed to write something proper then, or at least indulge in such frippery more regularly.

*There are about 150 different ways to transliterate that name, which makes me wonder why people got so vexed by the Irish Times plumping for 'Gadafy'. My Arabic speaking students tend to say that the way I've used is how they would write it. You would be wrong to quibble with them on this.

"Well, it's not exactly the backyard, but it'll do"*

2011-09-28T00:40:00.000+01:00

"Hello, I'd like to make an appointment, please."
"And what kind of an appointment is that?"

I swear I can hear a smirk in her voice.
"semen analysis"
"Sorry?"
"Semen analysis, fucking semen analysis, OK?"

Go here if video won't play.

There is not, that I am currently aware of, anything wrong with my semen, but Rosie's polycystic ovaries and the havoc that they wreak mean that we are attending an infertility clinic soon. I find it difficult to talk about, but the only thing worse than talking about something like this is not talking about it. They tell me that men feel overwhelmed with gratitude after they realise the suffering their wives have gone through to bear them a child. I already owe Rosie a massive debt for the physical and emotional nausea she has to get through every day from the vicious medication that is supposed to give us a chance. Having to get up early in the morning one day to have my goo pored over by some dudes is a piffling contribution, and the only tangible one I have had to make thus far.

I will not lie to you, good people, the limits of my knowledge of the workings of semen analysis extend as far as the above scene from Naked Gun 33 1/3.(It was harder than you'd imagine to track that clip down, and funnier than you remember to watch.) Tragically, it turns out you do the donating bit no more than an hour before your appointment, and bring it in with you in a special little cup that I'll have to go in and collect from them some time beforehand. You'd think a sandwich bag or a bit of tupperware would do 'em. The lady on the phone did say they had a special room that I could make an appointment for, but, in a fluster, I declined. I couldn't then call back and say that I'd changed my mind about their special room, could I? I wonder what the people who work there call it? I'd go with 'Spunk Space', but that may very well be why I don't work in a fertility clinic.

They also send a letter that tells me I'm not to ejaculate for 2-5 days before. What the fuck are they thinking, giving a bloke a three day margin of choice? So yeah, next week, forty eight hours and one minute after the tetchy beginning of a fiddlin'and humpin' ban I'll be waking up, cracking one out, and bolting it across the rush houred city with a sticky cup in my pocket. Light a candle for me, won't you?

*The second option for this post's title was 'Juan Kerr Does Plenty'. Third, I suppose, was 'Seminal'. Fourth, now that I think of it would be 'Oh, Comely' because, y'know, it has 'come' in the title and I do love Neutral Milk Hotel so very much. Should anyone reading this happen to have an extra ticket for Jeff Mangum in Whelan's in November, let me know. I'll pay you. In cash. Or spunk. As you wish, really.

you, me, we'll work it out!

2011-09-20T22:53:00.000+01:00

Latest aborted posts:

One about 9/11, with added eastern Europeans and infidelity. And sliced pan.

One about our cat that was somehow supposed to move seamlessly into a poignant meditation on the Zanzibar ferry disaster. There were seams.

One where I pondered whether I cared more about 9/11, the Zanzibar ferry disaster, the cat, or eastern Europeans.

One on why it might be OK to be a little bit of a racist.

One about why I hate seeing my brother suffering through a break-up. Turns out it's for much the same reasons as everyone else hates seeing their brother suffering through a break-up.

One in which I declare my candidacy for the Irish presidency (initially planned back in the days when Bertie made noises about running, but revived by the notion of Martin 'you only think I'm a cunt of a terrorist because you're a cunt of a west Brit' McGuinness now being in the running. The little cunt of a terrorist. (If he's feeling litigious, I totally got hacked, right?)

One where I ruminated on the very nature of confidence, only to realise that I entirely lacked the ability to write it.

not with the fire in me now

2011-08-24T17:47:00.000+01:00

You are walking home, midway between slovenly and respectable. And you realise that this, this village and this house feel as much like home as any of the 13 (or so) have. You will be thirty soon, you will be an uncle-in-law even sooner. You see more and more of your friends and you make new ones and you read good things all the time. Your mood can always be lifted by music, as is required. It is hard, at this precise moment, to think of a different step you might ever have taken. You are growing accustomed to the glow of your room in the morning. Summer is ending, but it feels like it is only breaking out.

new adventures in advertising

2011-08-15T00:01:00.000+01:00

One of the greatest benefits of digital television is the ability to pause and resume when you like. Not just so you can go off and take a shite without missing the lovely Mary Kennedy easing you into a story about cheese carpentry in Bagenalstown, but so you can leave it for ten minutes or so and then be able to fast-forward through all the ad breaks on whatever show you're watching. No more Pat Shortt singing some bollocks about something or other, no more Simon Delaney and Craig Doyle selling you everything, no more shit McDonald's ads that only serve to suggest that the future is nothing but manky food, mutants and morons.

It all feels positively utopian, quite frankly. I was starting to wonder if there's some sort of catch to it all, as though my refusal to watch these ads mean I'll have to suffer advertising in some other way. I'm soft on it in many ways, recognising its financial necessity in certain contexts. There are, for example, some bloggers who I appreciate need to feature ads on their sites in order to do what they do to the highest possible standards. So I click on those ads from time to time and, even though I've no intention of buying anything, dilly-dally wherever they've landed me for a while - just so the corporate bastards don't recognise that my click-through was executed without even a morsel of consumer intent. I also understand that TV funds itself through advertising, though I wish a state-funded station like RTÉ would be a little more BBC and a lot less ITV when it comes to poxy commercials.

Turns out that if you've found a way of circumventing telly advertising then the cinema is where the fuckers get you back. Captive in your big seat under a pound of popcorn and a three litre bucket of coke they will show you the gammiest, gratingest ads for about ten minutes before the trailers even start. They will show you one of those hideously unfunny Red Bull ads, and some weird fucker behind you will chuckle at it. Sometimes they'll show you a bizarre propaganda film for the EU, filled with the kind of sunshine and cornfields rhetoric that Pravda would have rejected for not being subtle enough. If you're anything like me you'll start getting thoroughly tetchy and take to groping your wife for distraction.

But at this point, fifteen to twenty minutes after the advertised starting time of the film, the trailers begin and you relax, because trailers make sense and are often what you'll base your next choice of film on. What you won't be familiar with, unless you've been to see Super 8 (or perhaps others) in Cineworld is Take That's cunty heads popping up on screen to introduce their new shit video to their new shit song from some new shit take on The Three Musketeers. Whereupon you think to yourself, "Why am I being forced to watch music videos? I didn't really even know music videos existed anymore, since MTV stopped showing them and went full retard on scripted reality shows instead. They're charging everyone about a tenner to be in here and another tenner for their snacks, should we really have to sit here and take this? Will I just slip out and go for a piss while this is on? You took a piss just before you came in, she'll just think you're masturbating if you go again now. Shit, why did I tell her Mark Owen was my favourite one, I feel a little gay now. Quick, grab her tit and then smile disarmingly so you get away with it. Nicely played."

This is what happens when advertising pounces in whole new ways and pushes us to the limit, my friend: innocent breasts get grabbed and ladies question the sanctity of certain vows they have made. But I believe there is a solution. Among the chin-stroking and musing over the causes of the London riots last week most commentators seemed to overlook Heidegger's trenchant maxim of Dickheads just gonna be dickheads, y'all and leapt into notions that rampant consumerism has led to a culture whereby kids just have to have blingin' trainers - be it by hook, crook or petrol bomb. So the only solution to my mind (and the mind of an Irish 29 year-old bloke who likes a bit of early Dizzee Rascal is exactly the kind of mind that should be consulted) is to ban advertising outright. Just fucking all of it. We'd all shout at the telly less and go to the cinema more even though we could download films for free, we could put poems and pictures of flowers on buses instead, riots would be averted as teenagers all over the world learn to just be satisfied with their lot, and mammary glands would be at least 27% less pawed. There is no downside.

From the excellent Photoshoplooter

Everything

2011-07-28T23:35:00.000+01:00

I am on the bus home and I am tired, though not as tired as I had been. Four weeks on from a fortnight of doing fuck all in the French Alps and I am still feeling somewhat restored. There were three months of waking up feeling bleached and sedated prior to that. I don't know why.

I'm on the 46A back to our new house in Stoneybatter, where Rosie and Biscuit purr at the spaciousness of it all. After two years in our Portobello basement flat I'm still blinking like a mole in the light. I like to potter up the spiral staircase to the converted attic. I have notions of properly learning to play guitar there, high and obscure where no-one else would have to suffer my noodlings. Mostly, though, I just go up there and stick my head out of the skylight and across the city. I can see the Spire and the Pigeon Houses at Poolbeg. And churches.* Didn't you have to feel impressed by Enda Kenny for once? Every dog has his day.

We are one year married on Friday. I've tried not to be smug for the last year, but even the constant question of "when are you having a baby?" hasn't stopped me. I've been asked it on this bus. Everyone is so very concerned with filling up this world of killing rampages and phone hacking. I swear all there is for them is X Factor and procreation. We'll keep at it (so to speak) but if there is to be no baby for Rosie and I that will be alright too. Partly because it will have to be, but mostly because it will.

Give me your hands cos you're wonderful.

*CONTRIVED SEGUE ALERT

On Divorce Settlements

2011-07-06T01:13:00.000+01:00

Not me and Rosie, mind. No, we had what could be considered our first ever row on Sunday after a few afternoon pints later led to a temporary mutual lack of perspective on housework, but I reckon we'll be able to avoid calling Lionel Hutz in just yet. I refer to the parting of ways between us and Eircom Broadband. €216 it'll cost us to be shot of them.

I remember when they were good old Telecom Éireann and the only ways they could fuck you up were by swallowing your coins in their banjaxed phoneboxes, or charging you extra if calls on your home phone lasted longer than three minutes. Then they got all supercorporate on us, dropped that pesky fada and floated themselves on the stock exchange, meanwhile convincing a shitload of fools to buy shares in them at a heavily infalted price. My family were amongst those fools, though we didn't get burned half as badly as some people did. But yeah, speculate on the stock market and there's every chance things might just go tits up.

What's not so hot is charging people around fifty quid a month for a service they simply don't get. Whinging about your broadband speed sounds an awful lot like what supercilious fuckers would call a First World Problem (blogging about it most certainly is), but getting vexed over consistently not getting what you're paying for strikes me as pretty justified. I lack the patience to detail the shoddiness of their service and their customer care, but take a look at their reviews. A lot of people are left spitting feathers, in what mostly stand out as unusually articulate expressions of internet rage. And why not? They've thrown thousands of euro and thousands of hours of customer hold-time at the incompetent cunts between them. I feel like we have too. Pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Pay €48 a month and you get the dimmest bunch of morons you're likely to find this side of a Kid Rock concert.

David, my favourite of the many technical support staff we dealt with, told me that we'd have to sign a new twelve month contract if we wanted a replacement for the modem that their technicians (incorrectly, as it turned out) told us was the reason why we hadn't had continuous connection for more than twenty minutes for the past month. I could sign that contract, or I could pay Eircom €47 for a new one or, y'know, "just buy your own in Currys". When I pressed David on why exactly I might have to do that he said (and I quote verbatim here, seriously) "Uuuuuuhhh......deregulation ummmmmmmmmmm increased competition and stuff............................................................................................uhhhhh, yeah..." He then left me on hold with squalling feedback in my ear for ten minutes before realising that oh, I was still under contract, as I had said. Fair balls, David, I'd turn up to work stoned off my fucking face too if I could get away with it.

If Eircom were a spouse they'd be attentive at first, before becoming distant, philandering, and then downright abusive. You might just be able to prove in a court of law that this was the case, but it'd take more time and emotional energy than you really have, so you just pay them some money to fuck off and stop annoying you.

"My friend had a hip operation and..." / Meeting People is Cheesy

2011-06-28T23:59:00.000+01:00

A change of working scenery, if not of employer, has reintroduced me to the devilry that is small-talk. New EFL teachers, nervous before their first ever paid class, are the worst for it; simpering and clucking and cracking awful jokes before they wait to get started. They don't know each other and they think they don't know what's in store for them.

I've lost all tolerance for it as I've gotten older - preferring to say nothing than to talk utter fluff. It's not the fluff that's the problem, mind, it's the scutter that comes out of your mouth for want of something better to say. 90 percent of conversations are nought but fluff, but they do at least tend to be couched in your own terms. On starting a new secondary teaching job a few years back I was small-talking with another new teacher, who told me he was from Newbridge. "You'll be worth your weight in silver to this place, then", was my side-splitting response . Oh yes it was. (Context for non-Irish readers here, should you wish). I still shrivel and die a little inside when I think of that, but that guy's been kind enough never to remind me of that, and he now knows I'm not quite that much of a fucking sack.

It can happen even with people you've known for a good while. A good mate of mine came back from a year's travelling and told irritating, shit-awful jokes for a couple of weeks before he got back to normal. I'm still not sure if he was just feeling a bit nervous and out of place being back home, or if he thought this material had played well among all the back-packers he had encountered - too polite around new people to do anything but chuckle politely. Wedding Table Syndrome, to so very many of us.

But yeah, my stock of patience for it is running perilously thin, given that lifetimes are just packed full of awkward making nice with strangers. "I do this, and I live there and yeah, I've heard there are loads of nice pubs in Clonmel and no, I suppose Simon Cowell probably isn't really like that in person, yeah I've heard the family name but I don't think I've met him - Wicklow's a bigger place than you realise, you know."

Fuck all that, I think I'd rather people just thought I was aloof.

Though there is always the nuclear option of going up to my new colleagues and launching straight into a bawdy anecdote involving casual sex or soft drugs, giving them some unanticipated physical contact and perhaps even dropping in a track or two from the '30 Greatest Paedo Jokes' album that's generally on heavy rotation in my head. It's what they'd end up getting somewhere down the line anyway.

I dunno, Leona Lewis or some shit?

2011-06-01T23:28:00.002+01:00

A man passed me on the bus this morning looking much like Twenty Major would if we were about fifteen years down the line and Twenty Major had taken up shrinking and Buckfast for breakfast. (Yes, I am that deeply embedded in the Irish blogosphere that I know what Twenty Major looks like.) Tenuous blogger lookalikes aside, it was the man's folded newspaper that caught my eye. 'SPLITS WITH FIANCÉ' is all I could read of the front page. Or perhaps 'FIANCÉE' - I pay little heed to gendered French vowels first thing.

And do you know what I thought? I thought to myself "I might just have enough time before work starts to pop into Dunne's and scan the tabloids to see who has split with whom."

I didn't have time, really, and am still none the wiser. It was one of those mornings where a Korean student hands me a banana at the eleven o'clock break and says "Take care of yourself, Andrew." Feel free not to enlighten me. I feel a profound fucking distaste for myself most mornings, I must say.

mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann

2011-05-25T01:09:00.000+01:00

“Nationality is respectable only when it is on the defence, when it is waging wars of liberation it is sacred; when those of domination it is accursed.”

-Rabindranath Tagore

Growing up in Cork, as I did, tribal loyalties and nationality were as straightforward as it comes. I was from Cork and from Ireland and I loved Cork and Ireland and knew that they were the best places in the world, ever. This despite being of stock with roots in Dublin, Belfast, deepest rural Roscommon, and yeah, England.

Living briefly in Birmingham and then in Tanzania made my sense of nationality all the more entrenched. No-one sported more green than me on St. Patrick's Day, no-one thrilled to the exploits of the Irish team in Italia '90 more than me. I learned of them weeks after the fact, through cuttings from the Irish Times my grandfather posted us. Weeks later. That may seem antiquated beyond belief, but there it is, that's how it was.

Katrina, an older Australian girl, once took a handful of rough, small stones and scrubbed furiously at my neck with them as punishment for claiming that photographic evidence from our homelands proved that the Irish rugby players of the 1991 World Cup squad were clearly better-looking than the Aussie Rules players of the same vintage. An admittedly bold statement, born out of a blend of national pride and awkward nine year-old flirting, I guess.

Flash-forward, if you will, twenty years, and I am slinking away from my workplace on Dame Street, my efforts to teach having been hampered all morning by soundchecks for the Jedward/Obama extravaganza due to take place later on. Every other person is going in the opposite direction. An admirable man is going to take to the stage, and everyone will describe him as "inspirational", even if he merely makes farty noises with his armpits for five minutes. He is an intelligent man, vastly preferable to the idiotfuck who preceded him, but our desire to be loved by him means there does not appear to be so much as one voice of dissent at the visit of a man who presides over the most capitalist country in the world, a country of relentless cultural imperialism, a country still embroiled in two unnecessary wars whose only tangible upshots of any kind have been the violent deaths of two tyrants.

I forget about it for a while (and you should too, for this post is not about anti-Americanism or anti-Obamism) and listen to music and read back at home, before curiosity gets the better of me and I tune in for the last few minutes of his speech. I can't have been the only one cringing at the squalls of approval every time Barack Obama says the words 'Ireland' or 'Irish', can I? And the squeals of delight when he utters a few words in 'Gaelic', before rapidly translating them into English, because Barack Obama and his scriptwriters are savvy enough to know most of us, me included, are proud that we have a national language but not proud enough to learn to speak it? Our Taoiseach (who apparently now considers a tribute act to be an appropriate warm-up) will be making moves to lessen its usage, as soon as he thinks he can get away with it.

"Inspirational!" roared whatever chimp TV3* had anchoring their coverage. I was left feeling cold by his words, though impressed by his subsequent 15 minutes of handshakes and baby-cuddling. Perhaps missing the start of his speech meant I hadn't had the chance to get swept up in the whole thing, but what he said certainly reads an awful lot like candyfloss, designed to elicit cheers from an expectant crowds and play very, very well amongst Irish-American voters - a fairly key demographic in a country where around 20 percent of the population recently claimed they believe Obama to be a Muslim.

I'd love to feel all superior to a country with that level of fear and misinformation, but around the same percentage in Ireland are happy to proclaim in a survey that they would deny citizenship to members of the Travelling Community.

Never mind the 'death of Anglophobia' that the visit of Queen Elizabeth is purported to have brought about, we live in a country practising something akin to apartheid, and we don't talk about it. I'll say more on this another time, should cogent words come to me. We, all human beings, are born on bits of land from people most likely from some other bits of land and we put names on them, and ascribe to them characteristics and personalities that can't really exist on a geographical basis and tell ourselves that certain bits of land are better than others and draw lines in the sand and makes flags and laws and borders and piss all over each other in our haste to mark our territory. May there be no more flag-waving for me.

*I know. I hadn't realised what channel I was on for a few minutes. I suppose someone has to make them feel better about themselves.

show you what all the howling's for

2011-05-24T21:55:00.000+01:00

I had a slight need to take a leak before I left work this evening but I decided not to go at work, knowing that after the 20 minute walk home the piss I would take would be ultramega satisfying. You get your kicks where you can, don't you?

In other, less urine-related, news, this blog is three years old today. I really don't know how that happened. Like most things, I think I hopped on the bandwagon just as the whole thing had reached saturation point and was becoming terminally uncool. Once I finally succumb to Twitter you can be fairly sure that that's over, too. Twitter was just getting going back then, and quickly started to gobble commenters who had stuff to say and then the kind of bloggers who only did this as a means of chatting to folks they didn't know and saying 'check this motherfucking dog video out!' Which is good for everyone, I guess, though it's certainly changed the landscape a bit. Nevertheless, blogs are still usually the best place to read articulate and uncensored writing by people without a political or commercial agenda.

I didn't do this expecting to be read by anyone much, so the readers I have picked up are an unexpected bonus. Especially as blogging by its very nature is a reverse narrative, so it must often be unclear as to what the fuck I'm banging on about. And I must surely have exhausted the goodwill of just about every longer-term reader out there by repeatedly going on about how I met my wife through blogging and how much I love her.

Anyway, I wish I had more to say right now. But I don't, so I'll just peter out in much the same way way as my wedding speech by saying "Umm...thanks" with a crack in my voice, and sitting down.

days of enjoyment to which everyone cheers

2011-05-02T13:17:00.000+01:00

Friday

I get my first taste of the royal wedding at around 2 o'clock in the chipper in Georges' Street Arcade. The rolling loops on Sky News are muted, but the man behind the counter offers his own commentary.
"I'd have hor and hor sister, an' I'd take a little flower girl, too. I'd just have hor watchin'."

Saturday

An unspeakable lack of whiskey.
Later, fly to Pakistan.

Sunday

Arsenal beat United. Too little, too late.
I kill Osama bin Laden. It was surprisingly easy: I burst in on him watching Cash in the Attic, offered him a Werther's Original and then kicked him in the hip.

Monday

Dinner with the parents.

On going one better

2011-04-18T22:28:00.001+01:00

"Do I get presents?" asked my wife meekly, in response to my post celebrating her 11,000th day on earth. I like buying Rosie presents, she's always surprised and appreciative of whatever morsels I bring her home. Biscuit, our recently adopted cat, wouldn't have dragged home as sorry an article as I did this time around, though.

The key to buying a present for someone you live with, I've always thought, is getting them something you would be perfectly happy to enjoy with them, but that doesn't appear to be an act of self-interest thinly disguised as generosity (like if I came home and presented her with a weekend trip to London, then mentioned that most of it would be taken up with an Arsenal match, for example. I haven't done that, yet).

I can often strike the right note with music, as we have some similar tastes and some contrasting ones, though rarely contrasting enough to cause upset. Rosie likes ambient music and minimalist electronica a fair bit, while I enjoy it perfectly well, but wouldn't be inclined to spend money on it for myself. So when I saw the Buddha Box in Tower Records and read the slavering blurb on the wall about how it was the future of ambient music and other such guff I reckoned it might be just the ticket.

It wasn't. Essentially, I was under the impression that it might be able to do something as super fucking deadly and addictive as this magnificent thing, only in a more portable form. It does not. The latest incarnation of the Buddha Box fizzles and crackles inexplicably and plays very short, downbeat loops of a Chinese instrument called a Qu Gin. The pitch of the instrument can be altered slightly, in a manner akin to detuning a guitar. Left thrumming introspectively to itself for a little while the yoke starts to create a soundtrack to 'Futility: The Movie' and the largely ignored sequels 'Despair: Gazing Deeper into the Navel' and 'Less Than Nothing'. She politely let it play for about half an hour or so as we sat on the couch and pondered unacknowledged trees falling in the Yangtzai forest and the cubed inside of a table tennis ball, while Biscuit glared angrily at it before flopping abjectly on the floor.

A night or two later I was searching the shelves of Spiceland!*, the local Asian food shop for exciting new curry powders when my eye, invariably drawn to things of a sugary nature, alighted on colourful boxes of custard. "Rosie likes custard," I thought, "so I shall go one better and get her banana custard." €1.50 for a massive fuck-off box of it, it was, which may well have been the first portent. The second was when I opened it after dinner, gleefully announcing "I got you something special for afters," just as an acrid puff of manky bubblegum powder hit my schnozz. Undeterred, I added warm milk. I had no answers as to why it was lurid green now. I stirred briskly and fretted over whether I was doing it right, as I do when I < open scarequote >cook < close scarequote >anything new. She couldn't eat her bowlful. I couldn't blame her. I couldn't eat it either, but I did anyway, and then hers. The point I was proving escapes me at this juncture, though the resulting stomach cramps barely have.

That night, as we lured Biscuit out of the bedroom with a turkey stick and turned in, Rosie reminded that she wouldn't be home until late the following night as she had a meeting in Kilkenny. She looked anxious. "That's grand," I said, "I'm playing poker tomorrow night instead of Thursday."

"Oh, thank fuck. I thought you were going to sit there all night listening to the Buddha Box and eating green custard with the cat like a piece of conceptual art."

*Exclamation mark my own, as I feel it really adds something there.

Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible

2011-04-05T11:10:00.000+01:00

She won't know it until she reads this, and she may not thank me for pointing it out, but today is Rosie's eleven thousandth day of life. It's not that I have Rain Man-esque abilities, it's just that during a recent chat with some similarly-aged friends, I realised that we hit our ten thousandth day sometime after we turn 27 and grew curious about exactly how many days old I am. This site does the job nicely, but make sure you enter your date of birth in that backwards way that Americans do. Days are more significant than years, if you think about it. You don't remember the year of your first kiss, or the year you got shitfaced drunk and made a holy show of yourself in a Spanish karaoke bar, or the year someone ripped out your heart and pissed on it, do you?

We've still only been together a little less than a thousand days, Rosie and I, but we both have had a fair idea of what's gone on for the other one in every single one of them. Speaking personally, they were when things suddenly got a fuck of a lot easier. The first 10,000, though, are the ones we really talk about, slowly.

Once again, you've embarrassed me in front of real people

2011-04-01T17:19:00.000+01:00

The thing about blogging is that there's every chance that once you've been doing it a while you may well end up meeting other bloggers and even get to know the blighters. The upside to this is that you might just make some new friends. The downside is that you now feel like you can't put up a post entitled 'cracking wanks I've had lately'. Which, given the face-achey dose of Nose AIDS I have at the moment, is about as much as I have to offer right now as I think I've already ruminated on the gibbering wonders of Deal or No Deal here.

Tell me, do other bloggers out there let real people read their blogs? Like, people they work with and non-blogging friends and stuff? My sister drops by pretty regularly, as does one of my cousins, but my brother just gave me a look that said "wow, you're far more of a spa than I thought" when he heard I was at this lark. People in work sometimes ask how I met my wife and I tell them it was through blogging. They then ask what the blog's called and I start this little dance of pretending I really don't want to tell them until they've asked a third or fourth time. It's a lot like Peter denying Jesus, really. If i tell them then they lose interest and say "Right, I'll check it out sometime", before realising that some of my posts are an awful lot longer than a Facebook update and that I might just be a little bit weirder than they thought. And then the whole thing never gets mentioned again. One colleague was quite happy to tell me that the whole concept is self-indulgent. It is. The irony was that she somehow felt that the novel she is working on, which will (as is inevitable) contain multiple lengthy fictionalised aspects of herself that she will one day hope to sell to people, isn't.

I dunno, the sooner we accept that we're all just confused souls pouring stuff out into the ether and hoping that one or two other confused souls get it, the better for all. And, furthermore, what does it tell us that Blogger's spell-check doesn't recognise 'bloggers'? 'Floggers', apparently, is fine.

Externalised

2011-03-24T21:58:00.000Z

The External World from David OReilly on Vimeo.

I realise that people don't tend to watch 17 minute videos on the Internet. You can shoot your load much quicker than that. But, should you have the time and inclination, this award-winning film by Irish animator David O'Reilly is well-worth a look. There's also a good interview with him here (and check out the link to his King's Speech pisstake acceptance speech). It may not be to everyone's liking, but it'll certainly stay with you: the "punch in the brain" that he refers to. It's frustrating that an artist like David has to live in Berlin to be able to do what he wants, but hardly surprising. Whenever I encounter people who can't see the value of art and of novel ideas in society I want to point out that even the purveyors of utilitarian entertainments like Fair City must have harboured loftier creative notions, once.

2011-03-15T01:01:00.000Z

When i wanted to buy broom handles today to use for some sort of a protest that i won't be going to the man in the hardwareshop made me feel like less of a man because he could see in my face that i do not own a saw, even though i had liberally sprayed the word 'timber' around and i thought 'you don't need to do that, man in the shop, because i have gotten this far in life without owning a saw and i'm alright with it and you are good at your job and i am good at mine'. and then, in the way that these things occur it occurred to me that i might not even be very good at my job at all and that that really should have occurred to me before, that i have no right to assume i might be decent at anything. i am, i suppose, reasonably good at carrying things of moderate weight but then, most likely everyone else is too. you are only really a weak fellow who is subject to controls like everyone else and though you know that a government is much like a referee in that you shouldn't really notice them if they are doing a good job you will continue to notice them and just think that it would be really nice if they could just tiptoe around you and your wife and not be quite so fucking noticeable the whole time because you never really did anything to them, did you? and that, today, it's harder to feel sad about 10,000 than about one because it's just not a multiplicable thing, sadness, probably.

Like it shines on me

2011-03-06T21:47:00.001Z

In the lead up to Rosie turning 30 I tried to tell as many people as possible that she was going to be 40. Or else made sure that everyone knew she'd be 30 before me. She was less than amused, which surprised me at first as she has a very self-deprecating sense of humour and is well used to me. Getting upset over jibes about your age has always struck me as pointless, as it's a bit like being slagged for existing. But, just as the only birthday freak-outs I ever had occurred as my 24th and 28th birthdays saw me unemployed, so are there expectations and disappointments that can attach themselves to any number. And sometimes these things just remind us that the worms'll come for us all.

We decided to go away for the occasion; it being preferable to getting drunk in Dublin and raiding the burger vans of Camden Street on the way home, and well-deserved after the austerity of honeymooning on gift vouchers and special deals around the south-east of Ireland last year. New York was the spot we chose, she still carrying a torch for it from a previous visit and me unacquainted. Unacquainted, that is, only in the flesh - for no other city could possibly seem so familiar to a new visitor, rich in both pop-culture and real events. The looming Manhattan skyline as we approached from JFK looked like somewhere I already knew. Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun I hummed . And - Bleecker Street, Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn, Grand Central, SoHo, Times Square, Madison Avenue, Broadway, Harlem - Jesus, the weight behind them! The neon, the subway, the hotdog vendors, the yellow cabs, the showy screaming at each other on the streets, the pancakes for breakfast: it's all there like they said it was. There were a hell of a lot less white people than TV and movies would have you believe, but I'd heard that before. I quickly came to feel that New York, in the same way that cities like London, Paris and Rome were the epicentre of past epochs, was the city that embodied the 20th century. But it's a century that, for me, began with the arrival of a young Vito Corleone on Ellis Island in 1901 and ended on September 11th 2001.

We had ourselves a time, of course. When you come home everyone seems to have a list of things you ought to have done in NYC, and there's every chance that you did none of them, and they've done none of yours. We saw museums and parks and skyscapers and shops and we ate ourselves silly and slept like sweaty logs every night as it blustered and dusted snow outside.

On our last night there, Rosie's birthday, we wandered up Eighth Avenue uncharacteristically late looking for a decent spot to chow down when Frankie and Johnnie's Steak and Chophouse lured us in with an unprepossessing exterior before we choked over the numerals on the menu. If the sexagenarian waiters in tuxedos hadn't tipped us off that this wasn't just any old steakhouse then the woman coming in to book a party of ten for Tom Selleck soon did. We shared the Porterhouse Steak For Two over an agreeable, affordable Malbec, with sides of cream spinach and fries. I may never eat a finer meal.

"We should come back to New York for all significant birthdays," said Rosie.
"Mmmfffyeah, and eat here" I gulped through a mouthful of medium rare.
"I suppose if they've been going since 1926 they'll still be here in ten years."
"So, 40, then," I said wistfully, "Just think, we'll be sitting here having dinner and we'll remember this conversation." It is, invariably, me who injects a note of sentimentality into such moments.
"Stop," she said, "you're making me cry."
I was in danger of the same. Because making plans for ten years up the road is the most married I've felt yet, because life feels so good lately that ten years away can surely only be worse, because the future is always terrifying. Because the worms suddenly edged that inch closer. Because I do not want to wait ten years.

You could have it so much better

2011-02-24T21:51:00.003Z

People I would want as Taoiseach even less than Enda Kenny:

Idi Amin
Yahoo Serious
Bertie Ahern

Barry Egan

Pol Pot
Tony Blair

Rafael Trujillo

Lucinda Creighton

And that is all.

I want to tell you all about my fuckin' deadly trip to New York that I'm not long back from, but it seems easier to get over this psychosis-inducing jetlag (which, this time round, featured me growling at carrots for quite a while in Fresh, before suffering an unprecedented level of fear of the teenage skangers in the chipper) and move past this headfuck of an election first. If you're still a little unsure as to which of the horrible parties to go for, this yoke is vaguely helpful. Turns out I'm almost a raging Shinner, 'cept that site omits to ask useful questions like "Are you mad into blowing shit up?" and "Do you hate yourself for being a Proddy?"

And you kept us awake with wolves' teeth

2011-02-12T01:38:00.000Z

I still indulge regularly in a pastime that grows quainter by the day: buying CDs. I use an iPod and that kind of thing, but I still like the hard copy of something in my hand. It's why I doubt I'll ever take to using a Kindle, or such things. Given that any music you like can now be found for nothing if you know where to look I've recently taken to viewing the exchange of money for music as almost an act of charity or benevolence. More grandly, I am a patron of the arts rather than a consumer these days. But the other day, teaching a class of 15 and 16 year-olds I said something about buying a CD and they were genuinely astonished, and then confused. They saw it as having no more point to it than collecting stamps, or trolls. And maybe it doesn't.

These were Peruvian students, but it's a pretty universal thing. Current 16 year-olds are unlikely to have had an interest in music that began in a time before pervasive internetness. The only teenagers you really see in record shops here are in HMV and they're in the games section. It's funny, you think you're moving along with the world just fine (albeit at your own pace) and then, suddenly, you're not.

1909-2011

2011-02-10T01:24:00.000Z

A couple of years back I wrote this post about going over to Wales to visit my great aunt who had turned 100 on New Year's Day. She died today, aged 102. On the scale of tragic-things-that-can-happen-in-life a very old lady passing peacefully away does not rank too highly, but I found myself more upset than I imagined I would be when today inevitably came. I'd wanted to marry her when I was little. I understood marriage as being something you did with a lady who always beamed when they saw you and treated you with love and kindness. Throw in 'age-appropriate' and 'not a blood relative' and it's still pretty much a philosophy I subscribe to.

I don't really get this world, more often than not, but 102 years of bringing warmth and smiles into other people's lives seems as good a way to have dealt with it as I've encountered.

I swat 'em like flies, but like flies the buggers keep coming back

2011-01-31T19:10:00.000Z

I visited Egypt for a couple of weeks a few years back. I wish I had a greater understanding of what was going on there right now, but a fortnight of eating, sunbathing and visiting tourist traps doesn't tend to enlighten you on the niceties of political infrastructure and social turbulence. Nevertheless, I do recall talking to a tourguide after visiting some temple* or other. He was telling me about a village near the temple that the government want to be razed in order to build carparks and hotels and shit like that. The villagers, who look markedly different to any other Egyptians I encountered, claim to be the last descendants of the pharaohs. It's pretty much impossible to prove or disprove that claim, but it is without doubt that the people there have occupied that land for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. When they first refused to leave their homes so that their village could be knocked down, their government shut off their electricity. When they still didn't move they cut off their water, too.

I don't know what developments have taken place since then, it's a hard thing to google when you don't remember which temple it was. But yeah, that's what I know of the Egyptian government. So if you're Egyptian, Andrew says go nuts right now. And if you're Irish, vote Fianna Fáil. They'd never do anything like that.

*Here's why I make a very poor tourist: My brain simply can't deal with visiting heaps of places of massive historical importance within a very condensed period of time. Nor do I keep a diary or take many photographs. Holidays for me need to be "Right, Andrew, here's a fascinating old place. Take about seven hours to look around it at your own leisure and then we'll take you home. Go to a waterpark tomorrow and then spend the day after that sleeping off the excitement and then we'll see you on Thursday for lots more time at another, single, fascinating old place."

if you think you know enough to know you know you've had enough

2011-01-19T22:06:00.000Z

They're saying you threw yourself into the sea, is what they're saying now. They who don't know you, they who really have no right to say anything about you. Like me. Except your face is all over the place on posters, which means you belong to everyone now. The man on the street knows everything about everything and you're part of everything now. You should probably be made aware of that.

You lived around my way. I was in Spar, kicking snow off my boots when one of your friends came in and asked if she could put your picture up somewhere. The guy hummed and hawed for an embarrassing length of time before saying yeah, there was some space at the top of the door. And we can look at you now and say she looks kind of sad, so she does. Received wisdom is that you really were sad.

I wonder when the posters will come down, if they're not already. Why buy Pringles when people are throwing themselves into the sea? A friend of mine's mum did that, but her body had the decency to turn up on the Isle of Man. I hope you show up alive and well. But if not, I hope you show up.

the panic, the vomit!

2011-01-10T16:17:00.000Z

Oh, I am in a state today. Fully 36 hours since consuming childish amounts of alcohol and I appear to still be hungover. My dear wife is even worse off.

Leaves me feeling low, this nuclear holocaust of headache and nausea and contrition. And so I'm thinking about John Gray today. John Gray was the first person I ever heard suggest that there is no such thing as progress, at least in the political and ethical sense of the word. I found that a complete and utter headfuck when I heard it, right up there with when you first seriously ask yourself whether there's a god or not. As a species we are obsessed with the potential of things and people, from footballers to musicians to actors, but we rarely ever stop and say "This is as good as it gets and I think it's just fine." We'd see that as defeatist, as letting ourselves down.

As Gray puts it:

"The idea of progress is detrimental to the life of the spirit, because it encourages us to view our lives, not under the aspect of eternity, but as moments in a universal process of betterment. We do not, therefore, accept our lives for what they are, but instead consider them always for what they might someday become."

and, also:

"The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run."

Most discomforting at first, that kind of rhetoric, but oddly uplifting once you get used to it. I am a riot to be around while dwelling on these things. I have also been learning about Black Swan Theory and reading this remarkably good piece about Internet stupidity. If you only click on one link in this post make it that one.

But I leave you with some even wiser words, as spaketh by the prophet Andrew:

"€5 cocktails do not make for a cheap night out when you consume eighteen of them between the two of you."

it went like this

2011-01-01T00:02:00.001Z

January

I begin the year both unemployed and engaged. The difficulty in reconciling these things starts to hit home. Still, plenty of volunteer work means I retain just enough social skills to function in society, and don't sleep until noon every day. Actually reading books, instead of just buying them, also proves to be a pleasant time-filler.
Elsewhere, in a move that gives credence to the notion that time is circular, it snows a lot in Ireland and we have water shortages. I write about it, while really writing about something else entirely, as is my wont.

February

Rosie turns 29, and I laugh at her because that's really the same as being 90.
Elsewhere, I manage to get a bit of TEFL work, which is exactly what I did when I finished college many moons ago, before I then spent a lot of time and money on further training so I wouldn't have to do it any more. But that's Ireland at the moment, you learn that you don't always get what you want.

March

I fall deeply and inappropriately in love with Stella, my new bonsai tree. She dies a couple of months later, but I don't write about it because it was all too sad. I'm pretty sure it was because I overwatered her. I guess you can love something too much. I later get a new tree, a Japanese Holly called General Honda, but he's a far more robust creature and doesn't need me like Stella did, so it's just not the same.

April

Realising that the only posts I feel like writing are about the books I've been reading, I start Slightly Read, a sporadically updated book review blog. Thus far it has failed to land me that lucrative contract with the Irish Times where they throw me the hot new thing a couple of times a month in order for me to capture the essence of it in a few pithy lines and get paid a rakeload of money for the pleasure. Thus far.

Elsewhere, while on a few days' break in Krakow, word reaches us that Gerry Ryan has died. I buy a clay statue of a frog prince and name it 'Gerry Ryan'. Not because I liked him, but because his jowly bloatedness makes them doppelgangers. I always thought he was an absolute cock, but it only becomes socially acceptable to say so after it emerges, months later, that he died of a cocaine overdose. Gerry Ryan the Frog prince remains healthy and contented on a bookshelf and prefers mescaline, if you're asking.

May

Back on the ranch, Chancing My Arm turns two and Rosie knocks me out a graph to celebrate. Nelson Mandela refers to it as "a momentous moment of momentousness" in a statement to the press and asks me to go knick-knacking in Ballybough with him to mark the momentousness of it all. I decline, but share a few laughs over a flagon of Buckfast and Bulmers with him.

June

Crystal Swing have their weekend at the Flatlake Festival made for them when they meet me and harrass me until I consent to a photo with them. They ask me to join them on stage for a bit of an oul' boogie, but I decline, knowing it'd only be a downward spiral into tea and brack abuse.

July

On the eve of my wedding, I come over all gooey with my readers. How embarrassing. We manage to wring two wonderful, happy days out of our wedding and we do it all our way. Our way involves a hog roast, a non-hotel venue, no cheesy wedding band and a hilariously inept display of Chinese lanterns. Good times.

August

Wouldn't you know it, no sooner am I off the shelf than Scarlett Johansson and Zooey Deschanel approach me on the stairs in Kehoe's, all "We're thinking of doing a little experimenting in our suite tonight, cowboy..." They take the rejection well, all credit to them.

September

I miss my school reunion and get a little paranoid about Facebook.
Elsewhere, politicians tell lies.

October

I turn 29, which is the new 28.
Work-wise, my boss adopts a new strategy of consistently implying to half his staff that every week in work might well be their last. Life would be dull if every week didn't see you swinging from gloom to gibbering relief on an almost daily basis.

November

Doing a startlingly good impression of Comical Ali, Brian Lenihan and Dermot Ahern appear on the tellybox shaking their heads and saying that there's, like, totally no way that Ireland is going to get a bail-out from the IMF. But the tanks are already on the horizon and a couple of days later Ajai Chopra and his cohorts swing into town. I manage to be the envy of every journo in the country by landing an exclusive interview with the great man. The wonders of some yoke called Google bring around 3,000 or so visits to my quiet little corner of the internet. They are, perhaps, drawn by the presence of the word 'deviant' in the post title. And yet the post only receives comments from three people who aren't me. Internet strangers, it's all take take take with you.
Some of us, about 100,000 or so (which must be around 5% of the adult population of Ireland), protest against the bailout. The government fail to give a shit.

December

It starts snowing at the end of November, and continues for most of December. Everyone ponders aloud whether anything like this has ever occurred in their lifetime, except for my grandfather who says "Well, you'll have heard of the Great Snow of 1943?" I hadn't, truth be told, but apparently that was fucking freezing too.
Rosie and I go to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor play, and it feels a lot like the soundtrack to the apocalypse. Except the world didn't end, I guess, we just got a bit more money taken off us.

So, 2010. Pretty shite if I hadn't got married, I reckon. I hope you all had something deadly happen to make it good, too.
Film of the year was probably Winter's Bone, gig of the year was the aforementioned Godspeed, book of the year was Paul Murray's Skippy Dies and slamming hot babe of the year was my wife. Only time will tell if she can battle the ravages of age to retain her crown in 2011.

In this home on ice

2010-12-24T02:54:00.000Z

Snow builds up outside our door alarmingly fast. When any way untidy, our Portobello basement flat looks a lot like a storage cupboard, the kind where you keep all your old coats and where the cat goes to shit (though that may just be in my family). But she found a way to make our two too-small rooms look like a home to be proud of. And every time I gaze at our bookshelves that feels like us. And every time we mistrust the rust on TV and stick on something better it feels good. A pot of tea feels like an event. I asked her to marry me here. We spent our wedding night here.

I don't get, more often than not, why she'd even want to live with me at all. When I tacked up fairy lights with electrical tape they fell down, probably minutes after I rushed out to the pub. It must have looked like someone had mugged Christmas when she got home, deserving far better than that. And me, bumbling home hours later, all "What? Sorry." Slinging my clothes everywhere but the shelves. Jesus, she'd have to love me.

She has the fairy lights sitting beautifully above the fireplace now, like I knew she would. Black ice permitting, we could be spending Christmas here, and that'd be fine. This place is big enough for the both of us, and my many varieties of cuddle attacks, but it couldn't take the strain of a puppy or a baby or a hamster or a goldfish and so we both know that it's an interim house, here to keep us warm and build on all the massiveness we have, until the next good thing.

I defy anyone to tell me something funnier they heard this weekend

2010-12-11T19:22:00.000Z

Since we broke up I'm using lipstick again

2010-12-06T17:10:00.001Z

"Are you going to write a post?" asked Rosie on gchat, earlier. I asked her for an idea to write about, and she suggested this assignment. The particulars of your first kiss. A meme, I suppose, but without the the tagging bit that everyone hates.

So, my first kiss. Were you not there? Fucking everyone else was.
Her name was Jane. No, it wasn't and it isn't but she's the type who might even be reading here without knowing this is me so I'm gonna leave it at Jane. We were 14 and Jane fancied me, despite my skin looking as though I was prone to rubbing it with the inside of a chip bag. I fancied Jane, too, though at 14 I fancied anything female between the ages of 12 and 90. Jane was, umm, an early-developer and the source of much macho muttering during warm-up laps before P.E. class. Double D, I was to find out later.
Jane flirted outrageously with me in science class and I didn't know what to do about it. I was no doubt supposed to seize the initiative in some way, but that was years beyond me yet. So one of her brassier friendds simply marched up to me at lunchtime one tuesday and said "Will you go with Jane?" I mumbled my assent and, even then, wondered why American teen films propagated this whole myth of 'dating'. You didn't date people in school, you just went with them and instantly assumed the status of boyfriend and girlfriend. And if you tired of them after an hour or so you dumped them, with the message preferably relayed by one of your friends.
Anyway, Jane was now my girlfriend, though I didn't know where she was. Apparently, we had to seal the deal by shifting (it was still 'shifting' then, 'meeting' didn't make it's way to Wicklow till I was about 16). This was to take place around the back of the bike-sheds. Yeah, I know. Even at 14 I think I found the cliché distasteful. But that's what we did. And word got around our classmates, so most of them came too. My first kiss ended up being much the same as my wife's experience, only that I was the one against the wall, and I was the one not knowing where to put my hands, not sure what the fuck was going on. In other words, I was the girl. Jane had boasted, during our times of awkward, stunted flirting that she had kissed nine guys. Previous action for me had consisted of some hardcore hand-holding with a girl at summer camp, but I implied that I was on a respectable total, and that a gentleman doesn't discuss such things. Jane must have seen through this because she guided things entirely, slipping her tongue into my bewildered mouth and swirling it around, as per the fashion. Our large audience stayed respectfully quiet, but drew the attention of a teacher on yard duty, meaning things were wrapped up hastily. But, like some shit out of Harry Potter, flesh memory meant my tongue stayed revolving for about 24 hours after. I didn't hug my mum when I came home from school that day in case she could smell it off me.
Jane and I went out for six months after that - a startlingly long time for 14 year-olds. By "went out" I mean "spent six months searching for secluded areas in which to grope each other", before she broke my heart by declaring that she would like to shift beaucoup d'autre blokes on our French exchange trip. Five years, and then six years, later I took great relish in toying with her emotions when I should really have been long over it, and she me. I was like that, once.

Frozen Assets

2010-11-29T20:56:00.000Z

"I don't want to sound paranoid, but this is a fucking government conspiracy" I opined to Rosie as we slipped n' slid down the snowy streets to collect Annie on our way to the protest march on Saturday. I was temporarily convinced that local roads were deliberately being left ungritted in order to immobilise the population, thus denying many of them the opportunity to attend the protest. In hindsight, I may have been crediting the leaders of this country with a greater level of intelligence and creativity than they possess. They don't really need to put any thought or intent into being inadequate, they just are.

As we neared the starting point of the march Annie and Rosie started to discuss whether or not it would be a good idea to withdraw all our cash from bank accounts, in case the banks collapse and they freeze everyone's assets. "It won't come to that," I started out grandly, in that way I have of pretending to be knowledgeable on subjects I haven't a fucking notion about. Even I know it's annoying, at this stage. "The bank bail-out guarantees that won't happen." "But, umm, aren't we on our way to protest against the bank bail-out?" asked Annie.
"I dunno, isn't NAMA separate to this...IMF...interest rates...burble burble..." I trailed off, realising that I was definitely not sure of my facts, and that crossing the road towards Christchurch was going to be something more of an ordeal than I thought. Truth is, it's very hard to know what affects what any more, and what the repercussions of anything are. I never thought for a second that marching on Saturday was going to stop the government from signing us up to the IMF bailout, and I don't think many people really did. No, for me it was about standing on the street and saying Fuck you, Brian Cowen, fuck you for being a fat, boozy, embarrassment of a leader. Fuck you for never looking like you care what anyone else thinks, fuck you and your party for always putting yourselves first, for being such pathological liars. For being such snivelling cowards. For never once telling it like it is. Fuck you for never saying sorry.

It felt good, for a while, being on that march. We skidded and slushed along the streets and enjoyed the pageantry of it all. I wanted to eyeball the gardaí and say You are an evil tool of The Man, and if you come swinging for me with your batons I won't be responsible for my actions. But they were smiling and convivial and, perhaps through their sheer weight of numbers, never looked unnerved by the event. Placards were, as ever, delightful in their schadenfreude. An early favourite, spotted at Wood Quay, read "YOU USELESS BASTARDS!!" on one side, with "Not you, the government (obviously)" on the other. This was only equalled by the sight of an eight year-old on O'Connell Street,trudging along with a sign bearing the legend "My mam told me Justin Bieber would be here." And then there was this little beauty.

Later, back in the comfort of home, the alarmingly superficial RTE news coverage will tell us that official estimates put the attendance of the march at around 50,000 and not the 100 odd thousand the organisers were claiming at the time. I'd probably throw my tinfoil hat back on and scream PROPAGANDA BULLSHIT! at that one, were it not for the fact that I feel it necessary to limit myself to one conspiracy theory a day. But I've been to enough football matches and music festivals to know what a crowd of 50,000 looks like, and Saturday's was far, far more than that. Later still, as we mosey home after an evening of alcohol consumption and snowball-dodging a man on the far side of the road is chanting, a full twelve hours after the end of the march, "Brian Cowen take a hike, we demand a national strike." Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first, I think to myself. But still. Still.

I trust I can rely on your vote?

2010-11-27T02:56:00.001Z

From the excellent Wheel Spinning Hamster Dead

It's weeks like this when you feel like you really have to write something on your blog about Irish current affairs. I never quite know what to say. We know that we have been let down by our government, we know that life is about to get financially harder for just about everyone, we know that the next generation are likely to still be stifled by things the current administration has done.

We also know that there will be a general election before too long.

This should represent a simple opportunity to kick Fianna Fáil and the Greens out of government and, with any luck, reduce their political influence to that of a sparrow farting in the breeze. But you wouldn't know, not in Ireland. Or perhaps, with 17% of the polled electorate still saying that they would, even at what must surely be their lowest ever point, vote for Fianna fucking Fáil. Sure, throw in a bit of spin, some canny canvassing and some snazzy posters and they could probably have that figure up to 30% or higher within a month. And that, with the vagaries of the proportional representation system, could amount to them getting back into government. Just imagine it. A vote of confidence for their lies and their conniving and their startling incompetence. A slap on the back for their slavering alcoholism. And a mandate (a real one this time) for their four year plans and whatever other havoc they might like to wreak on the country.

A sentence you may hear a lot in the forthcoming weeks is "Ah, those politicians are all as bad as each other." People who say this fall into two categories:

1. Those whose unspoken follow-up sentence is "So I won't bother my hole voting or attempting to influence things in any way."

2. Those whose unspoken follow-up sentence is "So I'll carry on voting Fianna Fáil just like I've always done. Just like my parents and grandparents do."

The election, and the decisive change that this country needs, will be decided by how many of each category there are. And, sad to say, it won't much be influenced by what we read or write on blogs. There have been some excellent examples of articulate rage floating around the internet this week, in the usual places as well as interesting new blogs like Rise Like Lions! , but it is not going to be the blogosphere (or whatever other disgusting term you might have for it) where the decisive battles are fought for this election. It would be easy to gaze around and see like-minded souls everwhere; a critical mass of people who want this government to become one of those anomalies that history students will ponder in the future and think "How the fuck could people ever have put up with them?" I've been reading a wide range of blogs for three years now and I've never seen so much as one comment indicating any level of support for Fianna Fáil. Not one. But the average punter doesn't read blogs. Most of my friends don't, my family don't. Tonnes of twenty and thirty-somethings are still far more concerned with reality TV than reality. Without wishing to talk in very broad strokes, I don't think the elderly (the most committed of voting demographics) are checking in on Twenty Major's polemics with any great regulaity, either. Which means not many people are seeing stuff like this. Which means not enough people are seeing the important work that the likes of The Story are doing.

We can contnue to entertain ourselves in a kind of "No, I hate Fianna Fáil even more than you do!" kind of a way, but we might as well carry on being frivolous because it is surely only preaching to the choir. Standing outside your local polling centre hectoring every young apathete (I may have invented a word there) to get in and vote, and chiding "Don't do anything stupid, now, dear" to every OAP going in might prove to be a more effective tactic. Blogs will continue to provide a useful point of catharsis in these enraging times, but it might be foolhardy to expect much more.

Ajai Chopra: economist, saviour, deviant

2010-11-19T03:54:00.001Z

A student asked one of my colleagues today why Irish people are so obsessed with economics. It's funny now to think of a time when we weren't. Terms like I.M.F., toxic loans, bailouts, Olli Rehn, mortgage arrears and E.C.B. certainly didn't always have such a large part in the vernacular. But while it's hard not to feel like the sky is falling in at the moment, I still maintain that most of us don't really have a fucking clue what's going on. Sure how could we when we're lied to by the government on a daily basis and receive a drip-feed of misleading and contradictory information. In much the same way as it seems that property developers and bankers made out like bandits during the boomtime it might just be that financial journalists and economic experts will be seen (along with politicians, inevitably) as being the villains of the busted years, for having made a mini-industry out of the public's confusion. For every genuinely well-informed commentator there's some cowboy who knows no more than the average barstool economist making a living from shit-stirring and scaremongering. There's something vaguely immoral about it.

With this in mind, Chancing My Arm took it upon itself to get hold of Ajai Chopra, the man leading the IMF's rescue mission to Ireland, in order to cut to the chase and find out what exactly the bloody fuck is going on. Here, exclusively, is the complete and unedited transcript from my exclusive interview with Ajai:

Ajai, thank you for taking some time out from bailing out our sorry asses to talk to the readers of Chancing My Arm.

You're welcome, Andrew, I myself have a blog , so I'm totally down with this. I love your blog, that shit you wrote about nailing both of the Sweet Valley High twins in a hot tub was righteous. High five, dude!

Thank you, Ajai. Though I must confess that it didn't really happen. First and only time I'll make stuff up to put on my blog, I promise. Now, down to brass tacks. Tell us, did this whole global economic ooopsy entirely originate with the collapse of Lehman Brothers?

Well, yes and no. After Lehman Brothers defaulted in September 2008, global trade collapsed, capital inflows into the region plummeted, credit growth suddenly stopped, and domestic demand plunged.
But pre-crisis domestic imbalances and policies made a difference in how these shocks affected each country’s economy. Some countries saw declines in gross domestic product (GDP) similar to those in the Great Depression (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine), while others avoided declines altogether (Albania, Poland). But the seeds of the crisis were sown, in large part, in the five years before the crisis. Between 2003 and 2008, much of the region experienced a boom in bank credit, asset prices, and domestic demand. This boom was fueled and financed by large capital inflows.
With low interest rates in advanced countries, banks in western Europe expanded aggressively into emerging Europe—where returns were higher. And, while the influx of capital boosted growth, it also led to rising imbalances and vulnerabilities.

I see, but what kinds of imbalances and vulnerabilities, exactly?

Current account deficits increased to unprecedented levels in some countries, and inflation accelerated. And substantial vulnerabilities emerged in bank and household balance sheets, particularly because much of the borrowing was in foreign currency.

Fascinating. Tell me, Ajai, in your brief time in Dublin have you had a chance yet to savour any of our local delicacies?

Oh, yes. Strawberry and vanilla YOP is famous the world over and after a good skinful at the bar in the Merrion Hotel a few of us ended up hopping in a taxi and telling yer man we were really jonesing for one. They were harder than expected to locate but we finally achieved success at a Shell garage on the Dargle Road in Bray.

Lovely part of the world. I once dated a girl from Bray, she was a right goer.

Is this Mary Coughlan woman from Bray? She introduced me to brown flavour Hula Hoops. I love her.

It's barbecue flavour, Ajai, not brown. Have some respect. Now, tell me, why was Ireland amongst the hardest hit by the global collapse?

Countries that experienced the fastest credit growth during the boom years saw the deepest recessions. And it now appears that average GDP growth over the full business cycle in this group was no higher, and in some cases was lower, than in countries with more modest credit growth.

In other words, we talked ourselves into believing our own bullshit?

To be succinct, yes.

Right, when you're walking into a high pressure, cards-on-the-table, heart-in-your mouth, cocks-in your-hands meeting with the likes of Brian Cowen and Angela Merkel do you choose to freshen up beforehand with Lynx Africa or Lynx Nevada?

Truth be told, I always favoured Lynx Tempest. I certainly associate it with the years when I did most of my shifting - is that what you call it, "shifting"? - with girls in nightclubs. I fell into a terrible depression for years after it went out of production and chose to wallow in my own faeces instead of deodorising. My career briefly stagnated as a result.

No doubt. Did the high price of housing in Ireland have a lot to do with our misfortunes?

Well, you all thought it was worth spending about 750 grand on a two bedroom semi-detached in Ballaghaderreen, so you tell me.

Don't knock Ballaghaderreen, Ajai. The wildest retirement party I ever went to was in Spelman's Motel there, you know.

The wildest retirement party I was ever at was my uncle Sanjay's. I snorted petrol and got off with one of my cousins. I wish I could remember which one it was, it would have been prudent of me to have made a note of it. Speaking of prudence, Ireland needs to learn to adopt a more prudent fiscal policy. This is a policy of saving money when revenues are growing instead of increasing spending and boosting public wages. Prior to the crisis, fiscal positions in emerging Europe looked good—better than in other emerging market regions. But those good-looking headline numbers masked a deterioration of the underlying fiscal position. Public expenditure was surging, financed by a temporary revenue boom. This not only further contributed to overheating; it also set the stage for large fiscal deficits. So when revenue plummeted in 2009 and fiscal deficits increased sharply, many countries had no choice but to cut spending precisely when this was most painful.

Uh huh. And if things start looking up a bit, what would you advise?

When revenue takes off during the next boom, it should be used to build up fiscal buffers rather than boost expenditure. Politically, this may be very challenging—when revenues abound there is strong pressure to increase expenditure or cut taxes—but this will help dampen the boom and create fiscal space that can be used to soften the impact of the next recession.

So no public sector pay rises ever again, ever?

Nope. Do you have Mary Harney's number? I would like her to be my wet-nurse.

You're a sick puppy, Ajai. But our futures rest in your hands. Now, Cash in the Attic is on soon and you're boring me, so any other pearls of wisdom before we wrap this up?

Going forward, growth in the region should become more balanced, and less dependent on domestic demand and capital inflows. Much of the shift will come about through private sector actions. Now that profits in the nontradable sector (finance, real estate, construction) have shrunk, investments will seek more promising venues. More balanced macroeconomic policies and wage restraint can also help maintain balanced growth by preventing the overheating that pulls resources from the tradable to the nontradable sector.
Above all, it will be important—when the next boom comes—to be wary of claims that “this time will be different.” Such narratives often have some plausibility and attractiveness in the heat of the moment. But a careful analysis of the drivers of growth, current account deficits, asset price developments, and credit growth should always be used as a “reality check.”

Lovely. And finally, if I may change tack entirely for a moment and imagine that I am a radio presenter, is there any particular song you'd like me to play for our listeners today?

Yes, it being the only song I'm aware of to namecheck the I.M.F. it has to be 'Electioneering' by Radiohead. But I'd like to dedicate it to Marek and Sklopek for indulging my whims at the hatch of the Dargle road Shell station and to Larry the cabbie for making the magic happen. Yiz fuckin' rock and I wish success and fiscal solvency to yiz all!

Are you carrying a weapon? I know a lot of you are.

2010-11-15T16:22:00.000Z

When I was 15 I was suspended from school for being a little bollix. It had manifested itself in various ways, such as shoplifting on a school tour, but had culminated in me and a mate getting busted for our 'convo book'. Bored as every other student, wary of getting caught passing notes, before the advent of teenagers and texting, we took to writing down our every waking thought in a copy book and then sliding it across the desk to the other. This meant that teachers were not inclined to notice anything, and merely assumed we were doing our work. Fancying ourselves as devastatingly witty we prided ourselves on the collection of stuff we wrote, even fancying that one day someone might want to publish our observations. Like Adrian Mole.
But, inevitably, we got caught by a teacher. Who confiscated the copy. And read some of its content. And looked horrified. And passed it on to the principal.
He was not amused. Our book was filled with the usual teenage complaints about school and parents, sometimes fairly bile-flecked. And, of course, lustlorn paeans to female classmates and teachers we fancied. Far from depraved, it was, but it was honest enough and it probably looked mildly deranged in accumulation. My defence, when confronted with the disgust of principal and parents, is that there was nothing there any worse than what everyone else was saying. That everyone had these complaints, these turns-of-phrase, these desires. They did, and much worse, but I learnt the painful lesson then that what you say and what you write down are two very different things. The written word can be taken vastly out of context and can be augmented in a tone that was never intended. And it's there for posterity, not blown in a breeze down the corridor. My mate and I had never intended to offend anyone, but we did, and we came to regret it badly. He wanted to keep hold of our other convo books that he had squirrelled away at home but I insisted that he burn them. As a pretty accurate record of teenage selves that slip further and further away they would probably crack us up to look back over now, but I still feel the right call was made.
I think of that situation, now half a world away from me, when I see stories like the PricewaterhouseCooper one, the Twitter joke trial, and the stupid Tory tit who thought it was merely 'glib' to tweet about stoning someone. As we choose increasingly to replace conversation with online interaction and to inscribe our every brainfart, people are going to have to realise that this kind of shit can't be unsaid, that words are still potent and that they go a fuck of a lot further these days than they used to.

Mo' money

2010-11-09T23:17:00.000Z

I have, largely out of vanity, signed up for Movember, whereby I'm supposed to grow a moustache and get sponsored lots of money for it, in order to fight cancer. I had initially intended my good deed for the month to be the Mini Miss Ireland competition, but the lassies from St. Pat's declined my help, on the spurious grounds that my appearance onstage in a bikini might spark riots in Copper's on Thursday night.

Truth is, I rather like having a mo'. A coat of arms for your face, as the website puts it. As arduous fundraisers go it's certainly not up there with running a marathon or appearing half-nude in front of a load of cops and farmers, but should you, Strangers from the Internet, feel so inclined as to stick something towards prostate cancer research my Mospace is here. If not, then see if you can identify me among this craftily constructed mo'saic (see what I did there?). I join some illustrious company, I can tell you. Super extra bonus kudos to anyone who can name all eleven of my moustachioed brethren.

feelgood friday

2010-11-05T17:54:00.001Z

I have, despite being told my job was up a week or so ago, been given something of an indefinite stay of execution at work, and carry on for the time being. I could use the respite of unemployment right now, if I'm honest. The only real time off I've had since February was nine days in which to get married twice, interview for a better, ultimately unattainable job, and go on honeymoon. Mornings are a hazy fugue at the best of times, but these days they're met with a new level of melodrama. "I don't think I can do this much longer" I croaked to Rosie as I shambled out of bed on Tuesday. I was tired and had a mild to middling headcold, you see. My wife, who gets up earlier, works a longer day, does a more important job, commutes much further and gets paid a lower hourly rate for the pleasure gives me a hug and makes sympathetic noises when I make these statements. I must stretch her patience fiercely at such times. I've passed on the headcold to her, too.

Still, in these DJ-wanking budget-looming student-rioting garda-bashing garda-retaliatory-bashing red paint-slinging days it can be difficult to feel too fucking chipper in the morning. What we need is a song by a bunch of Canuckistanis from thirteen years ago to capture the national mood perfectly.

Do give it a listen, if you can have ten minutes to devote to full-on gloom, and feel free to mumble along apocalyptically with the opening monologue and somehow feel a little better:

the car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
and a dark wind blows
the government is corrupt
and we're on so many drugs
with the radio on and the curtains drawn
we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to death
the sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

it went like this:

the buildings tumbled in on themselves
mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble
and pulled out their hair
the skyline was beautiful on fire
all twisted metal stretching upwards
everything washed in a thin orange haze
i said: "kiss me, you're beautiful -
these are truly the last days"
you grabbed my hand and we fell into it
like a daydream or a fever
we woke up one morning and fell a little further down -
for sure it's the valley of death
i open up my wallet
and it's full of blood

Yeah.

Normalcy

2010-10-26T23:33:00.000+01:00

Notice anything wrong with these posters for films released in Ireland in the last year?

Stop being thick.

'All Right' and Traveler'. A superfluous L and gap and a missing L. Without wishing to go overboard, this blogger is firmly of the opinion that once we start welcoming weird American spellings into our world we might as well, oh, I don't know, salute the stars and stripes and snort Sunny Delight and suchlike. It's a slide that began when we accepted 'cool' as meaning anything other than 'pleasantly cold', took 'awesome' to mean 'quite agreeable' and used 'totally' to mean 'I fully agree'. It will soon reach its nadir when we begin using 'sick' as a positive adjective.

We can, it's fair to say, blame the youth on such tendencies? But now they're smearing it all over our film posters like H-Block protesters. Mark my words, good people, this may very well be the beginning of the end, if the end didn't already begin on the day my mother deemed it appropriate to use the word 'guesstimate' in my presence.
Of course, one might suggest that I am indulging in such pedantry and curmudgeonliness out of an anxiety caused by my impending unemployment leading me to be slightly more on edge than usual. Well, you can all fuck off back to Texas too. It's ignoring the likes of this that led to the rise of Genghis Khan and Idi Amin and those lads, and I'm registering my displeasure at this growing tendency before Uncle Sam has wiped his "butt" with us entirely.

the fucking view is fucking vile for fucking miles and fucking miles

2010-10-21T19:38:00.000+01:00

Having watched the final episodes of The Sopranos over the weekend my next post was set to be all about the majesty of that show, featuring a detailed analysis of crime and society in America and the definitive opinion piece on whether it, or The Wire, is the best TV show ever made, ever.

And then I was told on Monday that I'll be losing my teaching job on Friday week. Spaniards and Brazilians, unfathomably, don't want to be in Dublin during the winter. And immediately I was overcome with that old sensation of no-one gives a fuck what you think about anything, Andrew. It seems to be the hallmark of unemployment, and I remember it well.

My last period of joblessness (Oct. '09 to Feb. '10) was characterised by early depression and onanism, followed by an upswing in mood brought about my reading lots of books and doing volunteer work.

This time around I plan to synthesise these disparate strands by writing a pornographic novel to be sold in aid of grieving kangaroos.

Coldmember

2010-10-11T19:52:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks back I was away in Bundoran for my brother-in-law's stag party. A group of his friends are as much my wife's friends as his, so I know them pretty well at this stage and get on most chummily with them. One of the lads, Kevin, who is also soon to be married, was laughing at the fact that his bride-to-be had, at one stage or another, snogged several of his mates. He doesn't care, this was long before his time and such things inevitably happen between any group of intergender mates. Then he looked mischievously at me and, expecting to get a rise out of me, said "But do you know which of the lads has snogged Rosie?"

It so happens that I do. Barry is sitting opposite me and, bless him, has started shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Barry is the very definition of a decent skin and is happily settled with a lovely young lady, so I really don't have an issue with my wife having kissed him on a night out many moons before we even met. We don't talk about exes much but she had told me about Barry, perhaps to help me avoid an awkward situation such as the one Kevin has just tried to engineer.

"Yeah, just Barry, right?" I hope Barry doesn't take my just as being dismissive of his tonsil-tickling abilities, more that I'm glad he was the only one. The direction of conversation is swiftly turned to the direction of 'Members of the Irish rugby team whom Kevin has nearly come to blows with in a nightclub' and everyone is drunk and happy.

The next morning, cruelly, we go surfing. I manage to avoid everyone seeing how bad I am at surfing by never even attempting to mount the board. "Waves just weren't right for me, man" I opine to anyone within earshot. Back at the surfclub everyone hits the scaldingly hot showers to try and reverse the damage two hours in the North Atlantic in October can do to a body. Barry is in before before I am. He is the only bloke to have dropped his trunks. Barry is a hurler and you can always recognise the lads who play team-sports as the ones who are happy to let everything hang out in public showers.

Here is, roughly, my thought process:

1. Dropping my shorts will surely help my frozen, shrivelled bollocks to resume normality that bit faster. It's only sensible.

2. Barry's a hurler and I'm a hockey player. Hockey players get a bad enough rap in the man-stakes without people thinking we're afraid to get it out.

3. Barry (and everyone else there) might think he has a far bigger lad than I do. I can't honestly tell if he does or not but, nevertheless, This Will Not Do. Sometimes things are just that primal.

4. HE KISSED MY WIFE.

So I strip off my shorts and stand there with Barry and six uncomfortable-looking, beshorted men. Hot water dribbles down our flaccid mickeys as I will a restoration of girth and pretend not to be sneaking glimpses.

No I in Threesome

2010-09-27T21:48:00.001+01:00

When I was born and lived in Cork I was from Cork and that was simple. When I briefly lived in Birmingham I was the Irish boy and kids at school asked me if I was in the IRA, or knew anyone in the IRA. I was seven, so I probably said I did. And when I lived in Tanzania I suffered the odd Irish joke from my Australian friends, but I could laugh those off because I recognised them as re-badged Kerryman jokes that Irish people had written in the first place. Coming back to Ireland after three years abroad was the hardest adjustment of all because of the Antipodean mishmash of an accent I'd picked up and the fact I didn't own a polyester Ireland shirt or a sega Megadrive made me more of a foreigner than ever.

Life got easier, but deep into my teenage years I still harboured fantasies of my family moving to America. Anywhere in America would do, though I reckoned Californian sun might work best for my greasy, troubled skin. I'd negotiate the cliquey, hierarchical minefield of U.S. high school and win. Girls would be blown away by my adorable accent and my roguishly, anachronistically Colin Farrellish looks. Yeah, and the jealous jocks would keep their distance because ofmy biting Irish wit and the assumption I was IRA; a notion I would take few steps to relieve them of.

I'd become a sporting superstar and have a college scholarship sewn up within days of arriving, due to my single-handed transformation of the "soccer" team's fortunes. This, I was confident, was the most realistic element of my fantasy, not due to any great skill on my part, but by sheer dint of my not being American - and therefore inherently superior with the ball at my feet.

Despite the attentions of most of the popular girls in school, including the icily beautiful Shelley Aryanski, my heart would be set on Naomi, the awkward art student whom I knew would be a stone-cold fox if only she'd take off those thick-rimmed glasses of hers. I'd capture her fragile heart by playing Damien Rice songs on a ukulele and pretending I'd written them. With the new strength she found in me she'd overcome her bulimia and her sculpture would really flourish.

I'd garner the devotion of the nerds through my powerful and outspoken stewardship of the school newspaper, and the black crowd would have my back after an impromptu rap-off saw me proclaimed "the illest, chillest honky muthafucka since Vanilla Ice", such was the impact of my mad skillz. 'A-Dogg' was how they would choose to address me from then on.

Jessica and Liz: strong swimmers

Naomi and I would hit a bit of a speedbump after word of me banging both of the twins from Sweet Valley High in Frankie Lopez's hot tub during a party to celebrate the team winning the championship after I scored seven goals in three minutes to beat our cross-city rivals 7-6 got back to her, courtesy of the bitter, spurned Shelley Aryanski. Naomi dumped my cheating ass initially, but she soon came around after I tearfully reminded her from beneath her bedroom window that it's not hard to fall when you float like a cannonball.

And then one day, perhaps as we were making our way to be crowned Prom King and Queen, Naomi and I would encounter Chuck Logan. Chuck had been captain of the soccer team and an A grade student before my glorious arrival. Now he was a high school dropout slinging crystal meth for a living. "Oh look, it's the Irish fag and his fag-hag" he'd sneer to his crackhead buddies, who definitely carried an air of menace. And I, I'd whip a can of Lynx Africa out of the back pocket of my Ralph Lauren suit trousers, and spray it against the flame from my lighter to form a blowtorch to scorch the skin off Chuck Logan's face. As he lay writhing acridly on the ground I'd douse the rest of his body in Lynx Africa and then take the cigarette out of my mouth and say "No, this is a fag, ya fuckin' eejit!" as I calmly flicked it onto him and watched him burn. Then I'd force-feed his charred remains to Shelley Aryanski for being a meddling bitch.

Leave your livestock alone

2010-09-15T17:25:00.000+01:00

My ten-year school reunion was on last weekend and I didn't go. Not being on Facebook meant that I was the last to know about it, only hearing at all because my brother happened to have been talking to a guy I was in school with. By that stage I had made plans for Saturday night anyway. Not plans that couldn't be changed, mind, but plans.
It would be easy for me to get in a huff and launch into one of my tirades against the privacy-thieving monster of a social network that dominates our lives, but I won't. "How else would they have organised it?" asked a colleague, who's really old enough to know better. "People had fucking reunions before 2006, you know," I managed not to spit back at her. In reality, though, I appreciate that posting a simple statement on a forum that no doubt 99% of my classmates are affiliated to is infinitely less hassle than tracking down current postal addresses and snailmailing every single one of them, or even emailing each person.
So no, my failure to attend was not because I was fucked off that people think that if you're not on Facebook you must be dead. It was something more intangible than that; and that troubles me. There was, perhaps, a time when I thought I might skulk into my ten-year reunion like John Cusack in Grosse Point Blank, all angsty and in need of some sort of redemption. I would confront those who were the biggest bastards to me, make a few quips and, with any luck, stab someone to death with a pen and make off with the startlingly compliant Minnie Driver.
Turns out school just didn't matter enough to me for any of that to be necessary. People weren't really bastards there, or at least to no greater degree than any teenager is. We were all just folks cooped up together for 35 hours a week in a place where we didn't particularly want to be. It was only oppressive in its mundanity, rather than its cruelty. I find it hard to think of the experience as anything beyond humdrum, and for that reason don't find celebrating with my old classmates any more of a logical thing to do than to celebrate with people I see on the bus to work most mornings. I'm still in touch with the ones I want to be in touch with, and I seem to lack the gene to make me curious about the ones I'm not.
Nostalgia? What is that? We still play video games and we still listen to The Prodigy and Radiohead. If nostalgia for people my age is pretending you liked the Spice Girls more than you did and sitting in a kip of a pub drinking until you overcome your mutual lack of interest in each others' lives then Nostalgia can fuck right off. And so can Facebook.

A Chugging on Wicklow Street

2010-09-07T16:09:00.000+01:00

Hey man, how's it going? Do you have a moment for Concern? Could I ask you a couple of questions?"

"I'll deal with these one at a time, if I may. Firstly, it's going alright, though I kinda need a piss after all the coffee I drank this morning and, frankly, my balls are sweaty to the point of discomfort in this weather. You know how it is.

Secondly, if I may wilfully misinterpret your question for the sake of a blog post, I have many moments for concern. I am concerned by the continued existence of reality television, I am concerned by the closing-in of the seasons, for I believe I may very well be a seasonally disaffected man. I am concerned that my fellow man is more preoccupied with Bosnian puppy-drowners than Bosnian war criminals. I am concerned that the only notable response to a British war criminal in our midst came from a few Sinn Féin nutjobs. That Mental Morrissey continues to be given a platform. I am concerned that with the dampening of Dublin comes the drying up of furriners, and that, on any given Friday, I may be dismissed from my employment with a shrug. I am concerned that I will take my anxieties about unemployment out on my wife. She doesn't care about money, but sometimes I'd love for her to not even have to not care. I am concerned that slowly, gently we will start to trust our government again, that we will vote the bastards in again, that we are falling victim to an indefinable propaganda machine as effective as Fox News.

To take your question as you meant it, no I do not have a moment for Concern. I am on my way to HMV to try to spend a gift card on whatever gems might still lurk in there beneath layers of Jedward and Adam Sandler. I am concerned by the rapid deterioration of that shop, too. And anyway, I've been Concerned enough to give your lot 12.70 a month since it was still a tenner in old money. It made me feel like an ethical student and I think I thought it would make the girl on Talbot Street who signed me up fancy me. Tell me, man, are you Concerned enough to waive your wage for even one hour? What do you get, about 12.70?"

Can you ask me a couple of questions? You've already asked three, fuck off."

i wish i was a neutron bomb, for once i could go off

2010-08-23T17:21:00.000+01:00

Syntax

I want to call you thou, the sound

of the shape of the start

of a kiss - like this, thou -

and to say, after, I love,

thou, I love, thou I love, not

I love you.

Because I so do -

as we say now - I want to say

thee, I adore, I adore thee,

and to know in my lips

the syntax of love resides,

and to gaze in thine eyes.

Love's language starts, stops, starts;

the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

Carol Ann Duffy

Had I been aware of the above poem three weeks or so ago I might well have used it as my reading during our registry office wedding. Not for all the soppy 'thou' stuff - though the worshipful tone can ring true - but for the last couple of lines expressing the awkwardness of finding the right words to talk about love. I scoured various volumes of poetry in the days before the wedding and even made the mistake of typing in 'poems for marriage' into Google. Unable to find anything that wasn't wilfully oblique, or cloyingly, clingily, cringingly awful I wrote my own poem instead. How embarrassing. I won't publish it here, not due to any sense of modesty or privacy, but because it is not, in hindsight, very good at all. But the sentiment it expressed, I think, was right.

Sadly, I don't think I can say the same of my speech at our Saturday wedding, the one with a hundred or so people at it. Years of wandering into a class full of baying teenagers with nothing prepared and winging it to a reasonable degree of success had lulled me into thinking it would be OK to do the same thing on my wedding day. It wasn't. I burbled a lot, glanced at the skimpy notes I had made with utter incomprehension, and forgot to thank half the people I really ought to have thanked. I was thinking of things I should have said for the first three or four days of our honeymoon - a kind of esprit d'escaliers without the prior insult. Perhaps I could blame blogging for giving me all the time in the world to think about what I want to say. Articulacy is easier when you only write something every couple of weeks.

But it was when I came to acknowledging my beautiful wife that words failed me most and I blithered on with a crack in my voice. The sense of what a significant moment in our lives this was meant that my brain was simultaneously simpering and squalling, cooing and caterwauling. But that's alright, I think. My feelings for my wife should never, all being well, be less than a maelstrom of thoughts that I can't easily express.

On Being Read

2010-07-28T18:27:00.001+01:00

Here's the thing: I think about you, my readers, probably far more than I care to admit. Late at night, quite often, when I wonder if I'd get to sleep faster if I told you about what's going on in my head. Even when all that's going on in my head is the horrendous feedback loop of wondering what's going on in my head. I wonder where and how you read me, and why. In an office, on the bus on your iPhone, in a college computer lab, on a rickety laptop on the couch as you growl with frustration at your slow connection (that's usually how I do it). Or as you watch football, as you drink, as you grin and grimace, as you pick your nose, as you go through someone else's blogroll out of sheer boredom. As you confusedly land here by googling song lyrics I've nicked for my post titles, as you follow someone else's twitter link and then stop and wonder if life isn't a mite too short to be on Twitter if this is where it brings you. And I'm fascinated by the very notion of being read in far-flung parts of the globe, and constantly wonder what it is that I might write that tickles someone's fancy in Laos just as it turns someone off in Laois. If some of you are just hoping that I'll pick another fight, or that I'll write a little more about love, as love happens to me.

I'll think of you, dear readers, even on Thursday as I get married to the loveliest creature I've ever encountered. Or at least in the immediate aftermath. And on Saturday, when we do it again more publicly. I'll think about how I'm marrying one of you; how we first recognised a kindred spirit through each other's words. How a few more of you will be there to celebrate with us as friends.

How I'll tell you all about it (and the job interview sandwiched on the Friday in between) when I have words that are good enough, if there are any. How good it is to have been read, then seen, then loved.

Photo taken, like most good photos, by the wonderful Annie Atkins

What others were feeling like today #16

2010-07-09T00:22:00.001+01:00

1938

'He has found a purpose in life for himself in his children'. So that they in turn may find the same in theirs? But what point is there in this endless procreation? We care so little about other people that even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God. Man prefers to punch his fellow man in the mouth, and is such a fool that to give himself an object in life he has to produce a son.

Cesare Pavese

I like this one a lot. Pavese manages to get such a wealth of ideas into a few lines of writing. I haven't been able to find out where the quote he opens with comes from, but while googling the phrase I learned that Usher, that most anodyne of popstars, said much the same thing a couple of weeks ago. Attributing all your 'purpose' in life to your children is a dangerous thing to do, as I see it. Surely it can only mean that you've given up on finding any meaning in your own life and are now only seeking to do so vicariously through your children. Or is it just something vapid that people say? If merely producing humans to produce humans to produce humans ad infinitum is our 'purpose' in life then it is really no purpose at all. I very much hope to have children some day but I'd like to think that even without them my life might have some purpose, and that if I do have them I won't subscribe wholeheartedly to the cult of the child.

Extract taken, as always, from The Assassin's Cloak.

Icerain Icerain, baby

2010-06-25T17:18:00.001+01:00

I did not get that job, as I thought. I suspect that the postion was sewn up long before they even advertised it, and that my interview last week was the kind of sham that educational institutions are obliged to conduct, for reasons I'll never understand. This surly fucker does not appreciate having to take an unpaid day-off from his temporary job to get suited and booted at crack of dawn o'clock for a joke of a ten minute interview. There will be other jobs, but it's hard to imagine one that I would be better qualified and experienced for. Fuck 'em.

It only started to really get to me when my mother called as I was on my way to work this morning and sounded genuinely heartbroken for me.

Further to this, some bollix decided to invade our home in the middle of the night the other day (I'm leaving Rosie to write all the descriptive stuff about our shared experiences these days, as she's so much better at it), leaving us both sleep-deprived and a little shaken. My system has yet to sort itself out and the primal rage that had me barking threats and obscenities at him like a rottweiler at a postman has yet to fully subside. A fat American nearly got me run over by a bus earlier and I didn't know whether to bellow at him or burst into tears.

Time for a holiday.

Fortunately, our renowned skills in assisting people with house and dog-sitting have brought us a free stay in this place, starting tomorrow. Not bad, I suppose. Still, the downside of it is that if i want to use the local municipal swimming pool I have to follow French law and abstain from sporting a nice comfortable pair of swimming shorts. Apparently I'd be refused entry in loose trunks but the bienvenues would be a-flowing were I to rock up in these bad boys. You gotta love them.

However, to fully achieve rehabilitation fully I reckon I may have to treat les femmes francaises to the sight of the semi-legendary Andrew gooch in these:

Mais oui.

Disclosure: Oddly bulbous crotchal region not blogger's own.

Pigs and needles

2010-06-24T01:42:00.001+01:00

Music-wise, I'm all about the dead guys at the moment. Mark Linkous (otherwise known as Sparklehorse) and Elliott Smith - two men who were appreciated by many before their respective suicides but whose brilliance will probably only be fully recognised in years to come.
It's disarming the way every now and then music can still make you feel like an insecure teenager finding meaning and empathy where most likely none was intended.
You ought to be proud that I'm getting good marks.
It's there when I'm yelping internally at everything that makes me frustrated.
And watching pounds and pounds on the digital scale.
I wanna new body right now, I'm a butchered cow.
The staking out of our house by a mentally-ill sparrow who goes for my face when he's not going for our door and just wants to live with us, just wants to be like us.
I wanna be a pig, I wanna fuck a car.
And the job I interviewed for last week and would love to get and should get but won't get.
Needle in the hay.
And the tension and burn to write but not the words.
And make music but not the skill.
Needle in the hay.
And wishing, come to think of it, that I enjoyed my love's company just a little bit less so that everyone else didn't seem so crap by comparison.
I wanna be a tough-skinned bitch but I don't know how.

And my own jaw-clenching ineptitude.
I wanna be a shiny new baby with a spongy brain.
I wanna be a horse filled with fire that will never tame.

Wanting to blog more and not having time.
Or not knowing how.
Wanting to be able to make her smile every second of every day.

Looking to surpass myself just the tiniest bit, for once.

Needle in the hay
Needle in the hay
Needle in the hay.

Save Me From Apathy, Save Me from Hell - Flatlake 2010

2010-06-08T23:22:00.001+01:00

Yes, dear readers, this is a photo of me with the mighty Crystal Swing. Now, you might have thought that I'd be altogether too surly a sort of fucker to request photos with such folk, but you'd be wrong. As of this moment, Andrew is happily going on record as stating that quasi-incestuous, hucklebucking langerpop is very much the way forward.

Now, a few questions you may have regarding said photo:

Where? The Flatlake Festival in Co. Monaghan, a glorious mix of parish fete tweeness, Monaghan underager boozefest, and serious literature thinktank. As curated by Patrick McCabe - warped mind behind The Butcher Boy.

Why is the photo so blurred? When I saw Crystal Swing being harangued for photos by passers-by I decided that this was an opportunity to good to pass up. Rosie concurred, but was silently laughing so hard that her hand wouldn't stop shaking as she snapped. The group just looked bemused, as I was about seventeen years older than anyone else asking them for a shot.

Andrew, why do you look like such a paunchy buffoon in this shot? This is an optical illusion, caused by the fact that Crystal Swing collectively resemble a cricket wicket when standing next to each other. I kinda fancied the gamey-looking ma beforehand, but Jaysis love, Skeletor wants his face back. I am, in reality, a svelte size 8, and not remotely bloated by the bottle of Captain Morgan and coke in my left hand.

Was there other good stuff going on? Yes, yes there was. There was Anne Enright doing a powerful reading, there was Jinx Lennon causing sore necks through vigorous head-nodding during a ditty entitled Stop Picking on Nigerians, there was roasting sunshine for more or less three days solid, there were hundreds of Chinese lanterns on the last night, there was only bumping into bloggers I really like, there was Shane McGowan droning " wurgle gurgle gurgle" over the verses of Mundy's tedious July, there was being able to camp right beside our car, there was the successful road-testing of our honeymoon tent, and there were dogs bloody everywhere for me to try and cuddle-attack. And there was Crystal Swing, making a horrendous racket with Lily Allen.

I may never need to go to another festival again.

Beware of Small States

2010-06-03T00:38:00.000+01:00

A few years ago I spent about a month working in an orphanage in Tanzania and staying in a youth hostel there. Among the volunteers there were two brothers from L.A. in their early twenties. Let's call them Dumbo and Follo. Volunteer work is, much as I am loath to admit it, an egotistical pursuit in many ways. The volunteer gets a kick out of knowing that they're helping someone and gets a kick out of people saying "Oh, aren't you great to be doing that!" Nevertheless, these two clowns took the vanity of the exercise to magnificent levels. One brother could not encounter a Tanzanian child without the other brother making sure it was caught on video. Whereupon the child's ears would be assaulted with something along the lines of "You're WELCOME!! WE'RE JUST DOING WHAT WE CAN, LITTLE FRIEND." On one magnificent occasion Dumbo was calling home to his mother when the emotions of working in the orphanage overcame him and he started to cry. As he did so he quietly beckoned Follo closer and indicated that he was to start recording him. They didn't see anything comical in recounting this story to the other volunteers. Another time, the two were painting a classroom when Dumbo's wrist suddenly went limp and his brush began dribbling paint onto his pristine new boots.
"Dude, what are you doing?!" cried Follo.
"Bro, when we're back home I can wear these shoes to bars and when girls ask why there's paint on them I can tell them I got it painting an orphanage in Africa."
A grin flashed over Follo's face. "You're a fucking genius, dude," he said as he tastefully daubed his own footwear.

But I digress. Wildly. All you need to know about these guys is that they were chumps. They took chumpishness to transcendent levels. They were also Italian-American, as Italian-American as Paulie Walnuts or the gang from Jersey Shore. Guidos, as I believe they call them in the States. Only for some reason they fancied themselves as Jewish, despite the fact that they had no lineage whatsoever to that effect. They liked to prance around the hostel louding chanting and dancing at sunset on Friday evenings because that's when The Sabbath began. At other points one brother would wander into a group of entirely disinterested fellow guests and tell them not to look for the other one for the next half hour or so, as he was busy praying. Such spiritual fellows they were. It took only a little prodding after a couple of drinks to get Follo to admit one day that Madonna and her high profile Kabbalah guff had more than a little influence on them, and that that shit was hot in L.A. right now. They chose to wear their Judaism on their sleeves with obnoxious Israeli Airforce t-shirts, rather than red strings on their wrists. You could not have made these guys up.

And then there was Dani. Dani had just finished her two year stint of mandatory military service in the Israeli army and was now travelling for a bit before starting university in Tel Aviv. Dani went about her day quietly, and did not care one jot for the posturing of Dumbo and Follo, or the sorry advances they made at her. She laughed off jokes we made about Israeli military training consisting solely of throwing stones at Palestinians, and expressed exasperation at the whole situation. Two years of army bullshit still didn't seem to have put a warmongering thought in her head. She didn't think being Jewish made her better than anyone else. She wished it was all very different.

Ack.

This all seemed to make a lot more sense when I began it a couple of night ago, feeling more shocked and saddened by a news story than I almost thought possible of my jaded head. I don't know exactly how I feel about it all. But I know that the actions of the Israeli army the other day weren't done in the name of people like Dani, but that they are enabled by people like Dumbo and Follo, stuffed to the gills with the romantic, dangerous bollocks that they attach to the idea of the rightful home of God's Chosen People.

As for the boys themselves? They couldn't be reached for comment as they are currently on a Buddhist retreat with the Jonas Brothers and three of the backing dancers from Glee.

Aisha, we've only just met and I think you ought to know...I'm a murderer

2010-05-25T21:00:00.000+01:00

What with there being nothing sad at all about sitting around the flat on your own watching the Eurovision semi-finals I am doing precisely that. Perhaps only for a few minutes longer though, as I'm starting to hate my ears, and the ironic appeal of all that kitsch has a limited lifespan before it just makes you start to despair.
Still, if there's one thing I dearly love it's a good and proper mangling being handed out to the English language, Engrish style.

And bless me if Latvia's entry, a mildly discordant, comely young lass in a dressing gown who goes by the name of Aisha, hasn't obliged me nicely. What for? Only Mr. God knows why. My favourite bits are in bold.

I’ve ask my angels why
But they don’t know
What for do mothers cry and rivers flow?
Why are the skies so blue, and mountains high?
What for is your love, always passing by?

I’ve asked my uncle Joe
But he can’t speak
Why does the wind still blows and blood still leaks?
So many questions now with no reply
What for do people live until they die?

What for are we living?
What for are we crying?
What for are we dying?
Only Mr God knows why
What for are we living?
What for are we dreaming?
What for are we losing?
Only Mr God knows why
But his phone today is out of range

The sun in colour black is rising high
The time is turning back, I wonder why
So many questions now with no reply
What for do people live until they die?

What for are we living?
What for are we crying?
What for are we dying?
Only Mr God knows why
What for are we living?
What for are we dreaming?
What for are we losing?
Only Mr God knows why

What for are we living?
What for are we crying?
What for are we dying?
Only Mr God knows why
What for are we living?
What for are we dreaming?
What for are we losing?
Only Mr God knows why.

Thank you, Aisha, thank you for the words.

oh what a small sky for so much rain

2010-05-20T01:22:00.000+01:00

The day is humid and stifling, or, as auld ones love to say, very close. We mosey about the place, out of the house just to be out of the house. Rosie is delicate today, after having her Mary Bridget interfered with yesterday in a non-sexy manner. I'm a little delicate too, because I'm just a little delicate sometimes, and I've needed to pee since three minutes after we left the house. There is more hanging in the air than humidity and tender pink bits, but it's hard to talk about because it's not of our making.
We sit in Cathedral Park, beside where an arm might first have been chanced, and spectate on an adorable Chinese toddler as she first makes advances on a group of unsuitable pubescents ("Ah, she's after kissin' ya Jayo!") before finding a more appropriately-aged friend, whose ball and father's attention she quickly commandeers. Then we putter home along Clanbrassil Street, as I hold court on the theme of 'Dickheads I Have Known, and Regarded as Dickheads'. We're both lathered in sweat when we get home from this most sedate of walks.
Later we fire up an episode of The Sopranos as she makes popcorn and I pour drinks: a fancy cider for her, a White Russian for me. As we near the end she opines that the drink has made her want a cigarette. We both gave up ages ago but I always buy a cheap carton or two when abroad just, y'know, in case. 'Palenie zabija' the packet warns. Which, if my rudimentary grasp of Polish serves me right, translates as 'Andrew, with this cigarette in your mouth you will look brooding, virile and ferociously intelligent. No harm can come of this.'
We're both already wearing pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt, and I add some grubby adidas trainers and my tattiest of hoodies for our trip outside for a fag. She effects much the same look, only with some brown leather heels. "Skobie chic, wha'?"
The recent shower has passed and she breathes deeply and says "The air's much better now, after the rain."
I suck in my Camel Blue and my dregs at the same time. "Yeah, it's much better now."

More tea, Gicker?

2010-05-11T10:01:00.001+01:00

Click to make it big and hairy

Sometime last year Rosie's blog turned two, and the indolent wagon asked me to write a post for her to mark the occasion, as she couldn't be ringed. So I did. I asked her to return the favour for my second birthday and, clearly reluctant to write anything as fawning as I would've liked, she produced the above graph for me. Smart lady.

The geeky book blog she refers to is Slightly Read - a book blog I started working on a few weeks ago when I realised I that I kept feeling an odd urge to write book reviews here. I decided to stick them into their own grubby little corner instead, so as not to put my legions of readers off this place. Head over there and have a gander if that's your sort of thing, or just sit tight and wait for my next gibbering missive here instead.

7

2010-05-07T23:56:00.000+01:00

and moreso
that they think it feels it flows it harps it hurts it flanges about every way
it
isn't and
writhing everything preordained preordained small means of mens drool by shooting solipses it snot like this is going to tell you anything you so far alone you so
light up you sized up you
knowthatimademymillionsandididntcareididntcareifuckeditupandilostitallandicarednotawhitiheldittightandthere
might
be
other ways
andmeansandends kwakkrak
elegiac notwithstanding
verisimilitude templates
eating disorders
rampant
yog-urt yo-gurt
titillation
hinges on
it
not
gurning getting or not being

How To See Yourself As You Really Are

2010-04-17T02:22:00.000+01:00

One of the many books I have lying by my bed is How to See Yourself as You Really Are by the Dalai Lama. It's one I picked up while working in the charity shop (His Holiness and his publishers would have liked me to have paid seventeen quid or something for it, but hey, I guess that's not who I really am). There's some good advice in it at times, and even the odd sniff of genuine profundity. Still, one can't help but wonder, at times, whether yer man's quest to see himself as he really is has ever taken in that noblest of pursuits in the pursuit of self-actualisation,the one known as "snorting vodka."

I've this friend who snorted a bit of vodka, in his time. The first time was on New Year's Eve, at a house party, when he was seventeen. Another lad, undeniably the smartest in his year, told him it that it had never done him any harm, so it must be fine. Solid enough logic there. He sniffed it right up and it burnt his nostrils and gave him brain freeze but just that one teaspoonful made him feel like he'd drunk three naggins so he had another one. A few minutes later he jumped up really high in the air thrashing around on his air guitar to the intro to Radiohead's Just and he landed hard on his left hip. Everyone laughed really hard so they put the song back to the start and he did it again. He only started to feel his hip ten minutes later. He reckons now that he cracked it, but he was far too embarrassed to ever seek medical attention for it. Still gives him the odd sharp pain now, eleven years on.

The second time was when he was eighteen, about to finish school, and he and his entire class mitched off to celebrate this step into adulthood by going and getting absolutely fucked in the sand-dunes of Brittas Bay. This was to be achieved through a cunning combination of cider and sunburn. And a capful or two of uncle Smirnoff, route one through the nose and into the good times. He remembers deliberately head-over-heelsing down a steep, high dune, and little else. A few of them headed straight to The Forge once they got back to town. They weren't all eighteen, but no-one gave a fuck at 5 o'clock in the evening. He remembers ordering gin and tonic and smoking a cigar, in what he can only imagine was intended as a display of louche decadence. He remembers blowing cigar smoke in the face of a toddler who looked over from the neighbouring booth. He remembers the child's mother not seeming to mind, as she said they were keeping him entertained. He remembers being warned that he had tapped cigar ash into his G&T. He remembers drinking it anyway. And how he vomited all over the table a few minutes later. And how they just changed tables and how, inexplicably, no-one kicked him out, this friend. Someone should really have kicked him out.

You're toxic, I'm slipping under

2010-04-07T03:32:00.001+01:00

"It's not fair!" Words you haven't uttered in years, now directed at two Leinster Hockey Branch referees on the occasion of your team being dumped unceremoniously out of the cup by a team bolstered beyond all recognition by a load of illegally unregistered players from a much higher division. A team whose legitimate side you had strolled to a 6-0 victory over in the league just a couple of weeks earlier. Yet another example of the skulduggery that dogs lower-level hockey to a surprising extent. Not fair at all, but your team are slowly learning how to play that game. Come to think of it, it isn't really fair that you're a hockey player at all, being a refugee in its middle-class bosom for over a decade now. Forced out out of football - a game you're much better at - as a delicate 15 year-old by one too many taunts of "Proddy bastard" from your own team-mates. And they laugh at you, these elder gentlemen, much as you do when teenagers approach you with the same whinge when confronted with a punishment they don't feel they deserve. Life's not fair, lads, I'd kick you up the hole too, if The Man'd let me.
The words come rising to your throat again in an acid bubble tonight, as you sit down with one of your best mates to watch the football over a few pints and he comes clean about who his new employer is. AnglofuckingIrishcuntingBank, of all people. The ones costing the state about 30 billion euro; you may have heard mention of them recently. Good to know they're hiring, innit? Loath to hear too much about the bastards, you fill him in on my recent own employment status. Which is that, after more than four months without a speck of paid work, things have been a bit better recently, a few TEFL hours and a bit of secondary subbing work making things feel a lot better. You don't bother spitting in his pint when he says that he's glad the hourly rate for subbing has come down a bit, as it was too high. You don't bother pointing out that it would take his new friend Seán FitzPatrick a full 1200 years as a full-time secondary teacher to pay back the debts the government reckon he won't be able to get back to them. You just let him get the next round in and you sit and watch your team take a hiding with an odd mixture of glumness and awe and you think that it's also not fair having to play possibly the best club side in the world with five of your cast-iron starters missing. Trying to counter Lionel Messi, the best player in the world, with Mickael Silvestre is most likely a contravention of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. .You console yourself with the fact that at least the horrible little banker fuck beside you is a Liverpool fan, so he knows something of pain. And a job's a job and a mate's a mate, right?
Right.

he did make some observations

2010-04-06T02:20:00.001+01:00

Having a bonsai tree really is like having a child, a puppy or syphilis: you have to bring it fucking everywhere. And so it was that Stella joined Rosie and I on a week-long jaunt to the west of Ireland, where we indulged in our customary pastimes of walking a bit, grumbling at the rain, reading a bit, watching DVDs, gorging ourselves like sows with tapeworms and cooing at each other a lot. It was precisely like that Discover Ireland ad, especially the bit with the couple looking affluent and aroused in Westport. We also flew (yeah, flew) to Inis Mór like motherfucking rockstars. More about all that another time, perhaps.

I was planning on throwing in a few grumbles into this post of odds and ends, as it's been a while since I've used the 'gripes' tag. Then Holemaster shows up in my feed-reader with a worthy list.
To his complaints I add:

People who won't switch their headlights on before the sun sets. Try driving down the M50 in a driving rainstorm with the backwash from a truck obscuring everything and tell me you wouldn't notice the fucker in a silver Audi cutting in front of you just a split second sooner if they had their lights on.

Bohemian Rhapsody. Tonight I sat through all two and a half hours of Channel 4's unfathomably unfunny Comedy Gala. It climaxed, like a sixteen year-old jizzing his pants, with one-trick pony Lee Evans performing his one trick, sweatily, to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody. And I realised that that song, far from being the 'greatest song of the twentieth century' that it is so often feted as, is a bloated monstrosity of a yoke that should have been left alone to enjoy its Wayne's World based resurrection and then banned from public consumption. Think about it: you don't like it half as much as you've been told you do, do you?

Overuse of the word 'rant' on the internet. There is a tendency among bloggers to preface and/or conclude any strong statement of opinion with a caveat along the lines of "I hope you'll excuse this rant", or "Don't mind me, I'm just ranting". It seems almost apologetic - anticipating the fact that some fucker will come along and take offence at something you've said. If your 'rant' is in any way blog-related you can be absolutely certain that someone will take offence, and will probably read far more into your words than was ever there. It happens. if you have something to say that may cause a few snarks then write it, read over it, sleep on it if needs be, then if you stand by everything you say then publish the fucking thing and don't use dismissive words like 'rant' for your own thoughts unless that is truly how it reads, in which case delete it. Or call it a rant, by which you might as well type "I'm not sure I mean this at all, I'm just not thinking right now."

And now, to close on an upbeat note, two splendid blogs that have recently come to my attention: This Limbo and Conor Creighton. Both well worth a click and a bit of your time. And Jennie, for fuck's sake, if you haven't already been round there.

The Hills of Donegal

2010-03-25T14:57:00.003Z

Old man, when you spoke to us in that proper rural pub, where everyone played cards and sat in rickety seats on the lino floor and had tea and sandwiches, when you told us you were 89 and only ever came here for one wee whiskey, I was beginning to think that I was in some TV Oirish drama, or a play written in the 50s. Then you told us of the poetry you used to write while you worked in America, and you started to recite one, at length, in your rolling northwestern burr, rhyming throughout and full of sentimental imagery about dreaming of "the hills of Donegal" and suchlike. And I resented the fact that I was now undoubtedly taking part in a cliché, in some McGahern wannabe's awful short story. But I was also enthralled, despite myself. And when you told us, both teachers, that there was "no education" in your poems we loudly disagreed. And you told us that you burnt your books of poetry after your wife died, and that your sons and your grandchildren don't bother about you but that's alright because that's the way life goes and we struggled to believe you because isolated, abandoned, sad old rural poets only exist in fiction, surely. And you bade us goodnight and Godbless and hobbled out into the dark and we didn't quite know what to say, but we recalled how you had started to recite the same poem again before slowly realising you'd already said it and we reckoned that maybe your memory is just bad and maybe you see your sons more than you let on.
And you stayed in my head and the next night, reading a novel into the small hours as the lake lapped outside my window the author quoted Joseph Brodsky in saying that "If there is any substitute for love it is memory" and I had to leave my book down on my chest for a moment because my eyes hurt.

Da Po'leese. (aka Monkey Tennis)

2010-03-24T23:00:00.002Z

Early Monday morning I abandoned Stella to the mercy of Rosie, and embarked upon a transition year outdoor pursuits trip to Donegal. No, I haven't landed a teaching job, I just provide cheap, grateful labour to the secondary school I last taught in. Not many teachers want to go on these sort of trips, but I'll take anything right now. I went on much the same trip last year, only to Killary Harbour. But there'll be divil a cute-faced German girl sniffing around this time. I'm engaged these days, and the women can smell it off you sooner than you'd get a chance to even drop the casualest reference to a fiancée into a sentence. Which is handy, because I don't get to wear the early warning system that the ladies so usefully sport on their left ring finger. I kinda wanted to have an engagement ring too, but was told that would be both lame and gay. It would be. And Rosie's jeweller sister is refusing to make our wedding bands until pretty close to the day itself because she reckons I would immediately start trying to wear mine. The perceptive bitch.

But this all academic right now, my friends, because what I wish to alert you all too is something the ginger foghorn of a kid sitting two rows back from me was anxious to be back home in time for on Friday night. It's Traffic Blues, Ireland's very own answer to Police, Camera, Action! and Road Wars. But there's little in the way of drugs, shooting and helicopter chases. Instead, you've got Garda Gerry ordering a Nigerian woman to pick her chewing gum up off the ground while he breathlessly, needlessly recounts the story to the camera over a dramatic soundtrack that just screams "check the fuck out of how intense this shit is!" Or another occasion where the boys in blue board an empty schoolbus, leaving the driver trembling in their wake as they admonish him with "Five of those seatbelts are broken, would you maybe get them fixed sometime, like?"

The only shocking thing about this show is how RTÉ managed to dream this up before TV3.

Update: A quick check on Youtube shows me that this yoke's been running for nearly a year now. Why the fuck did no-one tell me? I thought I was going to blow your minds with this shit! Clearly I'm way too cool to be sitting in watching telly of a Friday evening.

Stella, I love you!

2010-03-15T18:05:00.000Z

Lacking in words, as I am recently, I thought I would abort all the half-formed, moth-eaten posts I have been labouring on and post, instead, a picture of me staring at my new bonsai tree.

Her name is Stella and I have decided that I love her. I will caress her while my fiancée is not looking and gradually, gradually, I will have coherent things to say again.

codeine for a mouth abscess

2010-03-09T17:14:00.000Z

I'd say that it was the greatest feeling ever, only that i can't feel anything at all. I assume this is what it's like to be a bran flake.

this city you know, get paid, you get laid

2010-03-01T20:00:00.001Z

There's an art to finding the right song, or songs, to listen to on any short, purposeful walk. These days Simple Kid's Serotonin is the tune I'm using to soundtrack my brief trips to and from Charlemont Luas stop as I ponder the canal in that same way that I seem to stare at any mass of water, as if to dredge some kind of meaning from it. The canal sparkles in the cold sun and tells me it doesn't honestly give a shit what I think about anything.

Serotonin is that classic example of a song with lyrics that might sound like they were written by a 16 year-old when read flat, but then assumes a new profoundness when put to music. Songwriters rarely have half the way with words that poets do, but they have the assets to make them mean much more to us.

Nice video, this one. Makes me think about maybe having a shave sometime. I could even do my own tribute video.

Laying on the floor I think about superman: and did he ever lay around drinking, telling his friends, reefer in his hand, “Hey man some day I'm gonna make a big splash”, or does that kind of talk just come to us folk who can't find 'S' on our chests? So just keep wheeling, dealing, bus-stop dreaming, laying on the floor just staring at the ceiling.
Laying in the tub I thought about rock 'n roll and has it already been done before? Guess so, it's just getting your dick sucked, don't make it any less good than it once was, oh my god I wish that this brain would stop. Start again.

When I get well I'm gonna move to the country, breathe clean air man, turn the televisions off for a while, Eskimo style. Gonna just breathe in, breathe out, breathe. In the city you know, get paid, you get laid, go to the clinic and you listen as the doc says: “Don't drink, don't smoke, work hard, be fun, don't eat no junk,” ain't it just enough to make you wanna go get drunk? That's what I done. Well anyway the drink got me thinking what a friend had said, guess what he said:

“Happiness is nothing but the flow of serotonin in your head, hasn't got to do with Jesus Christ, nothing got to do with wrong or right, oh help me out Simp, can it be right? That it all boils down to how the chemicals flow to your soul?”

and on the lazy days the dogs dissolve and drain away

2010-02-23T20:50:00.001Z

A while now since I've posted anything. Thing is, I blog every single night in my head. All sorts of wonderful posts about everything both zeitgeisty and, um, the other word. And I write stories, all kinds of touchingly lovely ones that will probably save short-form literature as we know it and persuade millions upon millions of people to abandon heat and nuts and now hello VIP you cosmopolitan zoo mirror smut. Probably. But they're not on a page, like, or on a screen. They're in my head and they will stay there for the time being until I can stay up late at night and have the patience and the mental strength to churn them out and save all your sorry lives. You will be glad.
But for now I will take the sleep that I get so that I can take the work that I get to fix broken fillings and pay the lecky in this longest of long fucking winters.

how it makes of your face a stone that aches to weep

2010-02-12T02:31:00.000Z

My aunt told a story at the dinner table the other day of how the mother of a colleague of hers died sitting in an armchair while a birthday party in her honour bubbled gently around her. She might have been dead quite some time before anyone noticed her sitting motionless amidst the throng of friends and family. She was pretty elderly, so the story occupied the warmer end of the tragi-comic spectrum and we laughed. The consensus at the time, apparently, was that she would have died happy, perhaps expediated slightly to impending demise by her excitement at seeing all the people she cared about gathered in one place.

My grandmother, who died two years and three days ago, didn't have such a luxury. Cancer robbed her of her hair, a breast and her weight before it took her entirely. And her words. My mother and I sat with her one evening in the hospital as she tried to tell us something, both of us straining for meaning in her well-formed, well-spoken nonsense. But there was no sense to be made from the words she used whatsoever and she deteriorated into further gibberish as she grew more and more frustrated at this breakdown in communication. Already wracked with guilt over a previous occasion when she had woken up only to catch me crying over her, I was determined that she wouldn't feel that our inability to understand was her fault. "I'm sorry, granny," I said, after this had gone on for about fifteen minutes, "I think we're just not listening properly. We must be tired."

She smiled patiently. "Yes, I expect you are."

And with this, the last thing I remember her saying to me, she refused to let cancer take the politeness and consideration that had been her hallmark for over eighty years from her.

An Béal Bocht

2010-02-01T02:25:00.000Z

There's this grey coat I have that I bought in Milan about three years ago. I think it cost me about 240 eurolira - not exactly wildly excessive but way more money than I had ever spent on an item of clothing before. I swaggered around Dublin and various insalubrious parts of county Wicklow with it on, always confident that the coat lent me an air of respectability. I looked like the kind of man you'd be happy to have teach, and possibly even date, your children.

I still wear the coat in winter and, dubious strawberry yoghurt stain notwithstanding, it looks pretty good from the outside. Inside, however, the fancy satin lining is perishing to the point of non-existent and strands of it peek out most unwantedly from my cuffs. And lately I've been seen to meander into McDonald's and fumble for an unfeasible length of time in the inner breast pocket in search of Buy One Get One Free vouchers for sausage and egg McMuffins.

Aside from that, I don't think unemployment has made the slightest bit of difference.

Radio-friendly unit shifter

2010-01-30T22:48:00.000Z

I've known Patrick Kelleher since he was about nine. His older brother was one of my best mates in school and when I went over to his place Paddy would hang off us, misguidedly thinking it would make him cool by association. Since he released his debut album You Look Cold last year I've been hanging off him, resigned to never being cool by any means, but perhaps hoping that a modicum of his talent might rub off on me. I had bought his album because that's what you do - you buy the albums that your friends make. Then it kicked me in the bollocks by being really fucking good, probably the best album I bought last year. It appears an awful lot of people think so too.

I had little idea of what kind of music he makes, and to be honest, I still don't really know. I suppose it fits vaguely into that lazy category of 'indie/alternative', but this is no skinny-boys-playing-their-guitars-atonally drudgery. Nor is it the work of yet another earnest guy with an acoustic guitar keening about his soul. It feels more like a celebration of all kinds of good stuff, including folk, electronica and doo-wop. It's not cynical, designed to get played on daytime radio, seduce Hollywood starlets and soundtrack The Hills. It's not going to sell out stadiums or get him on the cover of Q magazine (though he'd make a smashing cover girl).
It's music for the sheer joy of it, at a time when reality TV seems determined to take us further and further from that notion.

Patrick and his band will be playing at two Haiti benefit gigs in Whelan's, on February 3rd and 17th. Do yourself and favour and get to one of the shows. And if you don't trust me on this, check out the ire that his omission from the Choice Music shortlist provoked over on Jim Carroll's blog.

Also, watch this video. I don't exactly put them up very often.

Patrick Kelleher - Coat To Wear from Gerard Duffy on Vimeo.

Myspace page.

Musical Rooms feature.

Interview.

maji moto

2010-01-19T03:27:00.001Z

The most important three years of my youth were spent in Tanzania, east Africa, where I lived with my family between the age of 8 and 10. We lived in a small village just outside the city of Dodoma. Dodoma is nominally the capital of Tanzania and means "it has sunk" in the local tribal language, Chigogo - a name that is said to refer to an incident where an elephant got stuck in the mud. Fond as I still am of the place, I never saw anything as exciting as an elephant there. Or any mud.

For Dodoma lies in an area that is classified as 'semi-desert'. I was delighted when I discovered this and tried to mention it every time the topic of Tanzania arose for years after I came back to Ireland, making sure to say the 'semi' bit quite quietly. Rain was scarce and precious, often going nine months without making an appearance, sometimes over a year. We never had running water, meaning that both toilet flushes and showers were limited to a couple of mugfuls from a bucket once a day. I never minded, but I felt the anxiety creased on local faces when crops failed and xylophone-ribbed cattle succumbed to a diet of dust.

So when it rained, it was glorious. You'd smell it on the dry dust up to half an hour beforehand, and hear a low hum in the air as the myriad insects would ready themselves. We'd run inside to tell our mother and would then set out plastic buckets and empty metal margarine tubs and open kettles, any respectable receptacle, below the eaves of the house to catch what we could before the thirsty ground chugged it all. Then I'd wait outside until the last possible second, watching the dust speckle and spatter until the downpour became too much. Whereupon the rain through the meshed window became the evening's entertainment, superior to that of our non-existent telly and the stacks of comics I'd already read. If I was lucky it would still be lashing down as I went to sleep, soothed by the drumming on the corrugated iron roof. Comforted by the knowledge that it was saving lives and feeling a little less at odds with my previous existence in Cork; a place more accustomed to precipitation.

Life would shoot out of the dust and cover the area in a lush veneer of greenness that might sometimes last an entire fortnight. Red scorpions would temporarily become more of a worry and malaria rates in the region increased (I caught it two or three times during our spell there). We'd go and skim stones on temporary lakes (which once led to my five year-old brother requiring stitches on his head after a misunderstanding with some older Tanzanian girls). And, excitingly, a very small tortoise would invariably end up on our verandah the morning after a deluge.* We'd adopt it as a household pet, vastly preferable to the incessantly mewling kitten we once found on a rubbish heap who died after three days despite our best efforts to feed it milk through a syringe, much safer than a dog in a country where rabies vaccines are a low priority, more loyal than the chameleons we'd lovingly place on our mosquito nets, only for them to feck off once they realised that there were more flies elsewhere. We'd call them all Polepole (po-lay po-lay - 'slowly' in Swahili) and try to work out what the hell they ate. And when they tired of us and refused to leave their shells, and we tired of them and found a new snake to throw rocks at, we set them down on the dust and they ambled off.

*I never quite understood why this happened or if, indeed, they were tortoises rather than turtles, until a quick Google check assured me that they were most definitely tortoises and that the poor fuckers were presumably trying not to drown.

1:01

2010-01-14T02:28:00.000Z

"Careful outside, our driveway is the last place in Dublin to still have patches of ice."

As was his flat, judging from this evening. It meant that one of the two extra layers I'd applied for outside wear had never been removed once I'd arrived over to drink some beer and share in his team's further ignominy. And now it's too late for a bus and I don't feel insulated sufficiently against the freezing fog that shrouds the Rathgar road.

I hunch my shoulders and truck homewards, knowing it's not really that far of a walk. A dark figure shambles out of the mist toward me. Look straight ahead and don't make eye contact, Andrew, that's how you keep them from murdering you and raping your corpse. It works.

Dozens upon hundreds of taxis crawl past me, with hopeful lights on top that say "Hey big boy, me bring you home long time five dollah." I pat my empty wallet and think there was a time, lads, there was a time. I walk past a blonde girl with a warm-looking hat on. She looks straight ahead and doesn't make eye contact.

Eddie Rocket's of Rathmines is open and deserted and I consider throwing them the sop of my company. But I've done nothing to earn fries and a chocolate malt on a Wednesday night. The clock above the Swan makes for an eerie backlit sight in these conditions. I wish momentarily that I had a camera with me, then I remember that cameras don't really get fog, especially at night.

Tramco has less punters than the net café next door. Taxis queue outside Rain Niteclub as it dry-retches no-one to their bosoms. In the future, when my grandchildren ask me what I remember of The Grand Depression I will say "Taxis, so very many taxis." 7,247 of them I've counted now, though I have been drinking. Aprile's takeaway are still doing brisk business - those beautiful, greasy, durable bastards. It takes all of my bravery to stare straight ahead and not make eye contact.

I stumble in the door, hit the leaba without brushing mo fiaclaí and fire up the laptop to thaw out my thighs.

What others were feeling like today #15

2010-01-09T18:17:00.000Z

Oh, readers! Be ever so thankful that Chancing My Arm does not come in Twitter form. For had I access to a medium that cries out for pithy, pissy observations I shudder to think of the flecks of bile I would have been spraying at my devoted followers this week. And perhaps some delightfully light-hearted observations on the iciness of the Dublin streets this week - ROGC - Rolling on the Ground Crying! Cuz I just fell on my bum again LOL!!!)
But anyway, enough of this tomfoolery. For you didn't come here to read my words, you came for those of Christopher Matthew. Oh yes you did. Did the government have enough salt in his day? How did he feel about Irish blogging? Let's find out.

1977

It may be a little late in the day to start making New Year resolutions, but mine are none the less serious for that. I shall write them down to remind myself:

1. To make some money.

2. To think seriously about getting married - possibly to Jane, but ideally to someone with money.

3. To find somewhere else to live. I am getting too old for this type of flat life

4. To move freely in society. I am always reading in the diaries of the famous how they dined here and lunched there; sat next to this person at table and met that one at the theatre. I see no reason why I should not do the same. My problem is that my life is too often taken up with domestic trivialities, and I allow my time to be wasted by people of little worth and influence. I shall take steps to break out of this little world in which I have become trapped in recent months, and give far freer rein to my personality and talents.

Christopher Matthew (Diary of a Somebody)

am i to be a king, or just a pig?

2010-01-02T04:17:00.001Z

RTÉ News' Review of 2009 concluded by listing the two things we have to look forward to in 2010:

Finding out if NAMA works or not.

The World Cup.

Someone in Montrose has a dark, dark sense of humour.

For better prospects, see David Mitchell.

My end of 2009 does not deserve a post of its own and ought to spend a long time in a dark, fetid dungeon thinking about what it did.

But my cultural highlights of the year include guffawing along to the hilarious antics of Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes in Men Behaving Badly, the rollercoaster ride of Dan Brown's thrilling Da Vinci Code, the shock of Biddy's untimely demise in Glenroe, ribald and astounding videos on a global phenomenon people are calling 'The Youtube', and the sassy stylings of all-girl soul group Eternal.

Some sexy people, yesterday.

Yo, Andrew still down wit da kids, y'all.

"Ride me sideways", that was another one.

2009-12-24T04:54:00.001Z

Fair balls to the church in New Zealand who came up with this poster.

In other, entirely unrelated news, I seem to have suddenly adopted that habit people have of saying "oh, stop!" in order to express their complete agreement with a statement someone else is making.

As in:

"Jesus, it's so fucking cold outside I think my nipples might snap off."

"Oh, stop!"

"Did you see on the news about those people down in Kerry queueing up to shake hands with that rapist fella from Listowel? I think it's terrible, so I do..."

"Oh, stop!"

The missus caught me doing it twice today and roundly, rightly ripped the piss. But her camp, hand-flapping impression of me the first time I did it wasn't quite on the mark, as I hadn't really been doing it in all that effete a manner. No, we realised the second time around that I can only have picked up this most unwanted of mannerisms from all the auld ones I've been working with in the charity shop. Auld ones love a bit of "oh, stop!" and use it to register their feelings on subjects ranging from diplomatic relations between Britain and Libya to the Christmas number one ("Full of effin' and blindin' it is, Connie." "Oh, stop!"). Popular variants include "Ah, would ya stop!" and "Stop the lights!"

No harm in any of this at all, only that it once again exposes how impressionable my vocal chords are, what a blank canvas my early years of moving around have left me with. After 27 years of referring to my mother as 'mum' I have now, after little more than one year, picked up the fiancée's preference for 'mam' - the kind of lingual slip that could probably see me excommunicated from the Church of Ireland (if they did excommunication). And a full twenty years since I left Cork, I still find that a few days down there leave me spouting stuff like "Ah, 'tis desperate altogedder". Australian friends have misled me into calling flip-flops 'thongs'. I could go on, but you're smart, you get it.

Next month, all being well, I'll be starting some voluntary work in this place. It was set up by the inestimable Roddy Doyle, a man who should be a hero to every right-thinking Irish person. I believe he can be seen about the place, so I'm looking forward to his influence upon my continuing adventures in idiom.

Happy Christmas, yiz fucks.

and the way the night just seemed to turn the colour of orangeade

2009-12-21T03:10:00.002Z

"Get the fuck up! Now!"

My shrill warning comes just in time for my brother to leap out of his seat and clear a path for the monstrosity in an ill-fitting aquamarine satin dress behind him (let's call her Sonya), teetering perilously close to the top of his head with a desperate hand to her mouth and ominously bulging cheeks. The contents of her guts are spilt inches from my feet instead. There's always carrots, isn't there?
Seats are vacated to accommodate the ensuing acid, acrid stench, but this pub full of demon drunks and festive finery allows us no quarter to move our group to, and the night is too cold and too far on to be seeking a fresh hostelry.

Lady Sonya of the Sickly Stomach is briefly escorted away by her friend, only to rapidly return with a fresh drink in hand, looking more chipper than ever, holding court and administering fulsome hugs unashamedly close to her oozing pool of vomit being trampled all over the pub by those oblivious to the feel of chunky slime beneath their feet. As it happens, there is but one degree of separation between us, a degree who arrives not long after, spies me, and foists an introduction to Sonya upon me.

"Oh my God!!! HI!!!"
I am generally cuddlier than Barney the motherfucking Dinosaur, but I visibly flinch as she lunges toward me with arms open and pursed lips.
Sonya is celebrating her 28th birthday and is having a brilliant night, as are her friends. In some countries they call a blasé attitude to adults puking publicly a problem. In Ireland the government celebrate its place within our culture in its Budget.

The Fiancée and I leave before kicking-out time, 28 too, and tired. We pick our way through the throngs of George'sWexfordCamden Street liberated by the First X-factorless Saturday of Advent. It is one long tracking shot of a scene midway between the last days of Rome and the last night of Oxegen. We fail to enjoy our solitary stale Spanish cigarette, we talk ourselves away from the hotdog van. I think of Essex Dogs as we hopscotch over streams and puddles of the generosity of Brian Lenihan.

The smell of puke and piss on your stilettos.

Is that the new thing?

2009-12-08T20:05:00.000Z

The bloke at the till next to the one I'm paying at in Tesco Express wears a few tragically disparate whiskers and speaks with the upwards inflection favoured mostly by the young, the terminally stupid and the Australian. And he's from no further south than Stillorgan...

"Hi, do you have any of those, like, larger naggins of vodka?"
"You want a half-bottle?"
"No, it's like a naggin, only larger?"
"Yes, you mean a half-bottle, a shoulder."
"Um, I think it's called a 'daddy naggin'?"

Bless.

Strange news from another star

2009-12-03T16:34:00.000Z

I don't check my Hotmail account very often any more. They have appallingly bad spam filters and Gmail is preferable in just about every way. I popped in for the first time in about a week last night and found this:

Get RickO'Shea to loose.‏

From:

Curtis J (getcharlottetowin@gmail.com)

Dear Andrew

Your country needs you. Well Charlotte Flood needs you.

Charlotte is competing in one of the annual awards in this years Entertainment.ie things. anyways.

She is close to but still second to Mr Rick O'Shea, you may know him.

I have already set up a number of people, both nationwide and overseas to vote for Miss Flood to win but we need to recruit more and more.

To help us you need to vote for Charlotte as much as possible!

Click http://entertainment.ie/pages/annualawards/

I find if you lower the zoom on the browser (by hitting CTRL and '-' at the same time) you can vote quicker as there is less scrolling involved!

You are allowed vote 100 times in one go , it is tedious but we need all the votes we can get for good ol Chalotte. It resets after a few hours so if you use up all your votes try later that day and vote another 100 times.

I hope you will be as committed to this cause as we are.

Spread the word and get as many people as humanly possible to vote.

Have a nice day

Who the fuck is that guy? How did he get my email address, how the fuck does he know I know Rick O'Shea and why the fuck does he think I'd care enough to help him rig a poll? I'd rather listen to Peter Andre having an attack of the scutters than any of the tools who pollute the daytime airwaves, but that's neither here nor there. Rick O'Shea is, presumably, running one hell of a campaign himself as he's still way ahead in that particular category, as is his merry band of try-hards (Gimme has said all that needs to be said on that particular matter). Entertainment.ie, your poll is dodgier than a Zimbabwean election.

Now, Internet, I'm going to be away from you for a few days, holed up in a cottage in Mayo with nowt but a fire, a jigsaw puzzle and at least one scantily-clad lady for company. When I come back I wish to hear no more of this frippery. I wish for you to become once again the calm, measured forum for intelligent debate that you've always been up to now. Or at least ensure that Karen Koster claims her rightful crown as 'Best Xposé Presenter', yeah?

Chancing my arm, biting my lip

2009-12-03T00:29:00.000Z

Things people say to staff in the Irish Cancer Society shop:

"I'm buying three of these shirts, I should get a discount."

"€1.50 for that? I'll give you €1.20 for it."
(Proceeds to pay with a €50 note.)

"Could you not throw that one in for free? Sure yiz get all your stuff for free anyway."

"30 cent for The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, brilliant."
"I think we have another of her books out in the back, will I get it for you?"
"Please."
(upon returning) "That's 40 cent for that one, please."
"Oh, it's dearer?"

(To the manager)
"I'm not waiting till Saturday to buy that figurine in the window display, I want it now. I'm calling the head office to make a complaint."

"There's a tiny stone missing from this brooch, can you give it to me for a fiver instead of 7.50?"
"It's 7.50 because there's a stone missing, it's worth at least 40 otherwise."
"I'll give you six for it if you'll wrap it up for me."

What this member of staff thinks about saying to these people every day:

"One in four of you will contract some kind of cancer one day, cuntos, one in four of you."

What others were feeling like today #14

2009-12-01T21:49:00.000Z

1869

Old Irish airs on violin. I love Ireland: were she only not Catholic! But would she be Ireland otherwise?

William Allingham

After yet another foul, fetid week in the history of this country a diary entry from exactly 140 years ago has summed things up better than I can. As have Radge and Gimme.

In a world where...

2009-11-27T16:23:00.002Z

I was having a bit of a moan the other day to The Fiancée about how everyone starts looking for 'best of' lists at this time of year. I mentioned Donald Clarke's post, and how I'd ended up giving my tuppenceworth anyway, even though I'm above that sort of thing.
"Um, I think everyone missed the point of that one. He was looking for piss-takey ideas, like his ones."

I hate missing the point. So here, because I'm vain enough to post this on my own blog instead of in the comments on Donald's, are my favourite eight movies that weren't released in 2009:

The Stuffing of Dreams
Dir. Ving Rhames
Haley Joel Osment gives an Oscar-nominated performance as a nine year-old with Down's Syndrome who comes to terms with the untimely demise of his Siamese cat, Musty, through the help of avuncular taxidermist Elliott Gould. Also starring Bonnie Hunt as the wise-cracking mom.

Adapting Charlie Kaufman
Dir. John Malkovich
Charlie Kaufman stars as Nicholas Cage, an actor preparing for the role of a lifetime where he will play Philip Seymour Hoffman as he prepares to portray Catherine Keener in a play about Spike Jonze directing Being John Malkovich. Samantha Morton turns in a stunning performance as Jean, the woman who ignores them.

Brown Torino
Dir. Ben Stiller
Clint Eastwood and Michael Caine star as two bickering, widowered toilet attendants who retire to the industrial paradise of Turin, northern Italy, only to discover that there's always shit to take care of.

The Flesh-Eating Monkeys that Live in my Vagina
Dir. Jane Seymour
Though rumoured to be based on an initial concept by Eli Roth, Jane Seymour is very much the star of the show as she writes, directs and plays all seven lead roles in this bleakly apocalyptic vision of the near future.

Alpha to Omega
Dir. Ron Howard
Tom Bosley stars as Harold Oldman, an old man suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Hilarity ensues as he forgets where he lives and is taken in and adopted as a mascot by the residents of a party-hard fraternity house. Jonah Hill and Seann William Scott both received Golden Globe nods for their sensitive portrayal of twenty year-olds who like beer bongs.

Out and Out (3D)
Dir. Robert Rodriguez
Zac Efron and James van der Beeck star as twin brothers who battle prejudice and their mother's frowns to overcome the obstacle of their homosexuality and realise their dream of making it in the world of musical theatre. Bonnie Hunt co-stars as their mother.

Mincemeat! (How Corporate America Screws us Over)
Dir. Michael Moore
Moore's latest provocative documentary is a shocking exposé of what really goes into mince pies.
Apparently, it's not meat at all.

Crazy Face Man
Dir. Pedro Almodovar
Jim Carrey delights in this knockabout comedy as a man who contracts Bell's Palsy, causing him to gurn unwittingly in the most hilariously inappropriate circumstances. Pamela Anderson illuminates the screen as Woman whose Boobs Jim Likes.

Some people say the sky is just the sky

2009-11-22T23:34:00.001Z

Late last Monday night, lying in bed beside my gradually-recovering-from-swine-flu girlfriend, I found my head beating and beating at me with something I'd been wanting to say for ages but had never intended to say there and then.

"Will you marry me?"

Turns out she will. I held her tightly and she cried a little. The sap. I just shook. We kissed and we talked, thought what exactly we said has long since left my mind, so addled was I by the heady concoction of joy and fear. Fear, not of the commitment that we had just made to each other, but that, once we started the task of telling all the important people in the morning, even one of them might express the tiniest doubt or misgiving.

I needn't have worried. We let the night tick into the wee hours before deciding that we'd burst if we didn't tell someone and that there was a chance my brother might be awake. He wasn't, but he received the news with delight. The following day he told me that he lay awake for the next hour or so, composing the opening lines of the best man speech he knew I'd ask him to give and crying a little. The sap.

We lay in bed and listened to one of our favourite records, laughing at how we've managed to wear the vinyl down already. I don't know what time I got to sleep at, but she was even later, for once.

My brother's reaction seems to have set the tone thus far, thankfully. The Fiancée ( I love saying that) made the important family calls in the morning and then sent a blanket webtext to almost everyone who would care to know. She lost her already fragile voice in the maelstrom of excited calls that followed. So uncomfortable am I with an inundation of attention I chose to do my informing in drips and drabs, soaking up the enthusiastic responses at a manageable rate. I wondered if my heart would ever stop racing.

It was nearly 24 hours later before I was able to lie calmly in bed, thinking about how incredible it is that someone should choose to wake up beside me every morning and how wonderful it is to be gaining a second family, that it all fully sank in. And I smiled, and I woke her up at stupid o'clock babbling about what stones she should get in her ring (her very talented jewellery designer sister will make it) and I knew that every day from then on will feel like a celebration of that one.

P.S . That's what she said.

About an old lady

2009-11-11T14:15:00.000Z

Last Saturday was my first day volunteering in a charity shop on Camden Street. As I bustled about trying to be useful and not get in the way I was warned to be vigilant against pickpockets and shoplifters, as they've had plenty of them there recently. "What kind of scumbag nicks stuff from charity shops?" I thought to myself, secure in the knowledge that my teenage shoplifting prowess had all been a carefully orchestrated plot against The Man, and that no-one ever suffered from it.
An hour later I was working away on the till when a greying man approached me, speaking in a conspiratorially low whisper. "You see that old woman down there, the one in the black coat?" She was the only old woman in a pretty small shop, so of course I saw her. He went on to provide further needless descriptions before saying "I saw her steal something, I think it was a tea-strainer she put in her pocket." His concern was simultaneously admirable and irritating. I am loath to be frisking old ladies, even villainous tea-strainer thieves, so I passed this on to a more experienced member of staff, who consulted with the manager. They thought she'd been at that kind of thing in the shop before, so decided to wait by the door to intercept her.
Business was good at the tills so I missed the dramatic moment, but the next thing I saw of the old lady she was trembling out profuse apologies, all five foot nothing of her. I was struck by how much older she looked than my 84 year-old grandfather, despite the fact that she's probably a full decade younger. Her eyes were brimming as she kept saying, over and over, "I just wasn't thinking, I was walking around and my mind slipped and I put it in my pocket. I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to." She was brought to the till so she could hand me over the €2.90 for the tea-strainer she says she was always intending to buy. A wretched sight by this stage, her unkempt grey curls quivering along with her and a tear rolling down a line in her face as she handed over her shivering coins.The manager kept trying to console her, agreeing that it's very easy for such a thing to slip your mind. But she was in bits by now, so they took her down to the back of the store to sit down and have a cup of tea and a chat.
She shuffled out about 15 minutes later looking little better, mumbling anguished promises about going straight to the church to say her prayers.

What others were feeling like today #13

2009-11-06T17:18:00.000Z

Checking my archives I realise that I haven't put up one of these posts in nearly six months. There's a couple of nice entries for today and I have little else of interest to share with you. When I hear back from E4 regarding my strongly worded letter expressing my outrage at their rescheduling of Gilmore Girls so that it clashes with Countdown I'll let you know. For any new readers (and,surprisingly enough, there seem to be a couple recently, which is nice), this is simply a section where I opt out of any creativity whatsoever and simply put up diary extracts for the day in question taken from a book I have called The Assassin's Cloak.

1660

At night my wife and I did fall out about the dogs being put down into the cellar, which I had a mind to have done because of his fouling the house, and I would have my will; and so we went to bed and lay all night in a quarrel. This night I was troubled all night with a dream that my wife was dead, which made me that I slept ill all night.

Samuel Pepys

If the lady and I ever manage to have a row I may well try out the "I would have my will" line on her; it's so delightfully authoritative.

1938

I spent the whole evening just sitting before a mirror just to keep myself company.

Cesare Pavese

Wikipedia tells me that "The typical protagonist in the works of Pavese is a loner, through choice or through circumstances. His relationships with men and women tend to be temporary and superficial."
Cesare, of course, lived in an era before either Gilmore Girls or Countdown had been invented.

Blue! Blue! Blue!

2009-11-03T13:52:00.000Z

You know you've been unemployed for far, far too long when you hear that 'mentalist' muppet Keith Barry on the radio banging on about how the Irish version of Deal or No Deal presented by his good self is starting soon on TV3 and you think "Hmmm...could be interesting."

Super Sunday

2009-10-27T02:48:00.000Z

Wandering past the Trinity College rugby on Sunday afternoon after a swim the lady and I are nattering away to each other. There's a smattering of folks along the sideline, most of whom turn to glare at us like we've just farted do-re-mi during the Pope's funeral. I look at the pitch; some stocky, cocky gobshite with stupid hair is taking an aeon to line up a kick at goal so straighforward that my dead granny could casually backheel it over. The glarers think our chatter from 30 metres away might cause him to miss. These eejits, whose rugby knowledge begins and ends with Munster's Heineken Cup matches on the telly, have decided that all kicks at goal must be met with reverential silence. They do that at Thomond Park, every time their boy ROG steps up to the tee. The wankers. They pride themselves on it there, and on how they're such a respectful rugby crowd that they even do it when the away team are having a shot at goal. Except when it's a kick that might mean Munster could lose, like.
Anyway, yer man blunderbusses it through the posts and the crowd singularly fail to erupt in jubilation. They don't even clap, they just put their hands back in their snug, smug pockets.

Later on, I ask if she'll join me in the pub to watch the football. Or to read a book in the pub while I watch the football. It doesn't interest her, and I've always appreciated that she admits this and doesn't feel it's her girlfriendly duty to pretend to be into it. I just want her company, as ever.
"Nah, I'll just get the shopping done."
"We can do it tomorrow. Or I'll do it on Tuesday, it's not like I don't have the time," I say, sounding far more wistful than any grown man should.
She joins me a pint and a half into a rather dull match, in which Arsenal have coasted into a 2-0 lead without even playing remotely well. She launches into the Irish Times crossword whilst I sup my pint, grunt at the match and chuckle at the wildly varying approaches to flirting within the group of cadets sitting in front of us. Just as I help her finish up by deciding that 12 down is 'secede', chaos descends onscreen and Arsenal contrive to swiftly turn a two goal lead into a draw. I thump the table, swear incessantly, mumble vague threat against both the referee and Alex Song, and become thoroughly unpleasant company for a Sunday afternoon.
"This is why I don't like watching football with you; you get so stressed."
I hate it when she talks in semi-colons. But she's right, I do.

What I most remember about reading Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch (a book, incidentally, about supporting Arsenal, but which contains universal truths for any football fan) was an observation he made about the one and only time he was able to pick his face out of the crowd when watching match highlights later on TV. He noticed that he looked completely miserable, and realised that he tended to be tense and serious at matches. So concerned by the idea of his team losing that he never really enjoyed the games at all. Concerned by profligate finishing. Concerned by how evenifthey'vegotawaywithdefendinglikethatthistimetheywon'tgetawaywithitagainsttop-classopposition.

And that's the nature of the beast. Watching a sport that you've somehow conditioned yourself into being highly emotionally with means that you're likely to feel unhappy for large amounts of it. The subhuman roars fans emit when their team scores against some particularly hated opposition are as much about relief that the other cunts aren't winning as they are about joy at their own team's prowess.
This shit isn't reasonable, and I know it. Emanuel Adebayor's obnoxious behaviour towards his old club a few weeks ago had me far more riled than John O'Donoghue's obnoxious behaviour towards his country, upset me more than any news from Darfur and made me ask more questions about the inherent evilness of man than the Fritzl case. If media coverage is proportionally representational then an awful lot of people must feel that way. I really don't know what to make of that.

Of course, you might reasonably argue that the tension and stress of watching sports leads to a such a massive high when things eventually do go right that it's all worth it in the end. But I'm beginning to think that that's a little like suggesting that it would be a worthwhile leisure pursuit to hire someone to hide all of your most precious belongings all over the country, just so you could enjoy the rush of finally finding them all again.

Oh, the enormity of how this genius has done great to write such a seminal post about wordsies. Enjoy!!!!

2009-10-15T19:38:00.000+01:00

The Irish Times published this piece yesterday about some of the most irritating words and expressions people use on a day-to-day basis, such as "whatever", "I, personally" and "basically". It's a good piece, though the sight of all these irritating phrases was enough to make me swear loudly to myself when I first read it.
Nevertheless, in the spirit of whining curmudgeonliness, I've decided to compile my own list of things people say that rub me up the wrong way.

Seminal: 'Seminal' comes from a Greek word meaning seed, the same root from which we get the word 'semen'. It is often used by music and film critics to denote how influential something is or was, e.g. "The Beatles were a seminal band", meaning that they sowed the seeds that led to many other bands. It does not simply mean that they are important. Sports broadcasters regularly fail to realise this. When Bill O'Herlihy excitedly welcomes viewers to "this seminal match for Ireland" he is eschewing much more suitable words like 'crucial', 'critical', or y'know, 'very important' because he thinks this one makes him sound clever. Only if you want to cover Kevin Kilbane in spunk, Billo.

Enjoy: How often are you in a shop or restaurant now where someone hands you what you've asked for and instructs you to "enjoy"? It's a pretty harmless statement, but it feels as unnecessary and platitudinal as "have a nice day". I mean, chances are I wil enjoy my lemon meringue tart and cappuccino, but I don't need your fucking permission, thanks. I could swear it only crept into common usage here about five years ago, but it's ubiquitous now. I could probably develop something of a dough-based crush on the young lady who works in the bakery near my house, were it not for the fact that she concludes every single one of our transactions with "enjoy". It's batch loaf, love, it's as much about staying alive as it is enjoyment.

-sies: "Wantsies!" "Ooh, you've bought your engagement ring, showsies!" "That's a big Mars bar, sharesies?"
It was probably cute when this one started, but it's dancing all over my metaphorical tits by now. I imagine it's only going to keep growing, too. This one should never, fucking ever, be attempted by any straight male over the age of three and a half. Try responding to the next 'sies' you get with a swift "piss offsies".

Enormity: Do you know what enormity actually means? It means 'outrageousness' or 'extreme wickedness'. Honestly. Somewhere along the way someone noticed that it sounds an awful lot like 'enormous' and started using it that way. It's perhaps due to sentences such as "the enormity of the Holocaust", where people assumed it referred to the scale of it, rather than the evilness. Kingsley Amis once wrote something to the effect that we "must battle against the enormity of using enormity to mean enormous." He lost.
"John, we can't underestimate the enormity of this match, can we?"
"No, we can't, Bill."

Genius: Probably the most misused word in the English language. Geniuses of our time include Wayne Rooney, Brian O'Driscoll, Peter Jackson, Robert de Niro and my postman. They're just very good at what they do, is all.* A fellow blogger once referred to Lampsy, the guy who puts pictures of lamps with the caption "I love lamp" all over Dublin as a genius. I had to be restrained from leaving a snotty comment. he's just a guy who likes Anchorman and has too much time on his hands, is all.

The death of the adverb: "The lad's done brilliant to get his shot in from there." Sports broadcasters can, once again, take a bow. Apparently you sound snobby if you tack 'ly' onto the end of adjectives, as the decline in their usage appears to be quite wilful at this stage. It's spreading elsewhere, too. The only instance where it's acceptable to forego the 'ly' is 'shite', as "he's playing shitely tonight" sounds stupid.

Readers, do feel free to wade in with your own pet peeves. 'Pet peeves' should probably be amongst them, disgusting phrase that it is.

*Except my postie, who regularly fails to deliver post to our flat because he's afraid he might slip on the steps. The pizza flyer guys don't seem to mind, the beautiful little geniuses.

Tell them I hate them

2009-10-15T02:52:00.000+01:00

I wandered along Thomas Street thinking "If I can't see it then I don't have to go, if I can't see it then it's not really there." But it was there. It was the big dirty building with SOCIAL WELFARE OFFICE above it in bright blue letters. It was my first time, and I expected it to hurt."28 years without anyone's help," I thought grandly. "Well, 28 years without anyone's help but that of my parents. Whose help was, at times, one must admit to oneself, of the sizeable variety. But still."

The nice lady at reception directed me to the Fresh Claims counter, whilst the obese man behind me tutted about Nigerians in between his sweaty gasps for breath. "I'm not like you people", I thought, "I washed today and I don't want to be here. I worked last week, I worked!" Two tracksuit warriors, no more than 19, wandered in, dragging mountain bikes across the beige carpet. "It's not my day for signin' on, I signed on yesterday," said the chap in the blue cap airily, to no-one in particular. They appeared to be there just for the craic, leaning their bikes near the counter I was headed to, then kneeling on the chairs like it was their living room at home, as they nattered to some comrades in the queue.

I took ticket 53 and waited in a chair. The queue for payments grew 30 or so long and showed little sign of movement. A bloke nodded to me from the queue. He looked about my age and like the type of person I might know, but his face rang no bells. Lots of people there looked like people I might know, looked not unlike me. If he really did know me then I resented him for showing it. A raised voice coming from behind a closed door in one of the interview rooms started to dominate the place, rising to a crescendo "...no, you're bullying me,WHERE'S. MY. MONEY?! "
"Where's mine?" responded some wag in the line, raising a few titters. I was feeling titterless.
A short, curly-headed woman comes out. "Sorry folks, there's a dispute going on in the office next to mine. You'll have to just ignore it, let it go in one ear and out the other, please." She seemed to rank this oafish grab for lucre alongside the Secrets of Fatima. Her face falls "It's difficult for everyone, it's in the office next to mine." A sigh. "Can whoever owns these bikes please take them outside, please?" The warrior in the grey cap arose sulkily "A'right, I'm movin' them, I'm movin' them. Jaysis." She let them leave them just inside the door, just as Wheresmymoney exited Interview Room D fatly, slamming the door fatly behind him and fuming fatly outside. Like a big fat man, the kind of big fat man that makes me feel better about my own fluctuating levels of chub.

My number finally came up, and I approached the counter.
"Do you live in Dublin 8?"
"Yes, in Portobello," I said too loudly, making it clear that I am better than these folks from The Coombe, and that, were it not for the peccadillos of the postal code people and a narrow streak of grimy canal, I'd have been allowed make the five minute mosey to the Rathmines Social Welfare office instead, where small, neat lines of fecund and attractive briefly-down-on-their-luck artists would welcome me, where no-one wears tracksuits or gets angry, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.
The lady was calm and patient, telling me what forms to fill in and arranging me an appointment for next week. Her constantly changing expressions of surprise as she surveyed her screen left me wondering exactly what kind of information a PPS number leaves one privy to. I left with a fistful of paperwork for both me and my sometime employers to fill in, with the bemused impression that I might somehow have been better off not working at all since June.

Mein Gott

2009-10-09T17:02:00.000+01:00

Nearing the end of a class on Tuesday, I used my standard technique for filling in the last few minutes of the final class I am going to have with a particular group: I ask them what they're looking forward to doing when they get home.

"Anna, what are you going to do when you get back to Vienna?"
"I will go to the toilet."
She said this without even the hint of a smile on her face.
"You'll go to the toilet? Does the family you're staying with not have a toilet?"
"Yes, but I can't go in another country. My mother has the same problem."

Some quick quizzing from her fellow Austrians confirmed that yes, for the entire week she was here she was happy enough to piss but was entirely unable to take ein scheise. My gut suddenly ached in sympathy and I dismissed the class, horrified.

In what furnace was thy brain?

2009-10-07T17:40:00.000+01:00

This perfectly composed shot is to serve as a memento for me of my final day as a 27 year-old. Because I don't think you're allowed to wear jumpers with pictures of gay tigers on them once you're 28. That would just be really sad.
I took this not long after having a shower, which is why my hair is wet. I've tended to make a point of having a shower the day before my birthday, it feels like a symbolic gesture - a washing-off of the year left behind. Most people might have these washings-off pretty much every day, but I've never been a believer in such things. I started this ritual the day before my 15th birthday. 14 had been a difficult age, bringing a certain amount of bother with it. A week later I got suspended from school.
It's just as well I don't shower too regularly.

Seasonally disaffected

2009-10-06T22:55:00.000+01:00

I've always found bin day slightly depressing. There's something about sad little black sacks of rubbish sitting on the street waiting to be picked up that gets to me. And it's on Tuesday around here, and Tuesdays are notoriously crap anyway. Bin day on a pissing wet Tuesday is even worse, my heart sinks for the binmen who have to pick up these sodden sacks, rendered several litres heavier by those who don't tie up the sack properly.
And there was something very, very shitty about driving the girlfirend's car back from the car dentist (where it must presumably have received a crown, two fillings and a nice little handjob, if the price is right) and seeing the contents of a ripped bag strewn all over Mountpleasant Avenue. Human detritus all over the place, wet.

Gonna help him put asunder bad guys who like to loot and plunder

2009-10-01T04:20:00.002+01:00

I wonder if in years to come we will look back on this point in history as the moment when Irish politics finally descended irretrievably into infantilism and lowest common denominator bullshit.

Ireland goes to the polls on Friday charged with making a decision that absolutely no-one seems to understand the ramifications of. It's very hard to when the people who are paid good money to do so seem incapable of anything other than lies and mud-slinging. Posters everywhere scream that the minimum wage could be cut to €1.84 if this treaty is allowed to pass. This always seemed unlikely and is, apparently, completely untrue. So why has it been allowed to stay on virtually every lamp-post in the country? Imagine I put up posters all over the country with a supposed fact like, say:

'IT IS WELL-KNOWN THAT BERTIE AHERN IS AN ENTHUSIASTIC PARTICIPANT IN DOMESTIC ABUSE. MANY PEOPLE WILL ATTEST TO HAVING SEEN CELIA LARKIN IN HOSPITAL AFTER HE BATTERED HER.'

My posters would be taken down pretty quickly, I'd imagine, and if anyone knew it was me who did them then I'd find myself in a bit of bother. This despite my fact being true, as far as I know. Yet a massive amount of misinformation is plastered absolutely everywhere right now. 'YES FOR JOBS', sounds massively disingenuous on Fianna Fáil's part, as there is really nothing there to suggest that more jobs would be created if we pass the treaty. 'We can't save the environment alone,' urge the Green Party, who apparently believe that passing the treaty is akin to shouting "Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Heart!" and summoning Captain Planet. But even He couldn't take pollution down to zero at this stage.

Then there's Jim Corr. I think we all knew, deep down, that touring the world with three ridiculously good-looking girls, all of whom are your sisters, would be enough to send a man crazy. But it hasn't manifested itself in old Jimbo getting whacked off his tits on mushrooms and attempting to snog Ryan Tubridy live on TV, as we'd all hoped. Nope, Jim has gradually turned into a full-blown conspiracy theorist with a fine line in paranoia that'd make even David Icke blush:

You will meet people as I do occasionaly (sic.) who are unable to grasp the reality of what's going on. You may even meet them amongst family and friends but don't get frustrated, It is understandably inconceivable for some people to contemplate that some governments at the behest of their globalist puppeteers could be staging terrorist attacks against their own populations, particularly for people whose reality doesn't extend beyond the television set, which is being used highly effectively sometimes as a Weapon of Mass Deception.

Jim has been "studying the New World Order", apparently, and is now running a website that can liberate us all. Step One is voting No to Lisbon, don't you know. I think I prefer it when has-been popstars try to make it as reality TV show judges.

I voted no last time round, simply because I wasn't happy with the way the treaty had been explained to the public. The wording on the ballot paper asks if you agree with the proposal to alter our constitution in order to ratify the treaty. I was undecided until the very last minute, when I realised that I couldn't possibly agree with the proposal, because I couldn't for the life of me understand what the treaty meant in real terms, and therefore couldn't honestly agree to accept it. So although I wasn't necessarily dead against the Lisbon Treaty, I felt perfectly comfortable saying I disagreed with a proposal to accept it at that particular juncture.

But I helped to spawn a monster. The rest of my family had all voted Yes, and gave me constant earfuls (mostly playful, though not all) about my unwavering support for Declan Ganley and Mary-Lou McDonald. Sadly, these two festering pustules both treated the success of the No campaign as a personal victory. Both were, mercifully, soundly told to fuck off by most of the population when they tried to get elected to the European Parliament earlier this year. But they're back again, duplicitous and obnoxious as ever, still making it all about them. This time round they may just turn out to be the Yes campaign's deadliest weapon, as there can't be many people left who have any sort of stomach for them.

It gets complicated, though. One argument for voting Yes that is often put forward is that "all the major parties are for it, so it must be fine." I remain unconvinced by this, as it only means that one or two heads in each party have decided on their policy, and that all the other plods have to toe the line if they know which side their bread is buttered on. Many of our public representatives, I think it has been proven lately, are a corrupt and venal bunch, who know exactly how to get what they want. I hope I don't sound as though I'm sneaking into Jim Corr territory if I say that I honestly don't trust any of them, and find any claims they make to be looking out for the public's best interests to be suspect at best.

So how will I vote (or will I vote?) on Friday? Fuck knows.

Would I blow everyone's mind if I ate dessert first?

2009-09-23T16:25:00.006+01:00

It's been giddy nuns, frank and sensible Germans and smiling Swiss. This is TEFL, and I love it. No two days are photocopies.

"So you definitely don't need me to work tomorrow?"

"No, we don't need you tomorrow. See you on Friday, Andrew."

This is how the wind blows, and it's OK. It's helping me steer clear of the inevitable maiden voyage to the dole office.

I wander down George's Street. Radiohead's In Rainbows is on my ipod. It must be my favourite walking album by an urban mile.

No matter how it ends, no matter how it starts

I'm hungry. But I have a Mars bar in my coat pocket and the components of a killer toasted ham and cheese sandwich at home, only 15 minutes away. I might even go fucking mental altogether and put salami in it too.

Past all the new students on Aungier and Kevin Street. Each and every one of them thinks they are the most unique and special human being on earth. If zany t-shirts and lunchtime pints don't say that, then nothing will. This feeling is likely only to swell for them as they go through the next few years. It will swell, and it will pop.

The infrastructure will collapse

Posters everywhere fight to appeal to my basest natures. Vote No. Vote Yes. Vota Idiota. Fucked if you do and fucked if you don't, from what I can see. Hard not to feel impotent at such times.

I'll be on my own this evening, as she's off to a meeting like a grown-up. A fleeting moment of panic grips me where I wonder what I'll do without her for the evening. Then I laugh at it, glad there's someone whose company feels like a treat every single night. It's dazzlingly sunny for a moment, and I realise I've been walking for the last few seconds with my eyes closed. I've become that guy.

What's the point of instruments? Words are a sawn-off shotgun

And I near home, and I think about how I might try and put how I feel on this brisk walk home into a post. Because I do that from time to time. And I think about how I will fail, because words can't really do that. There might be no way to adequately tell people how you feel. But if I could tell you I would let you know.

You've got a light, you can feel it on your back
A light, you can feel it on your back

Upon this tidal wave of young mud*

2009-09-13T02:50:00.000+01:00

I may very well be the king of posts-I-really-felt-I had-to-write-and then-never-did.

Tonight I had intended to write about football from a certain slant. But it's late and I'm still annoyed by the issue in question and there are plenty who can do that stuff better than I so I'll leave it, at least for now.

I had intended all week to write a little bit about last weekend at the Electric Picnic. But it's now one week on and I doubt anyone cares terribly about what acts I saw and why I went home a bit early, in a huff only with the muck and myself for wanting to see the hype act that everyone else wanted to see. So I'll relate to you instead only a quick anecdote from the Friday at said festival.

Being unfond of getting up and getting my hole into gear in the morning, the missus and I leave it rather late to make our way to Stradbally and don't get there till mid-afternoon. Somehow in our sluggish morning preparations we forgot that we needed to replenish our supply of tent-pegs, as we are about ten short of a well pinned-down tent.

We remember this while pitching the tent. I go off to seek extras from any shop I can find. The man at the camping supplies shop says "No, mate, we sold out hours ago." He is clearly of the belief that if one must be unprepared, one should at least be early to do so.

So I try the Gala mini-supermarket.

"Do you have any tent-pegs? I ask the girl behind the counter.
"Yes we do" she replies, with a certainty that suggests they must have plenty of them. In your fucking face, camping supplies man!
"Brilliant, you're saving my life here. Can't believe I came down without enough of them."
She smiles sympathetically, scans the item, and hands me a box of...Tampax.

*Hundreds of bands playing at the Picnic and I have to go and make my title a pun on a song by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a band who were not there.

The Second Sole

2009-09-07T04:27:00.000+01:00

"Is it ready yet?" you bark at the chap behind the counter, "I've been waiting twenty fucking minutes."
This is a lie. I think you had placed your order just before me, and I was only gone two minutes, fetching milk in the Late Nite shop across the road.
"Nearly," says the chipper man, as he stares intently at the pan, willing the fish to cook faster. I sense you were chatty while I wasn't there, too.

You wear a navy suit, not shabby but not half as suave as you might have hoped. It looks massively incongruous in such surroundings on a Sunday night. You are upper middle-aged and middle middle-class. You are old enough and educated enough to know better than to be an asshole to nice fellows working in chip-shops. Your belligerent demeanour makes me assume drink was playing its part, though you were odourless from where I stood.

And, for a moment, I want to smash your fucking face in. To decorate the pristine white tiles on the wall with a smattering of your blood. If only to put manners on you.

It passes.

Your order arrrives: two fresh sole and two chips, and you pay with a twenty. "I want all my fucking change, now," you growl, your prey fumbling at the till. You get your fucking change, and an astonishingly genuine sounding thank-you.

You turn to leave, and see me for the first time. I must look strange, freshly returned from a festival, spattered with mud and smelling faintly of rum. But your face speaks of only of contempt, not of bemusement. I resist the instinct to move out of your path and I make you walk around me instead. You meet my eyes in a way that makes my blood run cold. And you leave.

My food is ready instantly. As I suspected, it was ready before yours but they dared not give it to me first. I leave a twenty cent tip by way of a sympathy gesture and leave. Looking up the road I see you clunking your way along the pavement towards Camden Street.

And I can't help but wonder as to who's at home, awaiting you and the second sole.

Poke

2009-08-31T18:43:00.001+01:00

"Are you on Facebook, Andrew?"

"No."

He looks at me like I've just started dry-humping a life-size Margaret Thatcher doll.

"Oh, right. That's the only way I keep in contact with people now."

I didn't kick him in the shins, but nor did I feel guilty any longer for having gotten his new baby's gender wrong at the start of our conversation.

ratewhatusedtobemyfriends.com

2009-08-19T18:29:00.007+01:00

I missed a friend's going-away bash the other day. She's going to England, where most career-minded young teaching graduates are going this year. I haven't struggled to resist the temptation to join them. Various horror stories I've heard, coupled with my deep suspicions as to why English schools need to recruit so aggressively over here mean that I'm reluctant to go over there and live in Rutsford-under-Lyme while young Wayne and Chanelle throw chairs and chewing gum at my proud Paddy beard every day. Besides, leaving your beloved behind on the Auld Sod while you go off to earn a few pennies in Blighty: bit 1972, isn't it?

So anyway, I failed to make it to her farewell do. I had other friends I wanted to see that night, and I decided I really couldn't be ringed leaving my group and heading to a pub in an entirely different part of town just to do the token "just sticking my head in" gesture. I felt slightly bad about it for a while, until I started to think about how I have loads of friends of about the same level whom I haven't seen for ages, and am unlikely to see any time soon. Just because, really.
There's something about moving to a different country for a while that makes people want to round up every fucker they've ever met so that they can bid their adieus. I've experienced this feeling on trips to Kenya, Tanzania and South Korea. On no occasion was I gone for more than a month, yet I found myself unusually keen to let all of my acquaintances know I'd be away and I found myself crestfallen when there was no sign of a government delegation to greet me upon my return.

Yet that nagging feeling of guilt remained, until I decided to seek a scientific solution to the problem. It wasn't a think tank that was called for, it went beyond that: I needed a cognitive cabal. Comprising the world's most scientific brains from fields such as geophysics and quantum mechanics, the group was spearheaded by that most legendary leader of men and outside-the-box thinker, former Cameroon striker Roger Milla (not to be confused with King of the Road crooner Roger Miller, who I've always found to be utterly useless in such circumstances). Their findings may forever change our perception of social guilt. The cognitive cabal have devised an ingenious an utterly fool-proof formula for calculating whether or not one ought to attend such functions.
It goes as follows: (TxL)+(DxR)=S.
That is to say: (Time x Liking)+(Distance x Rarity)=Size of obligation.

Need that broken down further? Fine.

The number of years you have known the person is multiplied by how much you like them on a scale of one to ten (ten being your bestest BFF and one being the guy who used to wipe his ear wax on your jumper in French class when you were fourteen). My respective figures for this half of the formula were 0.8 x 6.8 (which equals 5.44).

Second, you rank the distance they are moving away on a scale of one to twn and multiply it by the rarity with which you expect them to return home (ten means they'll never come home, one means they'll be back to stock up on six-packs of Tayto most weekends). My figures for this side of the formula are 1.2 and 1.7 (which multiply joyously into 2.04).

You then add these two final figures together to work out the precise size of your obligation. Mine weighed in at 7.48. But don't fret! My boffins inform me that anyone whose final figure falls under 11.7 should not feel remotely compelled to attend the send-off for the person in question. Huzzah!

Though further testing is still required, this formula looks set to be proven a reliable and important one as it offers a way out to those who:
(a) like the person just fine but have only known them a matter of weeks and/or
(b) have known them forever but secretly can't stand them and/or
(c) adore the person in question but think that moving from Rathmines to Ranelagh is hardly the catalyst for an emotional send-off.

So now you know.

On writing, Radiohead, Red's retirement and uh...mixtapes

2009-08-13T17:51:00.005+01:00

Weird the way when you go to write a post after a fairly lengthy gap you automatically want to be all apologetic in tone, isn't it? (Though that might just be me). I'm not sorry at all, though, I've never understood why so many bloggers seem to feel this compunction to keep writing even when they know they've nothing to say.

I had this notion that unemployment might make me feel more creative in some way. I was about to say that it hasn't, but when you're as non-prolific as I am then I suppose one half-written short story, one fully-finished piece of crap and one three-quarters done post on an issue isn't that bad. The story will be entered into a competition if the end result turns out OK, the surreal piece of crap will be consigned to the bin, and the post should appear shortly.

As an aside, Radiohead have apparently said that they won't be releasing any more albums, but will release individuals songs, presumably as downloads. One such song has been released this week, it's called Harry Patch (In Memory Of), it's very good, and it's available for just one of those things the Brits like to call "pounds" right here.

Continuing the musical theme, I bought some new headphones the other week. They cost €25, which is not a lot when you consider how much they can be, but is more than I've ever spent on headphones before. And, listening to a bit of Nina Simone late one night, I got to thinking about how some songs really sound best when listened to in a quiet place, on your own, with headphones. It reminded me of my brother's complaint on the one and only occasion that he came to a music festival with me: "I think I prefer music in private. To that end, I've decided that the first ever mix-tape I plan on putting together will be made up of subtle little numbers that work best in a chilled out space on your own. It's almost an anti-festival mix, if you will (though I'm still all excited about the Picnic next month). I will send out a copy to absolutely anyone who would like one, regardless of where you live. so if you're interested in getting one just email me and I'll get right on it. My email is in my Blogger profile at the top right hand corner of the page.

And on that note, I'll finish by saying that I was sorry to see the retirement of the Queen of the Mix Tape last week. Red has been one of the good ones throughout the entire time I've been reading blogs and my feed-reader is going to miss her.

i never let on that i was on a sinking ship

2009-07-23T23:09:00.003+01:00

I was on the bus home from work today when I started to get all excited about the fact that College Green is becoming a bus-only zone during rush hour from Monday onwards.

"What crazy capers might I get up to with the extra five minutes or so this should afford me in work?" I wondered, largely quietly.

Then I remembered that, come Monday, I won't be going to work. I've been teaching English to foreign kids for the last four weeks. but tomorrow (Friday) is my last day. Spanish and Italian kids are, understandably enough, not coming over here in anything like the quantities they once were. You'll have noticed that you haven't had to step off the pavement quite so often to get around them. Finding out whether there may be sufficient amounts of them to get me work for August has proven an impossible task.

"We'll give you a buzz if any work comes up" is the standard line my colleagues and I are hearing. There was a time when the only people in Ireland who received such vague promises were the Lithuanians they hired to rub muck onto free-range eggs to make them more expensive. Now it's probably par for the course, whatever industry you're in.

And that's the thing about a recession, it's one hell of a leveller. So many people here got it into their heads that they were special, that they deserved everything they had and that good jobs would always be around. It's perhaps no harm for everyone to get a massive reality check. Because, judging by the national debt figures the government are mentioning, this mess has been a long time coming.

2009-07-09T20:03:00.001+01:00