A Trivial Blog For Serious People

What the Libservatives should do for us

2010-05-24T19:32:00.000+01:00

Unlike pretty much everybody else on the planet, I loved Britain’s hung parliament. I always fancied being an anarchist, but Mammy wouldn’t let me. That was anarchy she couldn’t do anything about. I was also keen on our new system of confusing politics with cricket: we played for days and nobody won.

He Who Knows Everything was confident in the prospect of a Labour/LibDem coalition and had been saying as much for weeks. I think he was rather disappointed when we ended up with the LibDem/Tory coalition.
Personally, I’m very pleased that Dave is our new leader. I have great faith in Nick’s ability to launch a bid for outright power the second Dave goes on paternity leave. Nick, if you’re reading this, remember: Bloodless coups are definitely the way forward.

It’s an easy thing to forget that the Tories are, actually, slightly demented. I don’t recall what Dave has said on the matter, but many of them are quite keen on repealing the ban on fox hunting. Over here, it’s still legal and a hunt, even one like my local – three blokes who can ride and 27 of mixed ages and genders who can’t – is a hideous thing to behold. It’s hilarious to watch them attempting to trot up and down, waiting for the hounds to find the scent while the wives and Mammies sit in their Ford Mondeos drinking tea from a thermos; then you remember that they consider it to be a fun and appropriate day out to watch dogs tear a live animal apart.
Although I am a hippy who feels massively guilty even using flyspray, it’s not the death part of the hunt I object to. It’s the detachment the riders have from it. If you wish to spend your weekends jumping over hedges and killing stuff, it’s the least you can do to get off your horse and do it yourself with your bare hands. If you are unable to do this, I will let you use a weapon of your choice. If you remain unable to do this, you have absolutely no business participating in it in the first place. It’s important to be honest about what you do and the consequences of it. There’d be much less gun crime about if the television special effects people put more effort into their portraits of blood and grey matter and how difficult it is to wash it from the walls afterwards.

The historic LibDem/Tory government we now live under (or, in my case, look wistfully at from beneath the incompetent rule of another nation), offers unparallel opportunities to create new ways of thinking. To many, it would seem the punishment loving, immigrant hating, upper middle-class braying toffs could have little in common with their new longhaired, hippy, pinko-liberal best-friends; but I think the time is right to combine the ideologies of both parties to create a Change for Good.

Take wind farms. Every Lib Dem loves a wind farm. By affixing a loudspeaker system designed to broadcast demoralising messages to the unemployed, the Tories can love them too. Who doesn’t want a field full of metal shouting ‘Hey you! Dole Scrounger! Scrounged much dole today?’

How about Trident? Nick Clegg may dream of a world in which we live free of nuclear weapons, but Dave isn’t so sure. Why not use nuclear war as a way of raising awareness about climate change? Instead of a mushroom cloud, design your missiles to write a useful energy saving tip in the sky following impact. We may have instantly killed hundreds of thousands of people, but we’ve alerted everybody else to the fact that their mobile chargers consume energy even when they aren’t charging a mobile. Useful!
Finally, the biggie: Immigration. Dave hates it and wants to track down illegals and ship them back home. Nick says we should offer citizenship to everybody who has been in the UK longer than 10 years. Can such diametric views find a happy medium? Yes. Yes, they can.
We must form an unholy super-army and rebuild the Empire. By bringing other places under our rule, those who were once illegal will become citizens without the need for complicated paperwork. It has other advantages too; those hardline Tories will be able to buy up estates in those areas of the world whose views remain distressingly obsolete: Malawi, for instance. Everybody wins!

I don’t know why everybody finds this politics business so hard.

I agreed with Nick First

2010-05-03T19:46:00.000+01:00

Ahhhhh… politics. Such a fickle swallower of my time. It seems like only weeks ago that “Call me Dave” Cameron was going to lead us into the golden dawn of a new empire. Now look where we are; forced to understand the implications of coalition governments and the breathtaking unfairness of the UK’s electoral system.
He Who Knows Everything has been tinkering with the BBC’s swing-o-meter and explaining, in increasingly agitated tones, exactly how stupid and unfair the electoral system is. I’ll spare you the details in case you are foreign and therefore do not need to fill your brain with superfluous information regarding the British Parliamentary System (particularly as is may shortly be subject to change), but basically we have managed to create an arrangement whereby the three major parties can receive equal percentages of the vote, but Labour gets a hundred seats more than anybody else.

As a British Citizen, I am entitled to vote in UK elections even though I no longer live there in any official capacity. Through an odd quirk of fate (otherwise known as HWKE filling out my voting application form), I am registered in the North West Hampshire Constituency. I wanted to be registered in Cardiff so I could familiarise myself with the policies of Plaid Cymru before I didn’t vote for them, but HWKW was too quick for me.
Happily, I no longer need to bother researching and making important decisions about how to use my vote because the interwebs can do it for me. Votematch.org.uk will ask you to rate whether you agree or disagree with a number of statements and give you a percentage score of how the parties match up to your preferences. It told me to vote Lib Dem, which shows it works because that’s how I was going to vote despite not being terribly good at remembering what their policies actually are.

To begin with, the Lib Dems seemed like a good bet for my vote. Any respect Gordon Brown earned during his years as Chancellor were decimated with the resurrection of Lord Mandy. He received his final death knell in my eyes the day his wife Sarah became part of his campaign. This is also my major problem with Dave. While any man is entitled to be proud of his virility, it’s not a reason for me to vote for him. Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron are not standing for government; I don’t need to see them following their husbands around and gurning at underprivileged children.
Mrs Clegg, by contrast, has said she has better things to do than try and get people to vote for Nick. I approve of this.

Another thing I approve of is the Lib Dem policy on Trident, the UK’s nuclear warhead program. Nick says he would scrap it and that he dreams of a world in which we are all hippies and nobody has any nuclear weapons any more. Gordon tells Nick to “Get Real” and mentions Iran and North Korea. This worries me. What has Gordon done to Iran and North Korea that he’s not telling us about? It’s clearly something serious enough to make them want to nuke us.
I’ve never understood the wisdom of having a nuclear deterrent. If you have a weapon of any sort, you must be prepared to use it otherwise it’s just something extra to dust. I don’t want a government who would be prepared to use a nuclear weapon against another country, particularly not against countries like Iran and North Korea who are not exactly noted for having the infrastructure needed to rebuild following a nuclear attack. I would much rather be the nukee than the nuker.

Nick has also got a rather controversial policy on immigration. He wishes to have an amnesty on illegal immigrants who have been in the UK for 10 years. I also approve of this. I grow tired of this debate on immigration and would like it if we could all stop being quite so Daily Mail about things. If somebody has lived in the UK for 10 years, they are no longer going to be fully equipped to return to live in whichever place they have come from. Absolutely let them become part of the system: can you honestly tell me that our resources are being plunged into tracking down people who have lived in the UK for a decade and shipping them back home? I hope not, it sounds like a monumental waste of money.
Immigration is one of these issues that few politicians are willing to stand up to people about and I do not understand why. Who, in all honesty, can tell me a story about the ways immigration has personally impacted upon their life? I’m not talking about the one about the Nigerian woman who can’t get her pram on the bus and leaves it behind because she says she’ll get a new one, or any of these stories, I’m asking for people whose circumstances have diminished due to influxes of migrants to their country. Very, very few of you, I imagine. In fact, I’m pretty damn sure that you are as grateful as I am that Tesco now stock decent beetroot to cater for our Eastern European friends.

Last week, Gordon Brown was caught referring to a woman as a bigot after getting into his car and failing to remember that he had a microphone attached to him. She had complained about the number of immigrants “flocking over here.” I am reliably informed (My dad knows the dad of the fella Brown was complaining to – I thought I’d mention because it makes me feel special) that Mr Brown in a lovely bloke and had misheard her. Even if Mr Brown had not misheard her, she was a bigot. I know people like this old woman and they are ignorant, bigoted people. In any case, she was more upset about being referred to as That Woman. The media palaver is pathetic.

Anyway, if you are a UK based personage, I truly hope you will take the time to go and vote this week. If you do not know who to vote for, or do not wish to vote for any of your local candidates, please, use your vote to spoil your paper. If you wish to not vote, it is better to actively do so rather than just not going down the polling station. Apathy is a terrible thing.

In Other News: I am awarding myself a small prize for biggest decrease in blogging over the last month. I’ve been pushing on with other writing based projects so the blogs have taken a bit of a back seat to them. If there are no blogs, this is why.

On attractiveness

2010-04-10T12:43:00.000+01:00

Attractiveness is a subjective thing. I am eternally grateful for this. It means that somewhere in this multifaceted universe, there exists somebody who thinks I’m really good looking. In fact, when you think about it, the universe is so vast, it is perfectly possible there is somebody out there who thinks I’m really good looking and who isn’t legally blind.

Thanks to the interweb, this idea no longer has to be proven through probability statistics and can instead be demonstrated as true through the medium of my Myspace inbox. While it’s always nice to have messages that begin with the words “you’re really beautiful”, they do rather get consigned to the pile of Things I Am Actively Ignoring.
This is ultimately for two reasons.
1) The way I look, and indeed your opinion of that, has no bearing on my abilities, achievements or behaviour; I would prefer you to appreciate me for who I am and what I do, not for something as transient and relative as attractiveness.
b) I have Photoshop.

As I do not place any great value on the way I look, it follows that I neither place any great value on the way you look. While height, a chiselled jaw and a manly bearing can make the world of difference in a potential partner, it will always remain a bonus to who you actually are. All I really require is an adequate amount of attention to personal hygiene and an awareness of social order when you get dressed in the morning (there is a time for jeans and ripped t-shirts, the office and dates are not they).

Mammy has always worried about the way she looks. Whenever we are out, she will take me to one side and whisper, “Am I as fat as that woman over there?” This is a bad thing to ask me. She may be my Mammy, but I’m not going to enable her neurosis by humouring her. These days she prefers to go out with Strider.
As she slides further into pensionerhood, Mammy examines older women on the television, comparing herself with them. “How old do you think she is?” she will ask, “Does she look older than me?”
Sometimes she asks if I think she should have a facelift. I’m trying to put her off by claiming a facelift will leave scars she will have to cover with makeup. Mammy is not keen on applying lots of makeup.
Mammy disputes my claim regarding scarring and jiggles her bingo wings. “If I had the money for a facelift, I think I’d spend it on liposuction instead,” she says.

Cos does not help matters. She has become a fan of Botox. When we saw her 18 months ago, she had already had one course of it in her forehead. Since then, she tells us, she has had her lips done and further updates to control the wrinkles on her forehead. This makes Mammy keen to try it herself.
“How will you be able to communicate adequately if you can no longer move your eyebrows?” I ask. “And what will you do if you have too much and your face freezes in a permanently startled expression? You know how annoyed you get when we constantly ask you what’s wrong.” Mammy agrees with this.

To be honest, there is far, far too much emphasis placed on the way we look. It is hugely depressing to read about how x% of 8 year olds think they are too fat or that you have to be thin to be popular. I think we have got to the stage now where we are no longer worried about how we look, but that we are instead worried about worrying about how we look. I’m not convinced an 8 year old genuinely feels they have an inadequate body, I think they feel that they are supposed to feel that way. How stupid is that?
It is the same with the rising numbers of women feeling the pressure to conform to the standards of the porn industry. Seriously ladies, is there a man in existence who is going to get far enough with you to discover the size, shape and styling of your labia, only to decide you are too repulsive to sleep with? Preferences are fine, we all have them, but to be made to feel it is the social norm and unacceptable not to be a certain way is both ridiculous and dangerous. The minute anything like that becomes a deal breaker is the minute we need to point out the exit.

At the end of the day we are as we are and we must accept each other as that. We must avoid placing too much emphasis on such ephemeral values as attractiveness. Sometimes we look great in photographs, sometimes we look minging. It’s always worth remembering that the hottie mugging at the camera probably spends much of her day in front of a computer wearing a cardigan covered in soup and toothpaste.

In Praise of Alpacas

2010-03-29T19:50:00.005+01:00

It’s never a great idea to admit to a passion for a particular breed of livestock, particularly when you are Welsh. I’ve never known how the international stereotype arose and probably never will, it falls under the heading of Things I Am Worried To Google, yet it perseveres even amongst our own kind.
Many years ago, a friend I shall refer to as Berwyn, because that is his name, told us he had broken a sheep’s leg over the weekend. Into the vacuum which followed, he rapidly explained he had fallen over a fence and onto the sheep. We were all very relieved to hear this explanation but I’m not sure any of us then present will ever remember Berwyn for anything other than breaking a sheep’s leg in definitely not dubious circumstances.

I am as fond of sheep as the next person, unless that person is Berwyn of course. I love the Hampshire Down and Lincoln breeds. The Lincolns are basically an Old English Sheepdog re-imagined as a sheep that you’ve permed, while the Hampshires are round, fluffy and slightly evil looking.
While I am able to summon an enthusiasm for sheep, such enthusiasm does not last for very long. Once the fact of their existence has been fully assimilated into my brain, I grow bored of them. Sheep do not do much other than catch pneumonia when the weather is excessively wet. They are also only worth keeping if you intend to kill and eat them at a later date. A sheep’s fleece is barely worth the money it costs to sheer it.

Instead, I have an enthusiasm for Alpacas. Alpacas are great. They’re look like Llamas, but instead of biting your head and spitting at you, they protect things. If they are pregnant, they conveniently only give birth between 10am and 3pm.
On The Yokel Show, which the BBC insists on referring to as Countryfile, Adam the farmer went down to visit some sheep on Portland Bill. In the field, the shepherd had three alpacas to protect the sheep from whatever calamities might have befallen them in an isolated field on the south coast. As soon as the alpacas clocked the threatening ginger figure advancing upon their charges, they immediately ran to form a defensive triangle around their dinner trough and looked at him with great suspicion. Oh yes, alpacas can look suspicious; that’s how great they are!
When not being convenient, protecting things or looking suspicious, alpacas remain busy growing their fur. An unprocessed alpaca fleece, I am reliably informed, goes for about £30 sterling (a sheep fleece is worth under a pound) and a freshly shorn alpaca remains one of the most comedic sights upon this earth.

Clearly, I need to find some sort of excuse to buy some alpacas. Having given this some careful thought, I have decided that what County Wexford sorely lacks is an Alpaca Rental Service.

As in the UK, it has become rather au fait around here to keep your own chickens. My neighbour (not the porn star, another one) is getting some chickens. My other neighbour already has some. My Dutch friend is getting some. My posh friends out on the Hook have some. Miranda at the garden centre had some for sale but when the bloke came to take them away for the winter, she gave him some money to let her keep them instead. Mammy has been desperate for some for years.
So, my plan runs thusly: You get chickens. You swiftly discover said chickens are vulnerable to foxes, dogs and other rural based predatory creatures. I come to your house and hand you a leaflet filled with threatening statistics regarding how many chickens a typical buzzard can carry away in a year and how this can be prevented through renting an Alpaca from me for a reasonable sum. You rent an Alpaca from me. Your chickens are kept safe, I have Alpacas, the world becomes as it deserves to be.

If only my bank manager could understand my vision.

In other news:
It’s been a rather damp day today. The newsagent, no doubt spurred on by the plethora or news surrounding him, observed this.
“It’s a wintery day,” he said.
I knew this. I had just been out it in. I made the reply Mammy made to me when I made a similar observation earlier that morning; “Yes, but it will bring the garden on a treat!”
“No,” he said, “It won’t. It’s. Too. Cold.”
He didn’t verbally add “now take your paper and go you hippy, Guardian reading optimist,” but I like to think it was implied by his stance.

Mail Overload

2010-03-11T19:38:00.001Z

It may have taken me a while to notice and then a while longer to get around to mentioning it, but it was a great thing to know that my begging did not go to waste regarding the Irish Blog award nominations. My thanks extend to the nominatory elves who filled out the form. It’s more than I managed to do.
Of course, this meant judges visited the blog and read it. Had I noticed they were going to do something like that, I would have ended up trying to write something hilarious to win me something to fit on my, already overflowing, desk; now featuring a WWI medal, Stanley knife and Tibetan Temple Bell (What, you don’t have one?).
In any case, they didn’t like what they found here as much as what they found elsewhere. I think it was mainly due to my habit of referring to the British as a Liberation Army rather than the more colourful terms the Irish usually use. My use of the words “peasant mentality” were also unlikely to have found favour with the judging panel. No official long-list nominations for me, I’m afraid.

I may not have any prizes, but I have received a small bump in traffic. This increase in attention has led to communications reaching my inbox (as well as comments linking to websites of a dubious nature). It’s nice to receive communications. They make me feel wanted. Unfortunately, I’m not the greatest at replying to any of them. Much of this is due to my inability to actually read them. I only check my email when I’m expecting something and I only read my email while I’m waiting for something to arrive. I consider inbox twelve hundred an achievement.
The majority of the information clogging up my inbox comes from circulars and newsletters. They aren’t important things, but they are usually things I need to at least cast my eye over. When I reach something which consists of an actual communiqué from a real person who typed it out using their real fingers rather than smacking their head against a keyboard until the space was filled, it gets filed away in the “address this later” folder and never returned to.
I have massive guilt due to a bloke who took the time and the trouble to tell me that he’d read my MS on Authonomy, thought it was wonderful and hoped that I would finish it because he couldn’t bear the idea that it would go to waste. He sought out my email address because he noticed that I wasn’t using the Authonomy website anymore. How nice is that? Yet, I ignored him. If he’s reading this now, I apologise profusely and admit that while I could have spent my time sending you a note instead of writing this, I didn’t. It’s the kind of person I am.

When I’m not receiving undeservedly kind and complementary messages, I receive messages offering me monies to place advertisements on my website. For some reason, these are in Dutch. For further and slightly bizarre reasons, I’m able to read them pretty well without the help of Google Translate. Apparently I’m able to speak Dutch now.

I’ve also received a message offering me an interview with some guy I’ve never heard of, who will be able to give valuable advice and information to the OAP members of my readership. I’m sorry to disappoint the OAP members of my readership, but I’m of the opinion that if you have the nous to operate a computer well enough to find your way here, you are doing better than he is. He can’t manage to employ marketing people who read enough of a blog to realise it’s not the kind of thing they are looking for before they cut and paste a message off to its author.

Numerous mails have arrived to let me know that I have inherited several thousand dollars and that this money can be transferred to my account as soon as I forward them my bank details. I’m very impressed with these particular scamming emails. There is only a slight lapse in the quality of the language used towards the end of the message. If I were less cynical and didn’t know my entire family tree back to the thirteenth century, I might consider the possibility it was true.

Anyway, congratulations to all those on the long-list and good luck with the next round.

The Book Snob

2010-03-06T14:55:00.001Z

From the length of the blogs I end up writing, you can probably guess that I am one of those odd people who reads for pleasure. Not only do I read for pleasure, I read proper books full of words with many syllables written by people you probably haven’t heard of and who sometimes compound that error by also being foreign.
You see, rather than impressing through the usual routes of attractiveness or achievement, I like to impress through literature. I bought a copy of Douglas Coupland’s Generation A the week it was published. I didn’t actually get around to reading it for a month, but anybody who came to my house was able to see it occupying the surface of my coffee table and ask if it was okay to use it as a coaster.

Happily, my local library manages to defy the trend of the rest of my local amenities by being rather good and for this I forgive them their conviction that Braille is a necessary and desirable thing on all of their signage. Unlike the local library where I grew up in the UK, they do not keep Lady Chatterley’s Lover beneath the counter; nor do they file Helen Fielding’s books under J.
Instead, they provide a wide variety of newly published books, run two book clubs, hold events for aspiring writers, organise exhibitions about local history and promote reading as an activity to the next generation. All this and interweb access. Marvellous.

Of course, being in a small town not generally renowned for its literacy, the librarians know all the regular users of their facilities and like to be helpful to them. I was returning my books on one occasion and the librarian said she had something out the back that she thought I might enjoy. I was very relieved when she returned bearing nothing more scandalous a copy of Xinran’s Sky Burial (and she was right, I did enjoy it).

The down side of this is that a book snob such as myself can no longer just pick out the books that take her fancy. She must instead treat the books as a collection. For every piece of populist dross I check out, books totalling a level of opposite complexity must be included.
For instance, last time I was in I borrowed a Sophie Kinsella and to cancel it out, took A.S Byatt’s The Children’s Book (recent Mann Booker nominee : +20 points) and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts. To be on the safe side, I took an Andrey Kurkov as well.

This may seem like an unnecessarily complex system but it actually helps me to push myself with regards to the books I read. If I get to the end of the shelves to find I have too many, let us say, “commercial” novels in my bag, I’ll do another round with an eye out for something impressive by somebody who gets nominated for things.
It was in this way I came to read Michael Booth’s Just As Well I’m Leaving (Non-Fiction about somebody Dead : +10 points) from which I learned a wealth of things about Hans Christian Andersen which his Wikipedia page, inexplicably, fails to mention. Did you know that not only was he thought to have died a virgin, he was also a copious masturbator who made careful note of the frequency of his habit? Don’t say I never teach you anything useful.

Clearly I am wrong to behave like this. Shame on me for being so snobbish and judgemental. Shame on all of us.
You see, anybody who enjoys reading is a little bit of a book snob. I blame our childhoods. Show me a person who buys books exclusively from a supermarket and I will show you a person who made fun of me as a child. They called me weird. I will now take my revenge by sneering at their literary choices. Dan Brown? Ha! I mock your convoluted plotlines and questionable grasp of Parisian geography! James Patterson? Ha! I look sideways at your repetitive narratives and conveyer belt output! As for you celebrity ghosted commercial fiction, do not think your sparkly pink covers will diminish my disdain. They will not.

It’s rather bizarre that we Readers are so averse to anybody joining in. Shouldn’t we be a little bit pleased that we no longer have to explain the purpose of these flattened trees we insist on carrying around with us? Instead, we’re like all of the hardcore gamers who complain about the influx of casual gamers they now have to put up with. Personally I’m just pleased that people no longer look at me with fear when I mention that I’ve been wasting all of my spare time growing crops which don’t exist, but for many, playing the wrong sort of games is, somehow, far worse than not playing games at all.
Really, it all boils down to frustration. There are a wealth of brilliant games on a multitude of systems and instead you’re spending your money on “Imagine: Lobotomy” and “Hannah Montana Looks At A Poorly Animated Background”. It’s the same for us Readers, why are you reading Martine McCutcheon when you could be reading virtually anything else? This is time you are never going to get back and you waste it.

Even I waste my time reading dross. As a book snob, the majority of the dross I read is by whoever the literary author of the moment happens to be.
Ian McEwan can write; he just doesn’t seem to write anything I enjoy reading. Saturday? Atonement? I found them both hugely boring. It’s just selfish the way he refuses to acquaint himself with my personal tastes in literature and bend his talents to writing something I would part with money for.
The aforementioned A.S Byatt’s novel was, again, wonderfully written, but enjoyable? Only in parts. It came and it went and paused helpfully for book club discussions. There were characters that didn’t seem to do anything; they would occasionally be mentioned and I’d have no idea who they were.
I read Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger and, having absolutely loved it to pieces, went to read Affinity. It was disappointing. I found the protagonist underdeveloped and never had a sense that anything happening when she wasn’t there. I was similarly disappointed in The Night Watch. I was left underwhelmed by the story and still don’t really “get” why it was structured as it was.

However. Reading literary novels you haven’t enjoyed is not the same as reading some of the more transient authors landing publishing deals. My complaints about the above authors stem from my frustration because I know that somewhere in their writing is something I can connect with and forget what is going on around me, it’s just being stopped by something which doesn’t quite click. I could talk all day about any one of the above authors - what’s good, what’s bad, what I would have liked to have seen more of , why a character behaved the way they did – but how long can you maintain a discussion about a celebrity Chick Lit novel?
People who only read bestsellers from Tesco are missing out on half the pleasure of reading a really good book: talking about it. Like a film, a book doesn’t stop when you reach the end; it enters into your culture and the way you think about things. You can quote parts to other people you know have read it and you can apply its language to your life.
More valuably, it will teach you more about yourself than any other medium I have found.

A Bit Lost

2010-02-18T19:32:00.001Z

Like everybody, I have a number of completely pointless skills. For instance, I can move my left eyeball independently of my right. I can’t see much and it’s really quite painful but it does have the additional bonus of either impressing boys or sending them wailing to their mothers. It’s dependent upon age and temperament.
Another skill is my ability to score 173 lines on the original GameBoy version of Tetris. I can bring swift swat based death to flies and other buzzy insects (although I prefer not to on account of being a hippy) and, if the occasion should warrant it, discourse knowledgeably on the development of the Protestant Church in England.

This is not all though. My most useful of my pointless skills, if you can forgive the oxymoron, is an ability to follow the plotlines of films and television shows upon first viewing. It may not sound like much, but I am the only person I know who fully understood the entire plotline of the original Matrix film and was able to explain it to Mammy on the way home.
It upsets me then, that somebody has seen fit to create a television show that I am entirely unable to follow, understand or even manage to remember what has happened in. Thank you very much, creators of Lost.

Lost is a show I would have happily remained ignorant of if it weren’t for Strider. She get into it as soon as it aired and, having requested and received the first half of Season One on DVD, demanded Mammy and I watch it with her. Having watched it, we were then required to have conversations which ran along the lines of “Yes, but what about that Polar Bear, eh?”
As the final season begins, we are still left wondering about that Polar Bear. Well. Strider is. Mammy can barely manage to remember what she watched last night, let alone an American TV drama she watched five years ago.

Happily, Sky One, who are responsible for broadcasting Lost in the UK (I don’t have RTE. I did once but it was so close to brain death it scared me. Judging Amy was Prime Time viewing for crying out loud), devoted an hour to reminding us who everybody in Lost was, what they’d been up to, and getting our heads prepared for the shiny new final season. Rather gratifyingly, between that and the “Previously On Lost” bits of the actual program, we got to watch stupid Juliet being sucked into a hole five times in just over two hours.

I’ve never been a fan of the American TV serial format. I become annoyed by advert breaks kicking in 4 minutes after a program has begun, particularly when many of the adverts were shown immediately preceding the program. I also dislike the mix of standalone episodes and 24 episode story arcs. I’m all for great epic stories, but in any 24 episode series, there are four or five episodes that have nothing to do with anything and which have been written to be filmed as cheaply as possible so the spare funds can be directed towards the season finale. I dislike it immensely.

The second biggest gripe I have with Lost is the nagging feeling that the writers have taken their story and spread it into as many episodes as they could get away with. Rather than sitting down and thinking about pacing and how it relates to plot, they’ve teased the story into a thread so fine, even I am unable to follow or remember any of it. If five series can be comfortably condensed into an hour-minus-advert-breaks minute program by Sky One, one can only suppose that much of what went before probably isn’t important to what will happen after. I’m very grateful for this because my mental prompt card for “Lost: The Plot” reads “Plane Crash. People Live on Beach. Scottish Bloke pushes button in case of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Annoying Child with Improbable Name leaves Island. Annoying Child with Improbable Name ages 18 years in a series for reasons that have nothing to do with the plot and more to do with lack of foresight on writers’ part when they wrote a child as a major character. Blond Bird even more annoying than Dark Haired bird looks anxious. Repeats. Ooo, look! Jim from Neighbours!” It’s good to know none of what I can’t remember matters.
Were it not for the helpful people at Sky One, I wouldn’t have remembered Jacob and the mysterious bloke in black at all. I’m still struggling to remember what happened to the French woman and her curly haired sprog. I remember them dead but I can’t for the life of me remember why, or whether it’s important.

Also, what is it with all of these “clever” names? Locke, Hume, Faraday… they don’t seem to mean anything. It’s more a way of generating discussion. Good marketing, sure, but a good show doesn’t need such cynical tactics.

The single most annoying thing about Lost though, has to be their portrayal of women. I’m sure that the writers’ believed they were creating feisty women who stood up for themselves. Unfortunately, they then committed the cardinal sin of creating women who are ultimately dependent upon men for their redemption.
If Kate stopped pouting long enough to realise that if couldn’t decide between Jack and Sawyer she probably didn’t really want either of them, she probably would have got much more done. Why does it have to be an either/or choice anyway? Does her brain explode if there isn’t a man who fancies her within 100 metres?
What about Sun? She speaks English, she’s got half a brain, yet she ultimately needs her bloke. It’s dressed up as love and all of that gubbins, but sensible girls remember that a relationship which forces you to compromise who you are is not a relationship you want to be in. Why does a heroine have to “save” a man? Why is it only then that she is “rewarded” with love?
Then there’s Juliet. Clever, educated, brilliant at her job, yet controlled by men. By Ben, by Jack, by Sawyer. Only achieves happiness after ditching the science job for mechanics and shacking up with Sawyer, who is incidentally higher in the Dharma hierarchy than she is despite her years of formal education and hard work. At no point does she tell them all to get bent and take control of her own life.
I suppose we should all just be grateful they haven’t written in any random lesbians to boost viewing figures.

So, with all of these complaints, you could be forgiven for wondering why I am bothering to watch it, particularly when I can’t get through an episode without shouting something abusive at the screen.
There have been 103 episodes in the first five series. Each episode runs at 43 minutes. 4429 minutes of my life have been wasted watching this stupid program which makes no sense. That’s 73 hours. Three days. Three days of my life that I am unable to get back have been invested in this. I have to watch it to the end, otherwise that time really would have been wasted.

Thankyou, And Goodnight

2010-02-01T20:37:00.004Z

If Forbes magazine is to be believed, Ireland is the perfect country for blogging. Its people are naturally loquacious and in a time of great socio-economic change, they were the ideal nation to narrate their stories in a clash of wit upon wit, unfettered by the threat of invitation to take it outside. It would also, although Forbes did not make this point, give them something to do of a Friday night if the plans to reduce the drink drive limit come to fruition.
If Forbes magazine is to be further believed, Irish blogging is dead. They cite an article from the Irish Sunday Times as evidence. Can there really be any rebuttal to such a compelling line of reasoning?

To be honest, I’ve don’t really understand what position blogging is supposed to hold in the world. The impression I garner from the print media is that bloggers should be an online equivalent of them; blogs should break news, give analysis and opinion as well as producing high quality content on a regular (preferably daily) basis. This is clearly nonsense. The day I start delivering content on a daily basis is the day I have been locked in a room with only word processing software for company.

Also, unless a person is directly involved in an event, they are not going to be able to get a story online more quickly than a news organisation. At best, they will have a few hours head start. Once this head start is lost, they will be competing against specialist analysts who are able to pull their factual information from the wire agencies rather than finding it out themselves. No blogger is going to be able to consistently provide a breaking news service to rival the networks and yet, this is what the print media seems to think they should be doing.

Another complaint levelled at bloggers is their failure to hold politicians to account. Forgive me for being sensible about this, but surely that’s the job of the free press. I know that the British liberation forces spent many, many years suppressing the Irish media so there isn’t quite the print tradition there is in other countries, but it’s been the best part of a century since then. You can’t tell me nobody has managed to get a grip on the idea that they can print what they want to, yet.
Perhaps the print media feel that bloggers have more freedom than they do. After all, a blogger can’t be sacked if the person who owns their blog plays golf with the person they’ve just written an exposé on. A blogger can, if they wish to, retain a degree of anonymity or, if they are particularly tech savvy, create almost total anonymity.
However. A blogger is also denied the protection of a publisher. Anything they write, they are responsible for in the way that print journalist is not.

Let’s say I am a journalist. I drink too much and my wife has left me. When we met she was the greatest broad on the block but she couldn’t take my obsession with Big PJ O’MacDonagh. I knew he had something mean going down in those Waterford back alleys but I needed to find the proof. If I spent enough time in those dark underbellies, I’d find it for sure, but all she wanted was a trip to Ikea Dublin and eventually, she found a man who’d take her there and assemble her flat pack furniture when she got back.
So there’s me, in the pub, with a cigarillo. There’s Big PJ O’MacDonagh in the corner drinking a Cosmopolitan. Sean Og Cumhail is next to him with a Long Island Iced Tea. Both men have a white wine spritzer chaser. I know there’s something going on. I remember what went down in Wexford. Some nights I still wake up screaming with the smell of courgettes in my nostrils.
So, I move closer until I can overhear their conversation perfectly and when I get home, I immediately write down all the nefarious schemes they are planning. I don’t have any proof but my editor publishes it anyway. The following morning, the paper is sued.

By contrast, if our hero were a blogger who wrote something without any proof and published it on the interwebs, they would be the person being sued. It is the publisher who is held responsible for what is printed, not the writer. Is it any wonder then, that bloggers are unwilling to put their necks on the line? Even if they did, what would it be for? A temporary surge in blog traffic?

The other reason there are no investigative bloggers around here is because the Irish have what He Who Knows Everything refers to as a “peasant mentality”. When they come across somebody doing something a bit shady or underhand, they do not immediately away to the Justice mobile and bust the whole thing wide open, they try to work out how they can get in on the act.
Heaven alone knows how many euro are drained from the social welfare network each year by people who live together but pretend not to because single mothers get more welfare than married ones. The amount of people I’ve heard openly boasting about this kind of thing is unreal and that’s just people. Add in all the schemes the Travellers get up to and it must equate to millions. Not so long ago I read a story in the local rag about a traveller family who were caught trying to get their child christened a week after they’d had him christened in a different parish. The only reason they were caught is because the priest performing the service was filling in for the regular priest and just happened to have performed the first service from the week before and recognised them. This is why christening certificates tend not to be accepted as proof of identity.

So, what if blogs are not intended to challenge the status of the traditional print media? What if they are merely a pleasant diversion from whatever important job is awaiting your attention? Well the canny print media has already thought of this one. There is no need for blogs like that because newspapers already have amusing comment sections and in any case, goes the argument, blogs are not as well written, nor as funny as something which somebody gets paid for writing.
There, the print media may have a point. Blogs are not as well written as the print media tends to be. I’m incredibly good looking and clever but I make a heck of a lot of typos, malapropisms and factual inaccuracies. Yes, most of it is to do with the dyslexia but some of it is down to not having a sub-editor who is not me. Unless you are Giles Coren, you need a sub-editor.

It seems to be generally considered that the top Irish humour blog is Twenty Major’s. He has won best Irish blog for two years running and would probably have one it again this year had he not kindly put himself out of the running (or so Wikipedia tells me). He already has one published novel based upon his blog and a second is forthcoming. You would, in that case, expect the blog to be quite good.
It is… sort of. Were I to describe it I would probably go for “nothing particularly wrong with it”. I can appreciate why people like it but I’ve never read anything on there which is funnier than a column written by Charlie Brooker or Tanya Gold. It’s certainly not going to rival some of the genius available around the interwebs (Awkward Family Photo, anybody?). Yet, this is held up as the best blog Ireland has to offer.

To claim that Irish blogging is dead is the kind of vague, badly researched statement that remind us the print media needs just about anything to fill the pages. Irish blogging isn’t dead, but it’s not exactly world class either.

*If You Have Enjoyed This Blog Post, We At A Trivial Blog For Serious People Would Like To Take This Opportunity To Remind You That Nominations For The Irish Blog Awards Are Open Until The 5th of Feb. Should You Know Of Any Irish Blogs or Blogs Based In Ireland You Think Deserve A Nomination, The URL Of The Blog Is www.atrivialblogforseriouspeople.blogspot.com And The Contact Email Is atrivialblog@gmail.com We Thank You For Your Attention On This Matter And Promise Not To Mention It Again. Until Next Year.*
Irish Blog Award Nominations

Fancy Nominating an Irish Blog?

2010-01-15T20:26:00.003Z

I have just noticed that the nominations are now open over at http://awards.ie/blogawards/nominations/ to nominate the best Irish Blogs of 2010. Should you know of any, ahem, Irish blogs which you think are deserving of a nomination to win massive kudos, the oppurtunity of a trip to Galway and possibly a KitKat, do have a scroll and fill out your nomination in the appropriate area/s.
If you would also like to point people on your own blogs in this direction so they can see how great somebody might be and how deserving of kudos/Galway/Kitkats then, y'know, feel free.

Carry On.

A Book, By Theo

2010-01-15T20:06:00.001Z

It was the ever lovely Sarah who commented that I should write a book. I approve of this suggestion. If there is anything this world could use more of, it is drivel written by me. If it can be delivered in book form for which people are forced to part with currency to acquire, so much the better.

As it happens, like every blogger on the interweb, I harbour secret dreams of being an author. I would like nothing better than to receive quarterly royalty checks and get paid to visit bookshops. I yearn for the days when I can inform people where I get my ideas from and tell them whether or not I base my characters upon real people.
For me though, this remains something of a vague notion which I may or may not do something about some day. Although I write, it is very clear to me that I am not, nor will ever be, a Writer. I simply don’t care enough about it and take rejection with a shrug rather than crumpling to the floor and weeping over my failed MS before opining that the person who did this to me doesn’t know anything about anything and that they’ll be sorry when I win the Nobel prize for literature, as I obviously will, because I’m that great.

To be a Writer is to fail to understand that a commercial fiction agent is never going to represent your epic 18 part science fiction saga even though you’ve managed to use the letter X 432 times in the first chapter alone. To be a Writer you need to have a bag full of excuses and the certainty that anybody who doesn’t like your book must be blind, stupid and a much worse writer than you are. I see a routine rejection letter for what it is, not as a personal attack against my person.
It is no surprise then, that I and Harper Collins’ Authonomy Website do not Get Along.

If you’ve not heard of it, the idea of Authonomy is that writers can upload an amount of their MS onto the site and other users can review and suggest ways to improve it. If a person likes your MS enough, they can place it upon their “bookshelf” which raises its ranking. Whichever book has the highest ranking at the end of the month gets a review by an editor from HC.
In theory, this is a sound idea. Peer review can be the most effective way to improve what you do. Unfortunately, the Authonomy site is basically a popularity contest and the book which makes the top of the pile is not the best or even the most interesting, it is whichever one has an author with a lot of time on their hands.
You see, rather than just looking around the site and seeking out the books which interest them, the vast majority of users do trade reads, usually initiated by a random message asking you to read their novel first. Anybody who is attempting to climb the greasy pole of the rankings chart will place and remove dozens of books to and from their personal bookshelf in a single day in the hope of other users returning the favour.

Of course, the other trouble with this system is that it does not help users to become better writers; all it manages to do is drown them in obligation. How on earth can you give an honest review of somebody’s MS when you are desperate for them to have a look at your own? Or point out flaws when they’ve just given you a glowing appraisal? You can’t, so the result is a website full of reviews suggesting everything is marvellous. In what way does that help anybody?
The other trouble is that if you sit down and work out how many hours you need to spend courting other users and worked out how much you could earn if you worked that time, you’d have enough money to pay for several editor’s appraisals.

When I uploaded a rather ancient MS I have mouldering on my hard disk, it was more in the curiosity of what feedback I would receive because, in all honesty, I have no idea if it is any good or not, let alone publishable (although given the timeframe between my writing it and now, I would say no. I’ve improved a lot since then). The first feedback I received was from somebody who absolutely loved it and thought it was wonderful and who thought, on the basis of what they’d read, that I would be really interested in their novel. What they’d read only seemed to be the synopsis, but never mind, eh?

My second review came from somebody whose work I’d given the once over. They’d very kindly sent me a note asking if I would like to have a look at their book, so I did.
At first, I was a little taken aback. The synopsis was a little jerky and didn’t make a great deal of sense, it began with an author’s introduction containing an anecdote about shooting the wife of the local Labour MP which was meant to be funny but which I thought wasn’t (maybe it’s something to do with all the masked gunmen in my area), and the entire first chapter was written in a vague play script form which I found almost entirely unreadable.
Yet, I persevered. As recommended by the synopsis, I picked out a few chapters to read at random (this being structured as standalone stories) and continued until I had formed my opinion.

To begin with, I was careful to let the user know that anything I said would be of limited use to them as I was not the intended audience for this book (it was aimed at children and I don’t have any) and it was not the sort of book I would be interested in reading. This was my first mistake.
I then compounded this error by suggesting their synopsis could do with some polishing and opining that the opening anecdote fell a little flat. I suggested that they might think of moving the play script chapter to further on in the book as it gave people a false impression of what the book was like and may be putting them off from reading further. I went on to say I felt it was a little contrived and unoriginal in places (the final chapter sees the child hero thwart a terrorist hijacking on an aeroplane by tying the shoelaces of the terrorists together – his mum manages to sleep through the entire drama) and recommended that they have a little more fun with it.

The response was astonishing. I could hardly have done worse if I’d drowned their puppy and spat upon their mother’s grave. The rebuttal boiled down to “Loads of other people say it’s great and find all the bits you’ve cited really funny”. An hour later, they left me a second message to ask me why I’d bothered to read so much of it if I had hated it so much. An hour after that, a third, from which I got the impression they believed I’d taken offence from their original review request because it included the line “I don’t mind that you’re Welsh” and that was the reason for my criticisms. They defended themselves this racist aside by mentioning Anne Robinson. Anne Robinson? Shakespeare made Welsh jokes for heavens sake.

To this, I wrote an eloquent and polite response in which I tried to be encouraging and reiterated that it was only my opinion. Unfortunately, because I wrote it in Word and cut and pasted it across in a hurry, I failed to notice I only managed to post half of my message back to them. Even more unfortunately, this included the half which stressed that, as I mentioned clearly on my profile, I did not give reviews in the expectation that they would be returned and urged them not to trouble themselves with it if they felt disinclined to.
The following day, I realised my cut-and-paste error when I encountered their review of my MS. It was told me that they had really wanted to like my MS(!) but that my style was repetitive and my protagonist boring. They also said they could make no sense of my first line. I can only assume they thought this was going to really hurt but unfortunately, I’m not about to take offense from somebody on the interweb I’ve just managed to upset. That, and I didn’t have any confidence they’d read past the third paragraph.

So, I tried again. I thanked them for their review, said I was sorry they hadn’t liked it and promised to bear their points in mind when I came to do my revisions. I also said I had noticed they had improved their synopsis and agreed it was clearer now.
Yet, that didn’t seem to be the end of it. I was left with the impression that they really wanted me to approve of the changes they’d made and declare that actually, I really liked their book. Why they would be so desperate for my appreciation I have no idea, but there you go.

Clearly, when it comes to seeking opinion on creative work, I am better prepared to handle it than a lot of people. I’ve been to Art School. I’m used to sitting in a room full of people who are discussing what I’ve done wrong and it frustrates me not to have access to a group of people who can honestly discuss and give constructive feedback to me on something like creative writing.

Anyway. While my experience on Authonomy was a brief and perplexing one, it would certainly be remiss of me to suggest that everybody on the site is a jerk. They aren’t. Even my antagonised chum stated that they felt bad to being mean to me when I was so nice and kept trying to help them. They didn’t actually apologise nor have a proper look at my MS, but never mind.
Authonomy sounds a good idea but, in all honesty, anybody who wants to be an author, rather than a Writer, would do far better to spend their time on their MS, synopsis and covering letter. An agent will get you published, Authonomy won’t.

Ice, Ice Baby

2010-01-07T19:47:00.001Z

As a Brit, I enjoy talking about the weather. It’s what we do. We frown at the sky. We grumble and compare the weather of today to the weather of our youths. We complain about its every aspect. We prophesise worse times to come in the coming days before muttering “Ah well, musn’t grumble” and continuing with our day.
The Irish are also keen on talking about the weather. They prefer to take a more direct approach with no chance of disagreement and state what the weather is doing rather than the more disagreeable British style.
Once you have greeted somebody, the usual line of conversation is to comment on the current climate conditions, state whether it is better or worse than during the previous days, remember a time many years before when it was just like this but something happened to somebody’s livestock as a result of it (which may or may not have happened this time around), state what the forecast is for the coming days and state either relief or concern at that prospect.

At the moment it is very cold. Freakishly cold. In some parts of Ireland it has been dropping to -12C at night. Even here in the Sunny South East it was getting down to -5C. In the 6 and a half years I’ve lived here, I’ve had to defrost the car maybe half a dozen times. In the last fortnight, it’s needed doing every day.
This type of weather is really unusual for here. It hardly ever gets below zero but at the moment, the ground is frozen so even when there is a bit of respite, the thawing frost refreezes and we’re back where we started. This causes something of a problem with the roads.

The Irish are not good drivers. They don’t need to be. Until recently, anybody who was on their second provisional license did not require a qualified driver in the car with them, which rather destroyed the need for people to sit a test at all. Some years ago, the waiting lists for new drivers to sit the test was so long they arbitrarily awarded licences to the people who had been on the list for the longest times. The man who won the Wexford Rally in September is currently one year into a five year ban for causing death by dangerous driving. He has no apparent problems obtaining a racing licence nor any apparent twinges of conscience; he competed in a race mere weeks after managing to drive his 911 into a wall, killing his wife and injuring his mate, but remaining unscathed himself. The Irish Independent referred to him as a “local hero” in their write up of his racing victory.

It is with some trepidation then, that I have been examining the road surfaces. It is gut wrenching enough at times driving over here, so you can appreciate I was not looking forward to driving on ice.
Happily, I am just about old enough to have sat the driving theory test when applying for my own licence and because I am extraordinarily good looking and clever, scored a hundred percent – an achievement which is rarer than I would have expected it to be. It is because of this that I know how to drive on ice, even if I have never done it before. So, when I turned left at the end of the road and found the car was unable to gain enough traction to get up the hill, I did not immediately panic and drive into a hedge as Mammy would have done but instead calmly slipped it into fourth and smugly made my way the two miles up to the main road where driving was better.
Apart from that first worrying five minutes, it was really rather nice. I’ve never managed to drive at anything less than 59mph on the main road without getting overtaken with much gesticulating but on that day, everybody was driving at 50mph. It was great. I’d forgotten how relaxing driving without somebody nudging your rear bumper and flashing manically is.

That was on the first day of the cold snap. After that, it got much worse. He Who Knows Everything and I were driving behind a bus. HWKE braked gently to be greeted with a terrible screeching noise and the worrying prospect of explaining to his wife why there was a wall shaped dent in the front bonnet of her car. As HWKE was required to do an Advanced Driving Course many years ago, he was able to keep control of the car and disaster was averted but it was still a perturbing experience and not one I am keen to repeat.

Much of the problem is caused by the fact that the councils don’t appear to be gritting the roads with the amount of vigilance the conditions would suggest they need to be doing; if at all.
This cold weather has not come out of the blue. It was predicted well in advance and, for once, all of the forecasts have been accurate about the harshness of it. If we had all woken up one morning to a blizzard, then I could appreciate why the councils have been so lax with their gritting. As it is, all they can do is claim they have had a lorry on it every single day but won’t be any more because they’ve run out of salt. If the N25 has been salted every single day since this weather started, I’m a custard filled pudding.
The simply hideous accident in Gorey should have been a wakeup call. It hasn’t been. I know it has been Christmas and I know these are unusual circumstances, but the councils have had plenty of warning and they’ve just crossed over into a shiny new financial year. Get the council check books out and sort it. Please.

This cold weather is set to continue for another week at least and it’s even beginning to cause me some problems. You see, I live in a field. To get to the main road from my field, one has to drive two miles on roads covered in snow and ice which haven’t been gritted at all. I’ve got my fingers crossed a thaw happens before I run out of tea.

Hope all your new years are going well and you are slightly less stranded than I am.

Dear Father Christmas

2009-12-18T20:05:00.000Z

Dear Father Christmas,

Thankyou very much for all the wonderful gifts you brought me last year. I was particularly delighted to step on the scales in January to find I weighed the same as before I began inhaling festive chocolate. If you could repeat that trick for me this year, I would be most grateful.

I understand that I’m a little late with my letter to you this year. My tardiness, however, will not excuse an absence of glittery gifts beneath my Christmas tree. You are Father Christmas and Father Christmas is magic so none of your excuses about how the elves couldn’t make it in time, ok?

Once again I have been very good this year. I have reached things from high shelves for old people in the supermarket, I did my best to convert the Jehovah’s witnesses and I have only killed one squirrel.
When I have found it difficult to be nice, I have endeavoured to remove myself from the situation rather than tell people what I think. If this means not answering the telephone on a Sunday then so be it. In an extra effort to be nice, I even wrote a thank you letter to Cos when she sent me a necklace for my birthday. She is holding my Christmas present to ransom (or, more likely, she has not got me anything) until she comes over to visit us.

This year I would like Cos to stop buying me any presents at all. They are always cheap and nasty and hideously inappropriate. She didn’t bother to get me anything for the first 27 years of my life, it’s far to late to buy my affections now – although if she is asking you to help her buy my affections let the record show I may consider renting them in return for a 50mm Carl Zeiss Lens.
I would also like Strider to cop on. While I am pleased with all her work undermining the Welsh government from within, it would make Mammy very happy if Strider was able to think of people who are not herself a little more; particularly with regards to the state of her bathroom floor and how other people might feel when they go in there and see it. Let’s just say it’s a good job it’s the room with the toilet in it.

For a long time I have wondered if I want another cat. My old one doesn’t do much these days on account of having been dead for three and a half months. I know I eventually will get another one because otherwise my life plan of dying a crazy old cat lady will go unfulfilled, but every time I think of getting a new one it makes me cry.
With this in mind, I instead request an Alpaca. They are a bit like cats but you shear them and instead of chasing things and killing them, they protect them from all harm. They also do not wake you up in the middle of the night to let you know they still exist. If you bring me an alpaca, I promise to brush it and shine its hoofs and give it vitamin D supplements and name it Genghis. It will also be helpful should Mammy get some chickens.

Please be careful in the icy snow and driving winds. Alpacas get air sick very easily.

Lots of Love

Theo (Age 28)

Traditions

2009-12-11T20:30:00.001Z

Ah, Christmas! How you do sneak up on a girl! One minute I am slapping the sun cream on and the next your festive twinkle has overtaken me.

This year, for a change, I am feeling rather organised. The cake managed to get made – this time without He Who Knows Everything braining himself on the garden furniture – and it smells rather lovely. When I say lovely, what I actually mean is Alcoholic. I have yet to perfect the trick of unwrapping it without needing to take a staggered step backwards at the fumes. Naked flames are banned for at least half an hour afterwards to let the vapours dispel.

What is particularly nice about Christmas is the rhythm of it. It pretty much follows the same pattern each year. Of course, nothing stays the same forever, but Christmas seems to assimilate new events into itself so they are swiftly lined up alongside the more traditional occupations of eating biscuits for breakfast and making fun of the Round Robin letters.

The newest tradition to enter into the Christmas pantheon of my household is for the hall ceiling to end up on the hall floor.

Regular readers may remember last years fiasco in which it was decided to decorate the hall, stairs and landing in the weeks preceding Christmas and in which a crowbar was taken to the hall ceiling for complicated reasons involving bureaucracy and which led to a longer than usual To Do list due to the necessity of rebuilding said ceiling before the builders holiday kicked in.
Happily, all the jobs got finished and a mostly merry Christmas was had by mostly everybody and we swore we would never undertake such a foolish enterprise so close to Christmas ever again. Then again, we had said that in previous years following a last minute decision to move house on the 23rd of December. We had found the experience to be a trifle incompatible with a peaceful holiday season.

This year, the hall ceiling has decided it wants to be included in the traditional festivities. Upon our return from Cardiff, we found it had colluded with the hot water tank and was sporting some new watermark tattoos and a pool of liquid beneath it.
Naturally, when He Who Knows Everything told me about this latest development, I sprang instantly into action.
“I shouldn’t worry about it.” I said. “It’s been doing that for the last week in our absence. It will have found equilibrium by morning. If that equilibrium is on the floor then I am good with it.”
HWKE considered my philosophy for a moment before agreeing and retiring to bed.

In more ordinary circumstances, I would doubtless have taken up anxious residence beneath the watery bulge, but these were no ordinary circumstances. Our ferry had been delayed for several hours while the heroic Captain Gerard donned his wetsuit to remove some wire from the propeller. By the time we staggered in through the front door, it was a full twelve hours after we had set out from Cardiff. The gallant captain had arranged a free carvery dinner for us, but all of that meat and gravy served only to make us full and less willing to do some midnight plumbing. If I came down in the morning to find my ceiling on the floor, I would place the blame squarely on the captain and his garlic roast potatoes.

In the end, the ceiling remained where it was. He Who Knows Everything got his spanners out and declared the fault to lie in some loose joints which had begun to leak in earnest after the lack of hot water flowing through them caused them to contract. He spent several days tightening them up and looking with puzzlement at the ceiling which still seemed to be leaking.
Eventually, he found the correct joint. He claims to have tightened it up and is busy with a roller and a spray restoring the ceiling to its original whiteness.

In other news: We have been debating about what size turkey to order for Christmas. Usually I request one as big as my head (because Christmas is the only time of year in which you get the chance to eat something the size of your head) but this year a slightly smaller one is being requested. Partly this is because Strider has declared she will return to Cardiff on the twenty seventh but mainly it is because of the absence of The Cat.
The Cat was always very keen on turkey. So keen in fact that one year, HWKE came into the kitchen to find she had managed to jump a six foot gap onto the kitchen counter top and was sitting next to a fang marked turkey with an innocent expression.
I’m really going to miss that kind of thing this year.

In Which He Who Knows Everything Learns Where Not To Park His Car

2009-12-04T20:17:00.000Z

Depending on the amount of entertainment your life is filled with, you may not have noticed my recent absence. If you did not then I salute you heartily.
In a pleasant deviation from the usual, there were a number of reasons for the gap in recent blog entries. The first is that I was being quite lazy. I am often lazy. Luckily, my lazyness can be cunningly disguised through doing work and pretending to the world around me that it is the work I am supposed to be working on rather than the other work I have available to me. So it is that I am usually doing something but rarely what it is I am supposed to be doing. The number of blog entries I make are directly proportional to the urgency of the other things I have to get done.
The second is that it had been quite cold. Normally this wouldn’t prove much of an impediment to computer use but when it’s dark and the wind is howling around the chimney, the lure of the stove becomes rather too much of an evening.
The third is that we have all been Away.

As we are exciting folk, Mammy, He Who Knows Everything and I went to visit Strider in Cardiff. She was so thrilled at the prospect of our clogging up her sitting room and using her stuff all day while she was out at work subverting the Welsh Government from within, she even vacuumed. However, as this is Strider we are talking about, she was required to explain that while she had vacuumed, her vacuum seemed to be broken and that the more she vacuumed the dirtier the floor got.
The last time this happened, it was because she had vacuumed up three socks and not noticed. The time before it was because she didn’t know how to empty the dust from the container. She was swift to assure me this was not the cause this time around with, it must be said, more pride than the usual 31 year old displays at knowing how to clear fluff from a filter. After half an hour I’d removed four, three inch blockages from the various tubes of her cleaner and given her strict instructions not to let it happen again.

I have always maintained that Cardiff is one of the most underrated places in the UK. It is large enough to have really good shopping (including the brand new John Lewis which is the largest one outside London) but not so large you spend hours driving in and out of it like Manchester or Birmingham. The Millennium Stadium is one of the finest sporting grounds in the whole of the UK and because it is in the city centre, visitors get a chance to see Cardiff properly rather than being whisked from their park and ride to some outlying suburb.
What is also nice about Cardiff is that, to me at least, it always felt like a very safe city. I lived in Adamstown in a house I painted purple. On the insurance forms this was rated as the most crime ridden place in the city (Along with Roath, Splott and Cathays) but even so, it was only a level three insurance band. Strider studied in Manchester and lived in an area where it was cheaper to replace everything she owned than to buy insurance for it.
When I lived in Cardiff, I never felt afraid to be a lone female walking at night. That said, like any city it is important to keep your wits about you. There are drug problems and plenty of petty crime associated with them. It is also worth ensuring you know when Cardiff are playing Millwall and make a note to stay well away from anywhere any of the fans might end up but other than that (and the Llandaff flasher), I always found it to be really safe.

It is somewhat ironic then that Strider, who lives in a slightly better area than I did, has experienced much crime and annoyance during her time in the city. Since she moved to a first floor flat, she has been less troubled by young people stealing her laptop from through her bedroom window but she is always full of tales of the local kids causing a nuisance.
As we drank our welcoming cup of tea, she filled us in on their recent activities. Among other things, they had recently taken up breaking into cars and she advised us not to leave anything in ours.

About an hour later, a car alarm went off. I turned to HWKE.
“Isn’t that your car alarm?” I asked. I am finely tuned to the nuances of his car alarm. Until he was able to persuade the man at the garage to disconnect it, it had the habit of going off when the temperature on the dashboard reached 25 degrees. This caused much embarrassment in a variety of places, particularly when he couldn’t work out how to turn it off and Mammy and I stood at a distance shouting things which suggested to passers-by that he wasn’t the legal owner of the vehicle.
For a moment he looked uncertain. Then he shrugged and ate the plate of food which had been placed before him. Only when he was full of dinner did he go to check on his car.

Some time later he came back and asked Strider for some duck tape, some bin bags and a phone call to the Rozzers. Yoofs had broken his passenger window. They had also smashed the windows of four other cars parked on the street but not, I noticed, the one belonging to the Mazda coupe.
Strider sighed and rang the old bill. I begged her to ask them if they were going to catch the crims and lock them up in her community, but she failed to understand the reference.

What was so annoying about the whole thing was the wonton destruction of it. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d broken the window to steal something – HWKE certainly wouldn’t have minded if they’d stolen the whole car because bits fall off whenever he drives it further than 30 miles so he’s keen for a new one - breaking the window because they can is just amateurish.

The Rozzers came. They took HWKE’s name. They told us some bloke had seen the gang doing it and chased them in his car. It was all most dull.

So, Cardiff. Great City. Just not for parking your car in.

Tell me Everything You Know About Squirrels

2009-11-16T20:29:00.000Z

For some reason, companies have got it into their heads that in order to find the best candidate to fill a position, rather than asking questions pertinent to the job on offer, it is better to ask questions which make no sense whatsoever. Thus it is that should you wish to get a job at Google (or Gwgl as I’m now calling it in the hope it will catch on and we’ll get a renaming on St David’s Day), you will need to answer such brainteasers as “How much would you charge to wash all of the windows in Seattle?” and “Why are manhole covers round?” For the record, my answers would have been “I charge by the hour” and “So they’ll fit in the manholes, obviously.”
Strider, who is currently decimating the Welsh government with her Probably-really-is-Swinflu-this-time-itus, tells me of a job interview she’s heard of in which the candidates’ chair is set to the kind of ridiculous angle reminiscent of a gynaecological exam and the successful candidate is whichever one puts the chair right without asking or making a fuss about it.

The original purveyors of stupid questions to determine worth were, of course, the Oxbridge Universities and a favourite of theirs, or so I’ve heard, is to lean forward and ask the nervous candidate to tell them everything they know about squirrels.
It is then, rather a shame I am not going to be experiencing any Oxbridge interviews as I could tell them quite a lot.

Squirrels are evil. Really evil. You have only to look at their fluffy, innocent tails to know you are staring at the backside of the most evil creature to stalk the realms of this earth. Even those red ones with the fluffy ears that everybody thinks are endangered are evil. The red squirrels live on the Isle of Wight for heavens sake; I’ve been to the Isle of Wight and I can confirm that nobody who wasn’t plotting something would bother to live there. You know who lives on the Isle of Wight? David Icke, that’s who.

To begin with, there were a pair of squirrels who would come and eat the bread from the bird table. They were quite sweet. One of them was clearly the Mammy squirrel because the other one would repeatedly attempt to suckle from her only to receive discouragement in the form of a swift blow to the head, often with the largest piece of bread Mammy squirrel had to hand.

Earlier this year, for reasons we were never able to work out, they took to appearing at the bird table and carrying away the quartered apples we had left out for the birds. Why we felt birds would enjoy apples, I’m not sure of either. In any case, it didn’t matter because the squirrels seemed to need them for something so the birds never got a look in. I theorised they were building a squirrel fortress deep in the woodland so they had somewhere proper to sit and plan their nefarious squirrel deeds. Either that or they have a cider press.
When we had run out of apples, the squirrels took to climbing onto the tubes of bird nuts and eating them instead. We were getting through a cylinder of nuts every couple of days. The problem became exacerbated by the Coal Tits who worked out they could extract whole peanuts through the holes left by the squirrels and who would fly off into the woodland with a peanut the size of their head.
The theory that the squirrels were extorting nuts with menaces was briefly floated but was swiftly discounted. The Coal Tits have struck a deal with the Chaffinches to form a gang large enough to take on the Greenfinches. Not even the squirrels are stupid enough to mess with the Chaffinch-Tit Mafioso.

Now that it is wintertime in this hemisphere, we have begun putting the nuts back out again and this has led to a return of the squirrels, only this time there are three of them. Or at least, there were three of them.
We tried knocking on the window to make them go away. This failed. We took to opening the door and clapping our hands loudly. This worked for a time until the squirrels decided they could safely ignore us. We took to walking outside with a menacing expression on our faces, a dangerous task given the wetness of the decking, which only worked for as long as it took the squirrels to realise we were hippies who weren’t going to do anything terrible to them. Now they just look at us carefully to see if we have any quartered apples for the woodland squirrel overlord.
Eventually, I decided the best way to get rid of the squirrels was to make a really, really loud noise. So I got a wooden spoon and a saucepan. This worked. This worked so well in fact, that one of the squirrels accelerated up the corner of my two story house until he reached the roof. He then fell back down onto the decking, regarded me and my pan with a surprised expression and ran across the lawn to the safety of the trees. I haven’t seen him since and feel massively guilty in case he’s lying in a pool of rotting apples somewhere in the forest.

The other two, meanwhile, continue to devour the nuts with impunity. They have also taken to looking through the kitchen windows at me in case I want to go outside and give them some more. When I tap a finger on the window to make them go away, they hopefully sniff at it through the glass in case there is a peanut attached.

In an effort to foil them, we hung the tube of nuts from the washing line where the bird would be able to reach it, but the squirrels would not.
To begin with, it worked very well and had the added bonus of providing He Who Knows Everything and I with squirrel based entertainment as we laughed at the fluffy wretches’ obvious confusion. For the best part of two hours they clambered over everything within a ten metre radius of the elusive nuts until finally managing the work out they could perform a death defying leap from the topmost branches of the bay tree and grab the nut tube on their way past. As I shouted to them through the window, if they could learn to put that much effort into finding a natural food source, everybody would be much happier and relaxed.
To foil further death defying leaps, we moved the nuts further along the line away from the tree until Mammy realised they were climbing all over her contorted hazel and breaking it, so we brought the nuts inside until a solution could be found.

I’m told that coating the nuts in chilli powder will prove a formidable deterrent which won’t bother the birds but I have to confess, I’m a little reluctant to try it. I already have one of their number on my conscience, I don’t want to be responsible for the other two staggering across the lawn looking as though they’ve been maced.
I’m also told that creating a squirrel feeder filled with delicious peanut butter and raisins will keep them away from the bird feeders. I’m not keen on this either. I’ve already had one of the little blighters climb in through an open window scouting for the missing bird feeder and leaving muddy squirrel footprints all over my hall and sunroom; can you imagine the siege I’d be under if I started giving them something they really enjoyed?

Pumpkin A-Go-Go

2009-11-02T20:00:00.002Z

Although I may have complained at length about the children who saw fit to disturb my isolation the other night, this does not mean I am totally immune to the pleasures of the faux holiday that is Halloween. I do quite like creating a three sided pumpkin masterpiece for my windowsill.
I confess, I did cheat rather. The templates I have appropriated from http://www.familyfun.com (the pirate) http://www.jamminpumpkins.com (the gravedigger) and http://www.scissorcraft.com (A Gingerbread my and My Neighbour Totoro?). Thanks to the people across the interwebs who worked hard and created these free designs so I didn’t have to.

Pirate Pumkin copy from http://theohrm.vox.com/

Pumpkin Gravedigger copy from http://theohrm.vox.com/

Gingerbread Pumpkin copy from http://theohrm.vox.com/

Things that go Ding-Dong in the Early Evening Time

2009-11-01T20:25:00.000Z

I am not, I will admit, a great one for Halloween. The pleasures of it elude me somewhat. For a start there is too much effort involved – first you need to find an outfit which is even worse than finding a blog template because your poor choice of dress will haunt you via friends’ photographs for the rest of eternity. What seemed like an ironic and droll Boney M tribute seems less so in the cold light of 30 years hence. I’m told we’re all going to live to be 120 years old from now on so it’s worth bearing in mind how much longer those youthful misdemeanours are now going to haunt you.

I’m also not keen on having to interact with other peoples’ children. Even with the ones I can personally manage to place a name to, social discourse is stilted and awkward. I’m always terrified I will say something hideously inappropriate which will scar them for life or, worse, be recounted by their Mammy to the other Mammys around the school gate who will laugh at me. I don’t know the Mammys around the school gate but this is a small community. I live in fear of the day a story is recounted to me by somebody I vaguely know and it turns out to be about me.

The main trouble is that I can’t help but feel this whole Halloween thing has become just another form of one-upmanship. A way for parents to show off to other parents that their child can have the best and most expensive costume. What ever happened to donning a couple of rolls of bandages and going as the Mummy?
I went into Tesco at the beginning of October only to find my way totally blocked by a Mammyjam in the seasonal aisle. There must have been twenty Mammys (and a couple of Daddys, equality fans), each with a trolley, all gushing over the nylon outfits newly made available that week. Mammys entering the store were parking their trolleys by the newspapers and making their way to the front of the crush on foot. It was utter chaos. By the time Halloween rolled around four weeks later, the entire collection was sold out.

In my youth, we didn’t do much for Halloween. It was always secondary to bonfire night. When we did, not a single one of my contemporaries would have bought an outfit to wear for Trick or Treating. Sure, you might have bought a moulded plastic witch’s hat or a mask or something to make it a bit clearer what you had come as, but the main crux of the costume would always be something fashioned at home from whatever you could raid from the dustbin or your Mammy’s wardrobe (this was the 80’s, there was a lot to choose from).
Kids today just don’t make stuff anymore. I’m not sure they know how. Even the lego kits of today have lost their way. In my youth I had about a kilogram of the stuff, all proper individual pieces that could be fitted together one of a hundred different ways. These days they are all pre-moulded pieces designed to make one thing only. Rubbish.
Can you imagine trying to persuade your average 8 year old that a really fun way to spend the afternoon is with a Pritt Stick, a pair of scissors and a piece of cardboard building a replica of the Globe Theatre or Darwin’s Beagle? Let alone garnering any enthusiasm for a carefully constructed Blue Peter Tracey Island model? They’d only complain it smelled of yoghurt. It’s little wonder they all turn out in logoed polyester rather than papier-mâché.

Over here, I was rather glad that I would not need to lay in a supply of candies for the little oiks of the neighbourhood as I did when I lived in Cardiff. When I say that I live in a field, I mean that literally. The nearest house is a good quarter of a mile away. Beyond that, it’s another quarter to the next one. If I want to go anywhere at all, it does have to be by car.
As children can’t drive, I assumed I would be safe from them. I was wrong.

At the risk of sounding like Concerned of Tunbridge Wells, what kind of person allows their children to harass strangers for sugar?
I saw the brake lights flash and moments later was greeted with a wild banging on my door by a number of breathless children demanding sustenance. They were each clutching a carrier bag and were clearly making an opportunistic tour of the neighbourhood.
It was only later that I realised that I did vaguely know them. They were the children of the man who seeded my lawn over 18 months ago. I haven’t seen him since I paid him and I haven’t seen his kids since they mysteriously pitched up at my door in an identical situation 12 months previously. On that occasion, Mammy gave them some rotten apples from her fruit trees (she thought they were fresh ones) and I gave them some leftover Harribo I had laid in for the children of my friend in the hope that plying her kids with e-numbers would discourage her from bringing them to see me.

Mammy tells me I am a grouch. She is right, of course, yet I’m still put out that I have to put up with these brats because their parent lacks the will, or the possibly just the manners, to tell their offspring that it’s not okay to call on people you don’t really know, who don’t have any pumpkins out the front, who haven’t seen you since you demanded additives this time last year and to whom you are as welcome as a soloist performing Silent Night in a Synagogue.

Anyway. Mammy has suggested that next year we put some Garda Crime Scene – Do Not Cross tape across the gateposts to try and keep them out. I’m not convinced it will work but I’m happy to give it a try. Leaving all the lights on will probably make it look more convincing.

If you have had your kids out trick or treating, it would be really nice if you could be a little more circumspect about where you take them. Calling on the people you don’t know is irritating and, to be honest, a little rude. Kids today need to learn you don’t get sweets for mere existence. It’s up to you to teach them.

The New Sofa and the Gap where it No Longer is

2009-10-26T20:32:00.001Z

It is not an easy task to buy something in Ireland. In other countries all you need to do is proffer the correct amount of the local currency and remember to carry your goods away with you. In Ireland, the first stage of any transaction involves the sales person trying to talk you out of buying whatever it is you are trying to purchase.

When He Who Knows Everything bought some motor oil, the lady at the garage did her best to convince him to get the low quality stuff because it was cheaper. The bloke at the plumbers’ merchant tried to get me to “save” €60 by buying a less powerful shower pump. He remained unable to accept my certainty regarding the amounts of kilowatts I need in the morning. Even now I expect he thinks of me from time to time, regretting he didn’t try that little bit harder to dissuade me.

Buy something costing more than several hundred euro and it becomes an entirely different story. For a start, anything costing more than several hundred euro will have had several hundred more euro added on to the price to reassure you that you must be very special indeed to be able to afford such a piece of tat. The price of furniture, in particular, is outrageous.
There is also no prospect of bargaining. In the UK, if you are spending a large amount of money, there is usually some room for negotiation either in price or benefit terms. In Ireland, asking what can be done on the price invites the type of look usually reserved for what you scrape off your shoes.
After much thought, I have come to the conclusion it is to do with self esteem. The Irish enjoy paying a premium for badly made, veneered chipboard furniture because it shows everybody else that they are rich enough to afford it. Here I am regarded as scum because I stop about covered in mud and wearing a Barbour wax jacket which has belonged to three people previous to myself; were I in the UK it would be recognised for the badge of distinction it is.

Anyway. Some time ago it was decided to remove the fireplace in the sitting room on account of how, whenever the wind had a direction, plumes of smoke would fountain into the room and cover everything in soot. A stove was duly chosen and a crowbar taken to the existing marble edifice. Apart from a slightly sticky moment during the dismantlement when HWKE and I realised what we had thought to be a mantelpiece in three parts was, in fact, a mantelpiece in four parts and the noise we were hearing was the separation of silicon prior to the fourth part falling onto our toes, it went very well. The new stove is great.
Now that the sofas were no longer consigned to a dusting of black most evenings, or to getting covered in Cat hair, it was decided it might be nice to get some new ones and redecorate the whole room. What we failed to realise was quite how high the premium on a sofa bought in Ireland was.

I don’t mind paying a lot of money for furniture, but if I’m paying a thousand euro for a three seat sofa, I expect the sofa to be worth that amount. Over here, they just aren’t.

After much debate, Mammy and I chose a sofa from a local shop and arranged for it to be delivered at the distant point in the future when the stove had been installed. Once the stove was installed, the sofa was delivered.
Helping the bloke to carry it in (he didn’t have a mate with him) I didn’t notice anything wrong and once he had gone, I got back to whatever triviality I was occupied with. It was only later when I walked through the hall that I noticed it; the smell.
It was dusty and damp smelling. It was an old people smell. It pervaded the whole of the downstairs. It was not good.

Valuing fairness, we gave it 24 hours to dissipate, but it got worse. We rang the shop who spoke to the man in charge of these things. He told us it was the smell of the fireproof spray the manufacturers put on it and instructed us to give it a week in the presence of baking soda. I had always understood it was required to use fireproof fabrics rather that applying a spray afterwards but who am I to doubt the word of the Warehouse Manager?
While the smell did get better, whenever the fabric became warm it could be smelled in the room. For a long time we debated because they were very comfy, but eventually we called the shop and requested that they be taken away again.

It’s hugely annoying and incredibly typical of the shopping experience in Ireland. These sofas were made in China, shipped over and stored in the warehouse for who knows how long. Instead of being properly upholstered, the fabric covering was affixed with Velcro. For this, in the sale I might add, I was expected to pay fifteen hundred euro for a three and a two seater sofa. This was a good deal.
In the UK, you can go in a shop, order a sofa in a size and fabric of your choice and have it delivered direct to your home from factory in which it was made in six to eight weeks. The sofas are made in the UK yet they don’t cost anything like the amount the sofas cost here. It’s ridiculous.

It’s no wonder the Irish economy is in its current crisis. For years, the Irish have delighted in spending more than a product’s worth – the traders have yet to cop on that those times have passed.
I like to spend my money in Ireland and with local businesses if I can but to be honest, I don’t really want to give my money to a company who remain unable to provide good service, reliable products and a competitive pricing structure.
Sorry Ireland, I’ll be sticking with what I’ve got until I can import from the UK.

Welcome To The Blog

2009-10-19T20:40:00.000+01:00

After months of attempting to make a decision on this matter, I have finally given the blog a cosmetic overhaul and applied a shiny new template to it. If you are looking at your screen now, you will be able to see it. Nice, eh?

The main reason it has taken such a long time to knuckle down and get this done was due to my innate indecisiveness. Some days I can be rendered unable to decide if I want a cup of tea or not; choosing a blog template from the millions available on the interweb was always going to take some time.

Of course, it was never as simple as going out and choosing a template, if such a thing can be said to be simple. I have a long list of things I demand from a template I am receiving for free. Firstly, it was vital that the new design represented the philosophy of the blog through colour, layout and number of columns.
Therein lay the first hurdle.

A hundred years ago or more, when I created this blog, I gave much thought to the title. I didn’t have any particular theme I wanted to write about, I just wanted to give a faintly humorous account of whatever I was doing or thinking about that day. Secretly, I wanted it to read like a columnist in the G2 section of the Guardian.
So I gave it the name you see at the top: A Trivial Blog For Serious People. It has served me well. It perfectly encapsulates what the blog is about. It is a sly dig in the ribs to those who get the reference but doesn’t alienate those who don’t - it is a play on the subtitle of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Ernest.
That, really, is how I wanted to blog to be. I wanted people to be able to read it and follow it without any prior knowledge, but I also wanted to get in layers and references that others would enjoy. I don’t mind that I am probably the only person here who notices a Noel Coward reference. One day, somebody who is not me will notice when I do that. I am sure of it.

Something I didn’t consider when I came up with the title was whether or not it would fit in the header space of a blog template.

The second thing I felt necessary for the blog was space for the explanatory introduction. One of the great challenges in communicating through text is ensuring people understand when your tongue is in your cheek. Anybody arriving here blind might take a single look at the title and assume there to be gravity where I have not sought to have any. Clearly either the explanatory note, in a revised form, needed to stay or the template would need to have the necessary whimsy.

Even with a vague idea of my requirements, it was hard to find something suitable. I must have looked at well over a thousand and while I found plenty I liked, it was difficult to find one which was right. The biggest problem I had was finding one which was sufficiently gender neutral. There are a lot of really pink ones out there.
For a while, the way forward seemed to lie in one of the “Messy Desk” templates. I have a messy desk. At the moment it contains binoculars, the instruction leaflet for my new angle grinder, a DVD of Gregory’s Girl, a leprechaun pen which doubles as a bubble blower and a pot of Vanish Oxi Action Multi. Unfortunately, as many of the “Messy Desk” templates contain more conventional things like iphones and notepaper with coffee rings, I didn’t really feel they were suitable.
Eventually, I did find one I liked. Mainly I liked it because it was called “Hello Sailor”. It had a very nice illustration of a red haired young lady showing rather too much leg. It could have been an illustration of me if I had a bottle of hair dye and laid off the cake for a few years. For a while I thought that would be the one I would go for but eventually decided against it. Not quite what I wanted, you see. I prefer to show off cleavage in public.

So I came back to it, whittled my choice down to a mere 14 and tried them all out until I decided on this one. It’s clean and professional and provides links to the forthcoming About, Contact and FAQ pages (I’ll let you know when I get that one up).
I got this template from http://www.btemplates.com although it is available from a number of websites. Btemplates seems to have the most comprehensive list of what is out there.

There’s some tweaking to do with widgets and links but for now, Welcome to the New Layout.

The Racism Problem

2009-10-12T20:23:00.000+01:00

It is a thankless task to be the BBC. You provide people with a myriad of television, radio and website goodness and all they can do is complain about the price of the licence fee and offer statistics regarding how many repeats you show.

I, for one, love the BBC. If the BBC were in renal failure, I would happily offer them my kidney. Television is an expensive medium and I am happy for auntie to show endless repeats at unsociable and daytime hours rather than creating something original for eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning when I’m not watching the telly.
It is all very well for people to draw up numbers and claim that however much of the output are repeats; I spend less than 15% of my week in front of the telly – less than 5% actually watching something properly. The Beeb could announce a suspension of programming between the hours of eleven pm and seven pm the following day and I probably wouldn’t even notice. If you feel the need to complain that a third of the programs shown across the four channels are repeats, maybe you should address whatever issue it is which keeps you in front of your television for 66% of your week instead.

The main trouble the BBC has is that because it is paid for by the public, they tend to like input on the BBC decision making process.
Many complain about the yearly £142 compulsory fee. It may sound rather steep but when it is considered what the BBC provides for this amount, it is very reasonable. In Ireland the fee is €160 (about £150) and for that we receive 2 channels (both with adverts), three radio stations (one of which is in Gaelic, another of which I prefer to refer to as Dorsexburyshire FM) and a rubbish website. The only things they show on the telly are films made in the last 10 years and CSI. When I first moved over here, Judging Amy was the prime time offering. They still roll out Father Ted repeats every few months and the star of that has been dead a decade. I only had RTE for a fortnight and it was the closest to brain death I have ever been.

Over the last week, the main complaint has been double standards over a racist comment made by Anton Du Beke. He is a professional ballroom dancer and partner to one of the celebrities on the current series of Strictly Come Dancing (known in America as Dancing with the Stars, it basically takes people you’ve vaguely heard of and requires them to do ballroom dancing before getting praised/insulted by people who know about that sort of thing). You see, earlier in the year, the BBC sacked Carol “Daughter of Margaret” Thatcher for referring to a tennis player as looking like a golliwog. People are wondering why Du Beke is allowed to stay after telling his dancing partner, Laila Rouass, she looked like a “Paki” following a spray tan. Ms Rouass is of Indian and Moroccan descent. Both incidents happened off camera.

The trouble with racism is that sometimes we don’t realise we are being racist. I remember golliwogs from my childhood; you collected the tokens on the side of the jam pot and you could send off for a badge. It was only when I was older that I learned the cultural origins of the figure. It’s not a connection that ever occurs to me.
However, Ms Thatcher referring to somebody as a golliwog was intended. She was aware of the term and, having had it pointed out to her, defended her use of it claiming that she didn’t mean any harm by it.
Mr Du Beke, by contrast, has apologised to anybody who stands still long enough to listen. He appreciates that it is not okay to use such terms and you don’t get the feeling he is complaining behind closed doors about the outcry. Ms Rouass fully accepted his apology and is happy to continue working with him. At best, it was an unfunny joke which should never have been made.

I think we need to begin thinking more about the language we use. It’s easy to decry political correctness gone mad but sometimes, we do need think about how we use a language and what we say with it.
I’m sure nobody here would make bad taste jokes about Pakistanis, Indians, Black people or whoever. I’m also sure that the world is filled with people who are not racist people but who would think nothing of leaving me a message to the effect of “You can’t help that you’re Welsh,” yet some have. Would that sentence still be okay if you inserted the word “Paki” into it?

As it happens, I don’t mind people saying such things to me. They are free to do so, just as I am free to consider them knobheads. I can’t help but find it a little objectionable that if I were to point out their racist attitude to them, they would fail to get my point and tell me I needed to get a sense of humour (as Bruce Forsyth told Talk Radio).
If having a sense of humour involves finding the punch lines of moronic seventies sitcoms amusing, I’d be glad not to have one. We need to remember that it doesn’t matter if there was no racist intent, it is how a comment is received that matters. We should never trivialise anybodies feelings on any matter.
Respect the people you are speaking with, whatever their race, whatever their circumstances.

So, to help people re-address their attitudes towards these things, I have helpfully designed a short exercise designed to help understand what can, and cannot be considered casually racist.

Before you speak, ask yourself this: If I said this to the Welsh Rugby team, would I get away with my kneecaps intact?

Scaring the religious

2009-10-06T20:00:00.000+01:00

He Who Knows Everything recommends that you should never ask anybody a question you don’t already know the answer to. It helps to avoid the kind of situations which prevent him from drinking tea and playing with his dead relatives. So, when he asks Mammy what she wants for dinner, he only does so because he already knows that the answer is pasta. He doesn’t ask why she emptied coke all over the bath, sink and toilet because he already knows there is no answer he wants to hear.

The trouble with questions is that very often you think you know the answer only to find a crazy haired individual giving unexpected ones. So it was that the Jehovah’s Witnesses came to call.

Although a protestant atheist (the worst kind, surely), I am happy to oblige other people and their belief systems providing it doesn’t put me out. It’s the way my Mammy raised me. She taught me that when the religious people knock on the door, you should smile and accept the proffered pamphlet. In the UK the system worked marvellously; it took about a minute and everybody went away happy. Over here, they begin by asking if I have read the Bible and take a staggered step back when I tell them I have.
It’s very bizarre. Ireland is still a very religious country. Even people who don’t attend mass are keen for the kids to get confirmed. The majority of the schools are associated with one or other of the religious orders and you can see the girls’ uniforms were obviously designed by nuns. I can’t be the only person who has bothered to read the holy text but the reaction of the Jehovah’s Witnesses would suggest otherwise.

It began badly.
“Hello, I was here before…” He says, “I spoke to your… Mother?”
“Could have done.” I replied cheerfully.
“…Or… your… Grandmother?”
“Could have done.” I replied cheerfully.
“Oh. I’m Tom* and this is,” *pause and turns to silent companion* “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” *turns back to me* “Have you read the Bible?”
“Yes I have. I’ve also read Richard Dawkins. I agree with him that religion is a scientifically untenable belief system”
“Right. Well, you know science has found that lots of what is said in the Bible is true. The order of creation for instance.”
“Oh yes, I know. The Bible is fascinating as an anthropological document. So much of what is in there has clear parallels with other cultures. The flood myth exists in many mythologies. The Chinese goddess Guan Yin bears striking similarities to the Virgin Mary.”
“Oh?”
“I just find it difficult to accept any document which has been decided by committee as a holy writ.”
“Committee?”
“Well yes. The protestant Bible has different books to the Catholic bible. There are also many other gospels in existence which are not included in the official table of what is and is not the holy word of God. After all, it was only several hundred years after his death that Jesus was declared to be holy and divine.”
“I… don’t know about that.”
“There are also many discrepancies and contradictions within the text.”
“Ah! Lots of people say that but when you ask them what discrepancies they can’t tell you any.”
“Check Dawkins. He’s got a list. I lent my copy to Strider otherwise I’d get it now and show you.”
“The Prophets of the Bible are true though. They knew the earth was round long before we did. If you read the prophesies you’ll see the prophets could predict the future.”
“Like Derren Brown and the lottery?”
“No. Not like Derren Brown and the lottery. That was a trick.”
“It might not have been. Anyway, the problem with prophesies is they have a get out clause. Any which aren’t true are just not true yet.”
“Hmmm. Do you know about the kingdom of god?”
“If I remember correctly, the kingdom of god is what we create for ourselves. It is in our relationship with God. We each create our own kingdom of god. It is in the world around us and in the way we treat ourselves and other people.”

As it turns out, my hippy protestant Jerry Springer influenced definition of things was entirely wrong. The kingdom of God is involves judgement and flames.

I’ve never been entirely clear what the core beliefs of the Jehovah’s Witnesses are. My mental index card for them reads “Operates on a pyramid scheme. Believes in finite number of places in heaven therefore not really interested in converting you.” After some further dredging I can come up with “Doesn’t like blood transfusions”. Having had a nice chat to Tom and his unnamed friend, I’ve been away and found out that one of their principle beliefs is that the end time is approaching and that we are all living in the last days.

While I appreciate the warning, I’m not going to be taking his advice on this matter. As I told them, ultimately I’m not a person who can follow the rules laid down for me by somebody I don’t believe exists. Even if I did believe in their existence, I will always end up doing what I personally believe to be right. It’s who I am.

It seems rather unfair that Jehovah’s Witnesses think we critics are unable to point to any discrepancies in the Bible. After all, they knew they were coming and had a chance to revise for our conversation. I was concentrating on understanding the Lisbon Treaty. If I’d been given notice I would have prepared a crib sheet with all of the things I forgot to mention.
For instance: The genealogical line listed from David to Jesus has different names (and a different number of them). It also gets drawn to Joseph. I always understood the point was rather that Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ father.

To answer my queries, Tom very kindly left me a pamphlet entitled “How We Know The Bible Is True” which addresses this very issue of discrepancies and contradictions. Who Cain married is one of the perennial ones, as in the bible there are no people other than the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. It explains the problem thusly:
“Cain married his sister, or maybe a niece.”

Nice.

*Not his actual name. I can’t remember what his name actually was.

Look Into My Eyes

2009-09-20T12:42:00.002+01:00

Any list of people I admire is, I admit, going to be an eclectic one. It will include such luminaries as Kit Williams (for be both interesting and brilliant), Kazuo Ishiguro (for being an outstanding and eminently readable writer) and Kirsty Allsopp (for making people cry). Even locally I find people upon whom to heap my admiration; Declan the Post knows the location of every house in the area and the name of the people within it. At first I assumed he had a piece of paper to remind him but if I drive past him, we’ve got into the habit of holding up the traffic so he can give me my post there and then. Mind you, I think he likes me because when I was putting the post box up, I put it so he could drive up next to it rather than having to get out of the van.

The person who heads up my personal list of “People who are that great I will offer them my kidney or firstborn child” is the immortal Derren Brown. Should you be foreign, as I know some of you insist on being, you will have no idea who I am talking about. You in particular should pay close attention as I don’t rule out asking questions later.

Derren Brown is usually described as a magician. He isn’t. He is a performer who uses magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. Anybody can gain the necessary skills to do what he does although not many people would use those skills to rig a photo booth so it hypnotised an unsuspecting young man and then put him on a flight so that when he woke up he was in Morocco.
Derren Brown is an altogether marvellous bloke, a rather nifty painter and he once made me faint (although that wasn’t deliberate, I was watching his show and I’m a bit of a wuss sometimes).

His latest series, The Events, is half way through its four week run on Channel Four and has caused a veritable explosion of conspiracy theories in every corner of the interweb. For his debut show, Derren Brown correctly predicted the Wednesday night lottery draw.
Of course, the trouble is that, having predicted the lottery, Mr Brown promised to reveal his method assuring his audience that they would be able use it themselves to predict the numbers. Following his Friday night revelation on the matter, the interweb has opined that the method Mr Brown gave is a load of gubbins and doesn’t work. There is, rather perplexingly, much anger in many quarters.

One of the joys, and indeed the difficulties, of watching Derren Brown perform is that sometimes, the trick he tells you he is performing is not the trick at all. On a couple of occasions, it hasn’t even been a trick, merely accurate data presented in such a way as to play into your misconceptions; when he tossed a coin to get 10 heads in a row, for instance. It wasn’t a trick. It was the result of standing in front of a camera for nine hours tossing a coin until the required result was achieved.

So, on Wednesday night, rather than going to a marvellous party, Derren Brown broadcast himself watching the lottery draw, live, before turning his set of balls around to reveal (GASP!) the same six numbers as had just been drawn.
On Friday night, he revealed the mysterious Wisdom Of Crowds method of prediction. This was discovered, we were told, by a scientist at the turn of the century, who asked attendants at an agricultural fair to look at a cow and predict its weight. He totted up all of the answers and found that the mean average of them was the exact weight of the cow.
This, Derren Brown claimed, was how he predicted the lottery. Get 24 people, give them some team building exercises, then ask them to choose 6 numbers each and average the result.

As the interweb was quick to point out, this does not work. I’m very grateful the interweb did this. I was about to ring my 23 closest acquaintances and offer them a thrilling day in a field with some office furniture. Imagine how red my face would have been!
Personally, I have no idea if the Wisdom of Crowds is a real theory. It may well be. The most likely attendants of an agricultural fair are farmers. Farmers know how much a cow weighs. It’s not a massive discovery. If the scientist in question had repeated the trick at the Ideal Home show, then I might be impressed.

So. If the Wisdom Of Crowds isn’t real, how did Mr Brown predict the results? The simple answer is, he didn’t. You cannot predict the lottery. It is a random result with one of 14 million different combinations.

As Derren Brown is Bad, having delivered his Wisdom of Crowds spiel, he went on to tell everybody that he had certainly not rigged the result and that he certainly hadn’t done it with weighted balls, that there was nobody on the inside helping him, that he definitely hadn’t hypnotised the security guards to forget they had seen him make the switch with the real balls.

So, did he rig the draw? No. Of course not. For a start that would be an absolute legal minefield both for himself and Camelot (the company who run the lottery). It would also be a really rubbish trick.

In that case, how did he do it? A quick perusal of the ever so reliable interweb gives dozens of weary bloggers explaining that it was all down to a split screen. One enterprising young man has created a Youtube video, complete with fake camera shake for added authenticity. Somebody else insists that if you squint really hard, the ball furthest on the left appears to grow by a millimeter where the assistant didn’t replace it properly after writing the numbers on the balls.
In my opinion, this is not the answer either. Sure, it’s certainly possible to do it this way but really, why would you? As the enterprising young man has shown, anybody can do it that way. Name me one trick, by anybody at all, which rests on the edit suite.
That odd program with the misogynistic voice over claims there are some tricks which are done with a crafty camera angle (the Bentley into a Porsche trick) but many of the methods shown on that program are not the methods used by the big name performers. Paul Daniels never used a camera angle in his life. The lovely Debbie McGee would never have stood for it. David Copperfield could easily have used the edit suite to vanish Lady Liberty or escape from Alcatraz but he didn’t. At least I hope he didn’t. My childhood memories will be ruined if I ever find out he lied to me on this matter.

So, if it wasn’t rigged, “The Wisdom of Crowds”, or a split screen edit, what was it? Well, I don’t know. I’m not Derren Brown.
What I do know is that Derren Brown is a great challenger of wooly thinking. He made people think it was possible to predict the lottery, this is why there are so many angry and disappointed bloggers and commentators at work. What he illustrated is that even when we know something to be fundamentally true, we are genuinely prepared to believe the system can be beaten.
Personally speaking, I wonder if the trick isn’t anything to do with the lottery. The theme of the first show was, after all, predictability in human behavior. The theme of the second show (in which he promised to stick us all to our sofas, bless him) was suggestibility and perception. Both were structured around what we believe, how we can be made to believe it and the effect it then has.

I’m certain Derren Brown did not predict the lottery in advance. This is not possible to do, even by somebody as debonair as him.
I’m fairly certain it wasn’t done with a split screen. While it could be done that way, I don’t give much credence to the “growing ball”, I feel it would be a very risky way of doing it (one wrong move from the camera man and the trick is exposed). Also, how do you ensure that the pictures overlap correctly when you fade out the split screen? Certainly possible to do but sounds rather complicated to me.
I am totally certain the draw wasn’t rigged. As I said above, aside from anything else, it would be a legal minefield for everybody involved.
Sleight of hand to replace the balls? I don’t see an opportunity for that to happen. Laser pens? Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility?
There is talk on the interweb of a film shown to the audience which discounts the split screen theory. It didn’t make it onto the show. Maybe it is being preserved for a later edition and for that reason, I shall say no more about it here.

I have no idea how Derren Brown appeared to predict the lottery but nevertheless, it was a great trick.

Theo Gets On After Depressing Events

2009-09-12T12:24:00.000+01:00

As might have been expected, since the death of my cat, I have been rather depressed. There is a hole in my life. As she was a rather demanding creature, that hole is quite large.
Even now, almost two weeks later, odd things make me well up. When I had a piece of steak for dinner, there was too much meat because I didn’t have to slice the end off and give it to the cat. The same thing happened with the roast chicken. All of a sudden I can have chicken sandwiches for lunch because there is no mobile grey shadow standing ready to hoover up the dark meat. I’ve never wept over a surplus of meat before.

I no longer have to drug her before I go to bed. When I come down in the morning, I can immediately make a cup of tea because I don’t have to feed and let her out for her morning ablutions. I can sit on the sofa to eat mackerel pate because there won’t be a sneaky paw attempting to steal toast from my plate. If I have a newspaper on the table before me, I no longer have to try and read around the sprawling mass of fur which has decided that is the only place in the entire house it wants to sit. To be honest, I feel like a bad breakup song.

It does get easier though. For the first couple of days it was hard. The Sunday she died especially. It was always going to feel like a long day and that we were up at six didn’t help. Neither did the unending rain which confined us indoors and instilled claustrophobia.
Monday was much the same. More rain. More claustrophobia. This time, though, there was the added pressure of practical concerns - How do you dig a grave in the rain swollen swamp that is my lawn? Although cold for the time of year, the time of year was nevertheless August and we were keen to get on for realistic motives as well as psychological.
As it turned out, although my lawn is a rain swollen swamp, an inch below the surface and it is no wetter than the clay you use to make pots with so that was good.

He Who Knows Everything built her a coffin. I’d already wrapped her in a shroud - an old bath towel - and we put in all of the collars we’d bought from Accessorize over the years, along with her comb just in case when the resurrection happens there happens to be a door code.
I anticipate that she is going to cause a heck of a lot of confusion for the archaeologists of the future. Somebody, somewhere, will one day earn a doctorate writing about the cult of Bast prevalent in County Wexford after the turn of the millennium. I am certain of it.

Personally speaking, I would have preferred not to bury her. I’m not used to it. Every family member I know who has died has been cremated. When Mammy and HWKE go, they are getting the same treatment (although I believe my actual words on the subject were “If you think I’m wasting my inheritance on a plot, coffin and headstone let alone visiting it every year with a big wreath, you’ve got another thing coming!”).
Having her buried makes it feel… permanent. When I leave this house, I’ll be leaving her behind and I won’t be able to come back. On the Wednesday, I was driving to Wexford in even more rain and weeping slightly at the thought of leaving my precious beastie in the cold earth in that kind of weather even though logically, I know better than to think like that because it isn’t true. Anyway, she had a nice warm towel to snuggle up in.

The trouble with bereavement is you run into it unexpectedly. So much of it gets you in the first few days as you try and get on with a normal routine. It’s the first time you do something you would have included your lost one in. The first time I went to bed and didn’t have a cat to drug was a punch. The first vacuum was hard because I got the clothes brush out to clean the sofas properly free of cat hair so now they look properly clean. I’d forgotten they were beige. When Strider was here and we played scrabble, the box was full of fur where she used to sit in it (on top of the pieces, naturally).
Getting used to the silence was a big one. I spent a long time listening for the click, click of her claws across the hardwood floors but it never came. Tragic, isn’t it?

Like most things, you think you are getting there and something comes out of left field to hit you. There will be other moments I’m sure but yesterday, when I got in from being out all day and she wasn’t there to meet me, demanding to know where I’d been and why I’d been off having a good time without her, that was the moment I missed more than anything. She would always be at the door wanting a hug if I had left her alone all day. The dribble would be everywhere and she would be purring like, well, like a cat who has cruelly abandoned and left alone all day.

Like anything else, it has been one day at a time. One day it will all be a long time ago. I’ve just been trying to stick to a routine and get things done in my own time. It’s the only thing I know how to do.
Yes, it does hurt, but it gets better all the time.

The Cat

2009-09-04T20:28:00.000+01:00

When I left you last time it was with the news that the Cat was to be taken to see Four Under Nine, the Vet, for a last ditch steroid injection in the hope that the end stage renal failure she was in could be delayed. As a family we were particularly keen that this should work as Strider was coming over at the end of the week and she dotes on the Cat as much as I do, albeit in a wusy “That Cat Food Smells Disgusting and I’m Not Coming Back Into This Kitchen Until The Back Door Has Been Open Half An Hour” kind of way.
Sadly, the cat did not respond to the treatment and died at home on Sunday morning.

One of the most difficult things from our perspective was knowing when the time had arrived to take her up to Four Under Nine for euthanasia. Right up until Saturday night it seemed as though it could have gone either way, she was responsive and interested in everything. She hadn’t gone to hide in a cupboard or behind the curtains; instead she remained on her doormat chirruping at anybody who gave her a stroke on their way past. We went to bed on Saturday night eighty percent sure we would be calling on Brian the Vet the following day, but in the end it wasn’t needed.

On Friday night when I was seeking out information about her condition, I came across an excellent website called Tanya’s Feline CRF Centre (www.felinecrf.org) which I would recommend without hesitation to anybody with an elderly cat. My cat was diagnosed with renal failure 5 years ago but apart from prising her from the ceiling to administer drugs on a nightly basis, she showed few effects up until the last few weeks. The CRF Centre website contains a wealth of information about diet and care in addition to detailed symptoms and their causes.
The page detailing the effects of the end stages of Chronic Renal Failure was incredibly helpful and the advice and personal stories regarding the time for euthanasia invaluable. It is because of this that I am now going to tell our story so that if you have stumbled here from a Google search for “Renal Failure in Cats”, you will have a clearer picture of what happens. We were supremely fortunate but if you are easily upset (or you are having a bad day), you might want to pause here and come back next time.

As I mentioned last time, we were aware something was seriously wrong when the cat stopped eating properly. We were encouraged that she was enormously keen on being fed Whiskers Cat Milk from a syringe on her Mammy’s lap and rather puzzled that she appeared to want food, she just didn’t want to eat it. The last thing she ate properly was teabag sized amount of turkey on Thursday night.
On Friday, He Who Knows Everything took her to the Vet who took a sample of blood for testing. On Friday evening he called us to let us know that her levels were off the chart.
On Saturday morning he gave her fluids and an anabolic steroid in the hope it would give her a boost but unfortunately, she did not respond to the treatment.

What was most distressing for us was her difficulty in walking. Her back legs didn’t want to work properly (which can be due to a number of different factors) and she had difficulty in lying down and became dependent on gravity to do the work for her. Despite this she was determined to go where she wanted to, including a final jaunt outside for a wee on Friday, even though she was so weak and wobbly the wind shunted her sideways on her way back into the house. What can I say? The cat wanted what she wanted.
In her final week, she was also drinking a fairly large amount. It was only in the last 6 months that she began to drink water from her bowl, prior to that she would have the occasional drink from a fresh puddle or, when we still lived in the UK, the stream in the back garden. On one occasion she managed to fall in and became slightly less keen on it after that.

Anyway, on Saturday, she was perky and tried to escape from the Hateful Box Of Horridness before we could put her in it. Then she tried to bite Four Under Nine when he gave her the injections. Then she tried to make a break for it from the examination table. When she got home, she returned to her doormat and had a nap, no doubt exhausted by all of the excitement of trying to bite people.
Throughout the day she frequently got up and sat down again, unable to find a fully comfortable position. This is common in CRF cats. She also felt the cold and began to make her way to the sunroom for a sunbathe. I lifted her most of the way as soon as I realised that was where she wanted to go and she spent an hour alternating between the rug in there and the patches of intermittent sunshine.

I was able to give her three more syringes of the cat milk which she enjoyed but by two o’clock, she no longer wanted any.
At five, having moved back into the main hall, she stood up and forcibly vomited a large amount of watery liquid which was followed immediately by a significant urination. She was able to stand up for this and I was on hand to lift her away from it as soon as she was done. Many CRF cats become unable to stand up and may urinate where they lie. This was the moment I knew that she would not get any better. Even so, she remained as perky as ever and was able to move more easily without a belly full of liquid.
At some point during the day her sight had deteriorated significantly. She was still able to see to some degree as she responded to movement and knew which of us was which, but her pupil was no longer contracting in light.

We put her to bed on her doormat that night knowing we would probably have to take her to see the Vet the following day. Sometime between midnight and six, she fell into a coma.
She had either vomited or urinated on the floor, moved away from it and lay down. While in the coma, she would defacate (although there was not much in her to come out) and drool copiously. We had cloths on hand to wipe as much of it up as we could, but she was damper than an ideal world would permit. That said, she was a very, very long way from what most CRF cats go through.
Although this sounds as though this would be awful, it wasn’t. She didn’t smell any more abominable than she had the day before (this is due to the toxins in the blood stream) and she was, in a very real sense, already dead. She just hadn’t bothered to stop breathing yet.

I know that she was in no pain and I am so thankful for that. A cat in pain will purr. Odd, but true. When she had her eye out, you had only to poke her and she would erupt like a lawnmower. My cat did not purr in her last days.

I had read about the fits and twitching CRF cats experience and I was concerned about what would happen if she had a fit. I’ve seen grand mal epileptic seizures first hand and they are enormously distressing things to watch. She did twitch during her coma but it was only slightly more violent than the movements she would make while dreaming.

When she died, her breathing slowed and stopped completely. Her body convulsed violently half a dozen times; the best way I can describe it is that it was the same as a retching motion. Her body then went into cardiac arrest. All of her muscles became tense so her back legs were stretched out behind her and her front legs in front of her and her body trembled very slightly.
I could see her heart beating highly rapidly for perhaps ten seconds before it stopped completely. I stroked her head with one finger as she died the way I did when she was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb her with a proper head squadge.

Even after the heart and lungs have stopped, the body still moves. The muscles relax and any waste products are expelled (in less delicate terms, more defecation if there is anything left in there). This was something I found hard. As I have said above, I knew she was dead when I saw her in the coma. She didn’t look like my cat looked, if that makes sense. Heaven knows my cat could not be roused when she was deeply asleep – I could pick her head up and she wouldn’t wake up, she’d just start licking my hand in her sleep – but the coma was different.
What was difficult was knowing when it was “okay” to wrap her up and get on with the cleaning up. As it happens, getting up, getting a towel and coming back was how long it took. Not long at all.

I am so grateful for all of the care she received from our Veterinary Surgery. It made a huge difference knowing we could totally trust Brian with her welfare and knowing that he would not have allowed us to let her suffer just so that we could have a few more days. I always had total faith in him to make the right decisions for her, indeed total faith in every single member of the Veterinary Centre in Wexford. Brian, Richard (the rugby physiqued vet), Dan et al, I salute you now. Thank you for everything you did for her.

Although I am sad that she is gone, I’m also happy that she was able to go more easily than some do. She had a good life. She began as the runt in a dumped litter, rescued by the Cats Protection League and she ended surrounded by people who loved her. She is done now.
I miss her, but I’m glad I knew her.

So, how does she smell?

2009-08-28T21:29:00.001+01:00

As you may know, I am the servant of a small, anarchic cat who costs me a fortune and generally attempts to add unhappiness and sleep deprivation to my life at every possible opportunity. My arms are covered with the marks of her displeasure. My bin is filled with the dinners she has refused to eat. She has spent her 19 years upon this earth firmly making a paw shaped dent in my forehead and I love her for it.

I don’t mind that she sits on the chair adjacent to mine at breakfast. Nor do I mind the insistent paw tapping me until she gets some butter to lick (but only from a finger, it doesn’t taste as good on a plate). I don’t mind her newly formed habit of sleeping on the doormat. I don’t even mind arriving home in the middle of a monsoon and spending ten minutes trying to wake her up through the glass so I can open the front door and get out of the wet. She is precious to me so I put up with these things.
It is somewhat troubling then, that over the last week she has gone from inhaling four packets of dinner a day to applying a cursory lick to whatever she is offered before wandering back to her doormat.

At first, we assumed she was being pernickety. Ever since she had her eyeball removed in the spring, she has developed a fondness for fish flavoured dinners; something she wouldn’t touch with a bargepole before. She became especially partial to the sardine Oh So Fishy meals which, being summer, we are all enormously grateful for, as you can imagine. Then, she began to refuse everything that wasn’t tuna fish, from a can, preferably covered in garlic mayonnaise even though garlic (and onions) can kill cats.
Such an all protein, fibre free diet is not good for a cat and He Who Knows Everything and I quickly became required to keep sheets of newspaper and some hygienic wipes handy every time she came in from outside. You’d have thought she would have been a little bit more grateful to have two people inspecting her rear end and making it smell of a spring meadow but there you go.
This unfortunate situation became rather more unfortunate when it became apparent that she was also suffering from impacted anal glands. While it is possible to evacuate them at home yourself, it was felt it would be best all around if she visited the Vets and had it done properly.

The Vets had a good look at her and decided that the dire-rear was not just caused by eating nothing but tuna for 24 hours but also by a bowel infection. Some antibiotics later and she was pernickety, but eating… for a short time.
A trip back to the Vets revealed nothing wrong so a steroid enlivening injection was administered and the advice to keep a close eye on her and bring her back a few days later. The injection got her eating a little more but still not much. Whenever she grew fond of a foodstuff, she would refuse to eat it the next day. I tempted her with meaty sticks, with Ocean Fish and King Prawn Flavour all of which garnered the same response; slight enthusiasm for a small moment before wandering back to her doormat.

It was when she showed no interest in butter that I began to twig what was wrong. If you showed her food, she was keen for it but between that moment and opening her mouth to eat some of it, something was going wrong. Some short experiments later revealed something intriguing; the reason she wasn’t eating was because she didn’t know there was any food there. The Cat had lost her sense of smell.
The interweb recommend waving an alcohol swab beneath a cat’s nose as a certain test but as I lack alcohol, I went for catnip instead. While not all cats respond to catnip, mine certainly does. One leaf is usually enough to make her go all soppy and vicious but at the moment, nothing.

Some research revealed that a cat can gradually lose their sense of smell as they grow older and that they may begin to prefer fish dinners due to their pungency. Hey, I thought, C’est Moi!

Eventually though, she wouldn’t eat at all and we took to feeding her through a syringe. She was not keen. She liked having the special cat milk but watered down dinner was not as popular. As it smelled identical to vomit, I couldn’t really blame her. Instead, I came up with a plan. I would make it taste better by mixing it with something tasty like Iams.
So, I soaked the Iams in water in the mistaken belief they would dissolve. When they had dissolved as much as it became apparent they were going to, I threw them into a food processor along with some of the special high energy, extra pungent Vet dinner.
This done, it quickly became apparent to me that if I managed to suck any of the, frankly delicious looking, mix into a syringe, trying to feed it to the Cat would be like attempting to feed Strider with a spud gun. Luckily, I watch a lot of TV chefs, mainly because I enjoy shouting abuse at them, so I pressed the mix through a sieve until smooth. It now looked, and smelled, like the contents of a baby’s nappy. I just knew the Cat was going to love it.

She didn’t. With a lot of effort we got her to eat 5ml and a further 7.5ml of Cat milk. It is not enough. The Vets did a blood test which reveal her to have liver and kidney problems. Tomorrow she is being taken for a last ditch anabolic steroid injection. If this doesn’t get her going then this will be the end of the road.

A little further interweb research reveals that we have been, inadvertently, doing the right things. Apart from letting her eat garlic mayonnaise that is.
A cat that doesn’t eat can quickly develop liver toxicity. It’s complex and as this is already falling into the realms of Too Long I won’t go into it here. Basically, if this happens, You Must Make Your Cat Eat Something. It’s nice to know my arsing around with the sieve and sticking the entire kitchen out wasn’t entirely in vain even if we didn’t manage to get much into her. Loss of smell can also be associated with this and with renal failure.

She seems bright and responsive so one would hope she will respond but on the other hand she is 19. With the best will in the world, this is going to be weeks, not months.

That, really, is all there is to say.

Keep safe people.

A Trivial Blog For Serious People - Now in Animated Form!

2009-08-21T19:29:00.003+01:00

Some time ago, I wrote a blog named "Conversation" in which I repeated verbatim a conversation I had with Mammy. Now, thanks to the power of a website called xtranormal, the blog exists in animated form! Now even people too lazy to read can experience the magic.

It should be noted that this is slightly less surreal than real life but other than that the accuracy is uncanny. Please feel free to share with everybody you know.

Everybody comfortable?

Something to be proud of

2009-08-17T19:37:00.002+01:00

For reasons I’ve never quite managed to understand, the Government occasionally gets it into its collective hive mind that it is not enough for us all to merely be British, but that we should also be immensely proud of that small fact. To help us achieve this, they like to try and work out what traits make us British so that we can all direct our pride towards displaying these characteristics.
Of course, it is incredibly difficult to define the British national character. For a start, there is no such country as Britain. Britain is more a designation. It’s something to write on the international documents to help the rest of the world who are not entirely au fait with the ins and outs of the home nations. With so many Brits confused about how Britain functions, it seems a little unfair to expect Johnny Foreigner to be aware of our slightly odd way of doing things. As an example, hands up everybody south of Carlisle who fully understands the differences between English and Scottish bank notes. You see?

Sometimes these differences can be inadvertently helpful. The only reason there isn’t a diplomatic incident happening about the possible release of the Lockerbie bomber (on compassionate grounds) is because the decision lies in the hands of the Scots and America has no idea where Scotland is. Even as you read this there is a room of sweating foreign policy advisors frantically checking Wikipedia to find out.

Eventually, it is concluded by some wag that not being proud of being British is, in fact, our sole uniting characteristic. Flags are waved, orchestras launch into Pomp and Circumstance and Parliament comes back into session so we can all get back to occupying ourselves with proper news.

I’ve said before that the only time a Brit will consider themselves to be British is when the English, Scots and Welsh unite against a common irritant. Happily, last week we were given such an irritant and I have never seen a country so united. Thanks are due to the American Right.
As I don’t follow American home affairs as closely as some, my time being otherwise occupied by British politics, Irish politics, EU politics and Coronation Street, you shall have to go elsewhere for an explanation of what Mr Obama has planned for the American healthcare system. All I know is that, for some reason, the people who are not Mr Obama are rather unhappy about it and have been spouting forth lies about the NHS and implying we are all communists.

In the UK, when you are ill, you phone the doctor. If you are lucky you will get an appointment within the next three weeks. Your doctor will see you, sigh, imply you are wasting his time and tell you that if you stay at home and drink plenty of fluids your Ebola will clear up by itself. Grudgingly he will write you a prescription which you will take to the chemist where you will have to stand in line behind 19 OAPs who all want to tell the Pharmacist about their corns in a very loud voice. At the moment you feel most nauseous, one of them will hitch up their skirt to show the Pharmacist their varicose veins and dripping leg ulcer. If it is pension day and there are more than 19 of them in there, somebody else will step forwards with their hands on the hemline and the words “call that dripping…?” If you accidentally make eye contact with any of men at this point, they will offer to show you their shrapnel wounds from the war.
You may, by this point, be thinking that the American right has a point. It sounds terrible. Actually, it isn’t.

There are, admittedly, many areas in which the NHS must try harder. Breast cancer survival rates for instance (The figures the American Right has been spouting are amusingly wrong, the accurate figures are worse.). Mental health care and drug rehabilitation are others.

However. What the NHS does brilliantly is emergency care. If I get run over on a visit to Cardiff, when I get taken to the hospital I know I am going to receive the best care available. Nobody is going to be checking my credit history or insurance details to decide my treatment, I will receive what is necessary to save my life.
Some years ago I carelessly managed to break my spine in three places. My legs still work fine. Score one to the NHS.
When Mammy had unstable angina and was rushed to hospital, she was immediately referred to one of the country’s top surgeons. She was given the necessary operation at the soonest opportunity in the Royal Cromwell in London. It was a complex procedure and the consultant felt it would be better done there as the teams and equipment were ready if necessary. He now uses her as a teaching case for his students. Score two to the NHS.
When He Who Knows Everything split his head open on a chair last October, he shuffled into Wexford A&E, bleeding profusely, only to be met with a demand for €60 before he could be treated. Score 5 billion to the NHS for being free.

This, really, is the key. Free healthcare for everybody means I don’t need to be afraid of becoming ill. With NHS direct, I don’t even need to be afraid of wasting my GPs time. Sure, if I have something trivial, I will sit on a waiting list for months waiting to be seen. It’s irritating but I always have the option of paying for it myself if I am desperate to have it looked at sooner.
Here in Ireland, a private appointment can take 6 months to come through and, very often, you will still get treated in the public hospitals. Even when you have insurance, any medical procedure will cost you money because the hospital puts anything it thinks it can get away with onto the bill. When Mammy saw a specialist eye doctor, she was rather surprised to receive a bill from the insurance company requesting she pay the surplus for the cost of her hospital room, particularly as she hadn’t had a room. On enquiry, the result came back that one is charged for a room whether or not one actually physically has a room because it is assumed a room is had, otherwise, how would one get treated, eh? And anyway, if you don’t have a room, the room charge is put towards our cost of keeping the broken vending machines extra shiny.

The NHS is the best thing Britain has produced and I would say that even if it wasn’t created by a Welsh man. The idea that we have Death Panels or that “if Stephen Hawking had been born in the UK he would have been left to die” (which is my favourite lie of all of them, it’s untrue in so many ways), are ridiculous. Can you really take the word of people who are so ignorant they only refer to England and the English NHS (And not because they are aware of NHS Wales’s natural superiority)?
Yes, whenever a new drug is developed it will be subjected to a cost efficiency analysis before it is made available. Yes, there is a postcode lottery and not all treatment is available nationwide. Yes, discretion is applied in cases where the doctors judge there to be little potential improvement in quality of life, such as in the very old or the very premature. The NHS has limited funds. These decisions have to be made to ensure that when you are brought in from your road traffic accident, the funds were there to buy the emergency treatment you need.
When you look at the American system the right are so keen to defend, is it really that great? Would you still think so if you were one of the sick people who had their policies cancelled by the insurance company who was having a bad financial year?

Be proud of the NHS. It isn’t perfect, but it is ours and it is a site better than any alternative I’ve experienced.

The State of the Job Market

2009-08-05T15:09:00.001+01:00

If you have been paying attention to the front pages of the broadsheet newspapers, and I have no reason to suspect that you haven’t, you may have noticed that gainful employment is becoming increasingly difficult to come by. Headline after headline reports the scaling back of graduate recruitment schemes and rising unemployment figures. What jobs there are have a lot of people after them.

Should you wish to get an interview for one of these rare and elusive jobs, it is essential to make yourself stand out from the hundreds of others who are vying for the same position. Now that Facebook and Google enable employers to unravel your Submitted Tissue of Lies (or as it used to be known, your CV), it has become somewhat necessary to make yourself seem like a more employable person through a gap year or, should you have opted not to spend a year taking drugs in Goa, charitable work.

It seems like sensible enough advice. Rather than sitting at home, collecting your dole, why not get out there and give back to society? It shows employers what a well rounded individual you are. It also has the added bonus of everybody else look slightly worse for neglecting to spend their spare time reading Chekhov to blind puppies as you have.
Like all pieces of advice glibly given by somebody who gets a regular wage paid into their bank account, it has a rather large flaw which remains unnoticed by the media and which renders it quite useless to anybody who is filling out job application forms.
In the UK, to be eligible for the dole, you must be actively seeking and available for work. Should you be performing any kind of charity or volunteer work, you will no longer be considered to be actively available for work and your benefits will be stopped.

A second piece of news you may or may not have paid any attention to is the report that the people in the more middle class jobs (journalists, lawyers, advertising executives etc) come from much more affluent backgrounds than they did some years ago.
It stands to reason. The graduates who manage to break into these areas are the ones who have a CV boasting stints digging wells in Africa and who spent their summer holidays showing inner city chavs which end of a cow milk comes from. The people who spent their summers as a checkout monkey to earn their tuition fees and who left university with a five figure debt cannot hope to compete.
They also cannot hope to get a foot in the door through internship. Unless you are part of the old boys’ network, your hopes of getting a place are slim to non-existent. If you do find somewhere which will give you the work experience, unless you have the (rather obnoxiously named) Bank of Mum and Dad to call upon, you will have to find a paid job to fit in around your unpaid 40 hour week.

Only yesterday I read a defence of unpaid internships which claimed it was a fair system because a graduate should look upon it as an investment against their future earnings. It was argued that at 16, a shop worker is earning the same amount as they will at 40 whereas a graduate’s wages increase year on year. Sadly, how one is supposed to pay the gas bill with future earnings wasn’t explained.
As it happens, a graduate does not earn more over a lifetime than a non-graduate. A teacher can expect to earn (according to the graduate careers service Prospects) up to thirty thousand pounds a year. A recruitment consultant earns an average of almost twenty four thousand pounds a year. It is only after 10 to 15 years experience that it becomes possible to earn the higher wages of forty to a hundred thousand a year. If you start on the checkouts at Tesco, you can work your way up to that wage in ten to fifteen years without a degree behind you.
The statistics produced showing that graduates will earn more over a lifetime get skewed by the 1% who earn the top wages. A degree is only as good as the career path it opens up to you. There is no point in doing a psychology degree unless you plan to do the other three years and become a qualified psychologist.

The upshot of all of this is a system which alienates itself from the population. There is no point in having an office full of boys from Eton or Winchester College. How are they going to come up with an effective campaign to sell fruit juice to single mothers on council estates in Birmingham? Why would I want to read a newspaper whose supplements are exclusively written by people who have au pairs and Le Creuset cookware? I bought my saucepans from BHS (they had a 20% day). What use is an MP who only knows what poverty looks like because they visited it once with a camera crew in tow?

I think the first step is to overhaul the Job Centre. It was rubbish when I graduated six years ago and my UK based unemployed friends assure me it is rubbish now. I’m told it has little to offer anybody who has already perfected the skills of reading and writing. Is a graduate careers advisor too much to ask for?
Then, allow claimants to perform voluntary work without jeopardising their benefits. When you’ve done that, enable people to claim a means tested allowance while on work experience. It will give more people the chance to develop the skills employers want and the contacts to be successful while opening up internships to those graduates are not in a position to work without pay.
The final step is to write to every single university in the land and tell them to specify the job (or self employed career) that each degree they offer qualifies a graduate to do. If it doesn’t directly qualify you for work, it really shouldn’t be a degree.
I’m looking at you, Women’s Studies.

In which Theo talks about the Stuckists

2009-07-31T08:14:00.000+01:00

Although this blog is vaguely subtitled Arts, Opinion and Things Going Wrong, the amount of time I spend writing about Art is very small. The main reason for this is because the instant you write anything about Art, somebody comes along and tells you that you are quite wrong about everything. Much as I like a healthy debate (I’ll argue with myself if other people aren’t available), I’m far too lazy to look anything up and so cannot be certain that they will not be correct in their assertations of fact.
I am also aware that there are no right or wrong answers about Art. The first thing I was ever taught at art school is that a critique is never held subject to the artist’s original intentions. You may have painted the wall by the fireplace green because you thought it would add a nice bit of colour to the room, but we say you were making a statement about the destruction of personal identity and on some level, we can be right.

Of course, many people fail to understand this. I’ve lost count of the amount of journalistic hand wringing I’ve read over the years in which the absence of “proper” art is lamented and sly comment is passed about Michael Craig Martin or the YBA’s, let along the amount of people who take pride in not “getting” modern art. As far as I am concerned, they are on a slightly lower level as those who take pride in saying things like “Oh, I haven’t read a book since I left school!” If you prefer to spend your time on things other than literature, grand, but revelling in one’s ignorance is a good look for nobody.

Groups like the Stuckists, who abhor conceptual art and advocate a return to the figurative painting, are worse still and not just because of their particularly hateful website in which every option seems to open a new window. Maybe it’s some kind of statement about something which I’m failing to grasp due to my annoyance with it. It’s hard to be sure these days.
While it is all very well to rail against dead sharks and unmade beds and the emptiness and pretensions of postmodernism (although that actually is slightly the point), I’m rather underwhelmed by the work of many of the Stuckists themselves. To begin with, some of it just isn’t very good.
If artists who don’t paint aren’t artists (as specified by point 4 of the original Stuckist manifesto), surely it is necessary to have a level of understanding of why we are painting as oppose to, say, producing a photograph. The poster child of Stuckism, Charles Thomson’s “Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision”, has many things to recommend it, but an example of a great painting it is not. For a start, it might as well be a print, or a computer graphic, or a collage; it would have the same impact. If a group is going to advocate painting as the only valid way of creating art, it would be nice if they could inspire with its possibilities as a medium.

Why painting should be held in higher regard than any other medium remains a mystery to me. I would quite like it if we could all just get along. After all, what is the difference between a readymade sculpture and a painting which has come from the studio assistant production line? Jeff Koons doesn’t paint all of his own work. Neither does Bridget Riley. This is how it has been for hundreds of years and how it will continue to be.

In order to have value as an artist, it is necessary to develop a brand. Some of this may depend on technical ability but that reputation takes a while to build up. Instead, it is easier to fast track a brand with media exposure. In order to get exposure, one needs a gimmick so we end up with things guaranteed to wind up The Daily Mail. It is just one of those sad facts of life that an exciting brush technique has a severely limited ability to generate column inches.

This is something else which narks me about the Stuckists. If painting is the One True Medium™ and you are the champions of all that is great about it, why are you better known for your publicity stunts than your paintings?
Who would have heard of S.P. Howarth if he had not been expelled from Camberwell for exhibiting paintings without any accompanying development of ideas? While I sympathise, because I am somebody who stopped keeping a sketchbook the second I stopped being marked for it, criteria marking is criteria marking. Either like it or else save yourself the tuition fees.

For me, any kind of art is at its best when there is dialogue, both with the viewer and for the viewer. A good piece of art should make you want to tell somebody about it. All I want to tell you about the Stuckists is that they do figurative painting a great discredit.

Stupidity Will Be Punished

2009-07-21T19:30:00.001+01:00

It is always nice to keep up with trends so over the last week I, along with everybody else, have been suffering from ProbablyNotSwineFluistus. I had the cough, malaise and sore throat but lacked the fever, which I’m told is mandatory for Swine Flu sufferers. There is every chance it was Swine Flu, of course, but as I stay away from more or less everybody, I’m not sure where I could have caught it from.
Naturally, I am blaming Strider for my wasted days lying on the sofa with a mug of lemon and honey. She had MoreLikelyToBeSwineFluitus but as she doesn’t own a thermometer we cannot be sure. As she had the same cough and sore throat as myself, I suspect she gave me what was just a vicious summer cold along with my birthday card.

Anyway. From time to time I like to apply myself to the problem of how the world can be improved. That way, when I am declared Queen of Everything (as I one day shall be) I will be well prepared and able to put my diabolical schemes into effect more or less instantly.
For a start, I would send every member of the BNP to live somewhere like Nigeria for a while to see how much they enjoy it, only letting them back into the country if they can pass the citizenship test (You have to know what a quango is and “a great scrabble word” is not an option). That done, I would make any young man with a souped up car who thinks it is big and clever to bomb around the backroads at 100mph have a portrait of a My Little Pony tattooed on his forehead. Try and make that look cool and desirable, lads.

The third thing I would do is instigate a law to the effect of: If you are too stupid to have it, it shall be taken away from you until you can prove otherwise.

We all have stupid moments. Strider, for instance, cannot be relied upon to know what a Philips screwdriver is. He Who Knows Everything once drilled through a gas pipe and didn’t notice. Even I, who am extremely good looking and clever, realised after an embarrassingly large number of months of ownership, that my Sigma lens has a button on the side which turns it into a Macro lens. These are all small stupidities which can be forgiven.
What I cannot forgive are people who send thousands of pounds to con merchants.

We’ve all had the email asking us to help smuggle ten million US dollars out of Burkina Faso by just giving our bank details here. In recent times I have received a number of even more entertaining ones purporting to be from the director of the FBI, congratulating me on winning a lottery he had kindly entered me in (without my knowledge) and telling me that once I have sent a two hundred dollar handling fee to this address in Zimbabwe, my thirty million dollars will be dispatched at once. He Who Knows Everything was sent the one which Jack Straw’s office fell for, which claimed his email address was being cancelled unless he filled out the form they provided a link for.
My Myspace inbox is deluged by men telling me they don’t normally do this kind of thing but that they could see the goodness in my eyes and had to send me a note because they were convinced I was an angel. Their wife has usually died in a plane crash as well, so I feel a little mean ignoring them all but I’m sure they will get over it.

I had always assumed that everybody who received these notes laughed at them as much as I do, but astonishingly, they don’t. They believe them.
For the right amount of money, it is possible to procure a so called “Sucker List” of names and addresses of people (usually pensioners) who will send money in response to unsolicited mailings in the belief they have won millions. There was the case of one man who received something like 500 letters in three months and who sent an estimated total of £50,000 to the scammers. He is by no means the only one.
It isn’t just unsolicited mail either. I’ve heard dozens of accounts of modelling agencies who want £500 for the cost of putting you onto their books (and of dozens of people who have paid up) only to disappear into the night. I have a friend who went for an interview for what she had been led to believe was a sales and marketing position in an expanding company, only to find it was a commission only, cold calling job and everybody who physically turned up for interview was offered a position. The most shocking thing about it was that the 16 year old my friend was interviewed alongside was all ready to take the position, believing the OTE quotes of thirty five thousand a year to be true, until my friend quietly took her to her to one side and explained that it was a total scam.

It’s terrible that there are people who make their living deliberately exploiting people who are too desperate not to believe them. It is worse that there are people who would charge forty UK pounds to burn a candle claiming it will ensure the Voudou spirit guides will bring a person good luck. It is unbelievable that Derek Acorah gets paid to be on TV, communicating with rabbits, much less that it isn’t half as entertaining as it sounds.

The worst thing of all is that, when so many people are so desperate and have nothing, there are people who have plenty but who are too stupid to hang onto it.

What I propose is this; If you have money you are intending to send to somebody in an unstable African nation in the belief you will get millions of dollars in return, my people will come to your house, seize your assets and give you a very small amount of money to live on until you understand how stupid you are. Until that time, your assets will be invested and the profits used to help families living below the bread line and who are never going to have enough money to behave as thickly as you do.

Begin your applause… now.

Go Shorty

2009-07-13T20:15:00.000+01:00

It’s my birthday. Or rather, it was my birthday. Time’s relentless march forward rather ensures my birthday only lasts the same length of time as all the rather more mundane dates in the year which are not my birthday. This strikes me as being a trifle unfair especially given that a wet Sunday afternoon is able to expand into the same length of time traditionally given their own designation by palaeontology departments.
In retaliation for this time based injustice, I like to stretch my birthday as far into the surrounding days as I can get away with. Strider, who lacked the foresight to be born at a time of year when nothing much else is happening, rolls her eyes at me and asks sarcastically if I am still a birthday princess, little realising that if she is going to ask, the answer is will always be yes.

I don’t traditionally do much for my birthday. I demand presents and attention and cups of tea I haven’t had to make myself but other than that it is a quiet affair. Obviously, with Strider being as stingy as she is I can be flexible on the presents and with the Cat as noisy and demanding as ever, attention is often given to her rather than me and while He Who Knows Everything is happy to make me a cup of tea, most of the time I prefer that he doesn’t.
The only thing I do demand, with no exceptions given, is cake.

Cake is important and birthday cake is doubly so. Without a cake setting off the smoke alarms, a birthday would just be any other day but (hopefully) with added receiving things. As cake is so important, I refuse to settle for any of the Tesco bought nonsense however much in the shape of an 80’s icon it is. I also refuse to settle for a cake purchased from the local bakery as they tend to have an obscene amount of aerosol whipped cream in the middle. Instead I request that Mammy bake me one from scratch.

Mammy is a very lovely woman whose talents are myriad and varied. Unfortunately, baking is not one of these talents.
Mammy is not a terrible cook. She can be a very good cook. It’s just that much of the time she grows bored half way through the process and wanders off leading to a house full of firemen and an indelible stain baked onto the bottom of the oven. At other times she will become enthusiastic about a recipe but omit and substitute ingredients according to mood or immediate availability. An inadvertent noodle and stilton soup was once created from a recipe originally entitled Goats Cheese and Sun dried Tomato pasta sauce.
Much of my childhood was blighted by Mammy’s insistence that a piece of bacon and a tin of plum tomatoes was a balanced meal, that we would all die instantly of salmonella should any food be served without a coating of charcoal and that aubergines are the perfect vegetable for adding cheese to and baking for three hours. If it hadn’t been for the E numbers in the coatings of Findas Crispy Pancakes, I would never have made it out alive.

The first year I demanded home made cake, Mammy did what any other person in the world would not. She went to Marks and Spencer, purchased a tub of chocolate coated mini swiss rolls and spent a constructive half an hour with a box of matches strategically melting them into a pyramid.
The second year I demanded home made cake, Mammy attempted a Victoria Sponge. I know that is what it was meant to be because I had a look at the recipe. What it turned out to be was an 8 inch square suitable for board games.
A year or two later, I requested a rather marvellous cake Strider and I made in our childhood called a Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake. Mammy obediently dug out the recipe and, upon finding that half of the instructions had stuck to another page and become illegible, opted to make them up instead. The result was so good, I chose to enjoy my piece next to the bin.

Since that time, I have remained silent on the subject of what kind of cake I would like baked in the hope that Mammy will not attempt it. Instead, she has fallen into the yearly routine of attempting to perfect the Victoria Sponge. It hasn’t gone well.
A Victoria sponge is a very basic cake but it is also a very difficult cake. It is the cake that sorts to bakers from the pancake makers. If you can bake a Victoria sponge, you can bake anything.
As it happens, I can bake a Victoria Sponge. People ring me up to let me know they will be dropping by in the hope I will bake a cake for them. Everybody thinks my cake is wonderful although personally speaking, I can take it or leave it. My cake ability does not help Mammy feel better about her failures.

This year’s cake was rather black around the outside. As a backup cake, Mammy attempted a different kind of sponge but, failing to realise a cake tin is different from a sandwich tin, ended up with a mushroom.

Still. Despite the hatred of the task and the constant failure, every single year Mammy attempts to get it right. I don’t mind that she creates things other people would require a lightning rod to produce, she makes the effort to get it right and that, my friends, is worth far more than cake.

In other news: I have received a perplexing amount of hits from a variety of people using the search terms Alright, Constable and Please Be Gentle. Now I’ve managed to use the terms obscene and whipped cream in a post, I anticipate even more popularity.

Best. Farmers Tan. Ever.

2009-07-06T19:41:00.005+01:00

To be honest, as this is the 100th post, it ought to be a little bit special and I had half a mind to leave it for some reflections on being 28 on Wednesday but as I haven't yet given up all hope that I will be lying half cut in a gutter somewhere by then, you shall just have to have this instead.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you, He Who Knows Everything....

Dad from http://theohrm.vox.com/

Maybe it is the jaunty leg pose, maybe it is the enourmous belly, maybe it is the rather distressing fact that this is the front garden...

Whatever the reason, you can see why all the girls love him.

Theo: Killing the Music Industry since 1989

2009-07-03T20:28:00.001+01:00

I’ve been debating for a couple of days now about whether or not I should write about the death of Michael Jackson and how much his loss has affected me. As his loss hasn’t affected me in the slightest and anything I wrote about him would include the observation that insisting we only remember him for the music, not the less than savoury aspects of his personal life, is a little like insisting we only remember Hitler for his efforts to tackle childhood obesity, I’ve decided that it is best all around that I don’t.

Anyway. Like many people born in the 80’s, my youth was a happy blur of sitting on the floor of my bedroom, listening to tapes. It wasn’t just Tracy from Coronation Street at it, we all were. We didn’t all go on to murder people quite horribly with a small piece of decorative art but I, for one, would never totally rule out such an option especially in provocative circumstances.
As I believe I have probably mentioned on countless occasions, as youths, Strider and I didn’t get pocket money. We were offered the grand total of 50p for cleaning He Who Knows Everything’s car, which was a trifle unfair as it was a huge white Vauxhall Carlton Estate and I was too short to reach the roof and so subsequently never got paid. We were also given to option to line our pockets with a whole 20p each for cleaning Mammy’s brass Art Nouveau fire surround. I suspect this is one of the reasons I no longer drink. After of years of inhaling Brasso in a confined space, no legal substances can ever come close to those happy sensations.

In those far off days, it was not possible to thieve music from The Man via the medium of interweb as it is today. Instead, we found ways around it by recording from friends or, particularly if you were me and didn’t have any, from the radio. The result was a tape with the second half of every Phil Collins song ever recorded and a learned oblivion to impacting furniture at speed.

These days, of course, it is so much easier to create collections of the music you want. For a start there is Spotify which is essentially a giant jukebox. It is free a handful of countries (although adverts will be played periodically) or an ad free subscription can be taken out anywhere in the world for the price of ten euro (or your local equivalent) a month. I tried it for a month and it is very good for mainstream music, I just felt I didn’t listen to it enough to warrant spending the money on it.
There is also interweb radio. I recently found a useful site (www.listenlive.eu) which links to all the European radio stations streaming onto the net including Vatican radio “One-O-Five” Live and Radio Liechtenstein. I’ve never listened to Radio Liechtenstein before. I can’t promise I ever will again but it is certainly proving an arresting diversion and demonstrating that I managed to sit in German classes for two years yet learned nothing of the language. I hope you are proud of yourself, Frau Straub-Lee (although to be fair, we did spend much of our allocated German learning time throwing paper at each other. We didn’t want to learn German. We used to chant “Two world wars, one world cup” at the exchange students).

Something else I have usefully found out is that if you use Real Player to stream the radio station, you can record a portion of the stream. It is my childhood returned with a computer and this time I don’t have to fling myself across any rooms or have Doctor Fox on the Pepsi Network Chart talking over the last 30 seconds of everything. As some kind of magic bonus, presumably a reward for not learning German, when I hear a song I like I can rewind the stream to begin recording from the start of the song rather than having only songs that start from the end of the first chorus. It’s brilliant.

Of course, even back in my day it was argued that sharing music illegally and home taping would be the death of the industry and I can sympathise. If I have a copy of a song I have recorded from the radio, I can play it as many times as I like without paying the artist. They are correct to be narked at me. If somebody distributed copies of any of, what I laughing refer to as, my Art to their friends, I would naturally be rather peeved at being denied the opportunity to overcharge people for something.
However. Like many others, I offer free licences on some of my work in the hope that, should they ever wish to pay somebody for something, I will be the person they turn to. While there are many who abuse this system, the people in it recognise that this is one of the best ways to gain the exposure we need. It doesn’t pay the gas bill but if that’s what you want, McDonalds are probably hiring.

It’s not a good system. If you are not able to juggle your time between the day work and what you love, it is a sad fact that you will probably have to drop the creative unpaid parts of your life. The people who don’t drop it are the people who are willing to omit television, the pub and sleep in pursuit of their craft. If that sounds too much to give up, you are probably better off out of it.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have heard “Oh, I’d love to paint/write/glue noses back onto Lepers in Africa, but I just never seem to have the time”. I’m not sure why people say this because all it tells me is they are probably the kind of person who wants to be a painter/writer/gluer of noses back onto Lepers in Africa but who doesn’t want to put the effort in to learn how to do it. It is time heavy and you will fail a lot but if you persevere for a couple of decades you might produce something not everybody agrees should be burned. Oh, and while I’m on this, don’t tell people they are talented, it negates their hard work.

Anyway. Home taping and free distribution is not going to kill any industry and this bleating insistence that it does can only continue to be proved wrong. Give a little love, industry. We are not all file sharing crims. If we don’t have to spend out money on CDs, maybe we will spend it on a promotional T-shirt instead.

Things that make you go "Ngggggghhhhh"

2009-06-25T09:27:00.000+01:00

For reasons best known only to themselves, a random person in Galway has recently taken it upon themselves to send me a number of messages in which they display astounding levels of pedantry (and if I find them too pedantic, imagine how bad they must be) and recommend that I consider how lucky I am not to be somewhere less fortunate. They also recommend that if I can’t take responses to my sarcastic comments then I should refrain from making any. It is very, very odd.

I’m not averse to comments. Quite often they are charming and far wittier than anything I could manage and for these I am pathetically grateful. It’s always nice to know I have achieved my aim of providing somebody with a brief and not unpleasant diversion from the more important things requiring their attentions.
Occasionally though, people feel the need to let me know that actually, Napoleon did not invade on a SW trajectory through Spain, it was a SSW trajectory and that if I don’t even know that I probably go out strangling kittens in my spare time. Upon receipt of such comments I usually let them be but this time, I foolishly forgot Rule One: Don’t Interact With Pedants.
Having swiftly realised that my correspondent may not have realised I was joking, I opted to explain and engaged in the rookie mistake of thinking that signing off a note with the words “Take Care” would indicate a matter was at a close. It turned out not to be.

I tried to be nice about it. In the interests of diplomacy, I apologised if they found my replies anything other than light and compounded my rookie errors by thinking that finishing a note with the words Please Do Not Contact Me Again would indicate that I did not want them to contact me again. In reply, I received the charming advice that if I did not want to be contacted by them then I should not make any more sweeping generalisations about Ireland.

My inner Dark Theo wants to name them them, provide an address where they can be contacted and publish their charming notes in full here. Sadly, such a move would be an abuse of the power I believe I have but which exists only in my head. Like my fifth rule of existence states, Just because Somebody is being a Jerk, it does Not make it okay for You to be.
Instead I must comfort myself with the thought that, should I require it, I have a lawyer who is so good at his job that a government once tried to kill him. Unfortunately, this thought is not much comfort so last night I did reply to them. It wasn’t the nicest thing I’ve ever done but strangely I don’t regret it as I normally do after I have done something a bit unkind. I feel good. I felt better still after blocking her from contacting me again.

The maddest thing of all is that the comment this person has taken umbrage with was made back in April. Somehow, they have worked it into their head that what I said is a slur on the whole Irish nation and its culture. While I frequently do slur the Irish nation and its culture, this was not one of the occasions when I had. The only reason I do not give the specifics of it here is because I don’t want to give anybody any indication of who this person is and where they can be contacted.
The whole situation has the air of “I’m sorry, who were you again?” I have no idea who they are of why they feel the need to keep badgering me. I’m sorry but I’m never going to stop and think to myself “Oh no, I’d better not write that, so-and-so might send me a note!”
Of course, there is every possibility that finding themselves unable to communicate in their usual manner they come here instead. Should they have done that, I hope that reading this over encourages them to stop wasting their time sending me notes and instead get on with their own life in peace. It is very bizarre to have somebody berating you over an issue you are slightly less interested in than Wimbledon.

Oh. Good. Vegetarians.

2009-06-19T21:16:00.002+01:00

If I could cull a group of people from the face of the earth with a wave of my finger (and make no mistake about it, one day I will be able to. Science is working on it as we speak) I would have a difficult choice between homophobes, racists, neo-nazis, book burning small town far right Christian organisations and everybody on a fixed rate mortgage who needs to stop complaining and accept they made a bad decision.
However, if I was not required to consider the good that could be done to all of humanity with my cull and could make my decision based upon purely personal preferences, the group I would chose to cull would definitely be vegetarians.

Obviously, as a hippy and pinko liberal, I am obliged to respect everybody’s lifestyle choices and defend their right to make them. If you wish to exist on bean curd and lentils, please continue to do so. It would just make me a little happier if you could do it somewhere other than at my dining table.

You see, He Who Knows Everything’s sister and her husband have been over to see us. When I say “have been over to see us”, in real world language I mean “wanted a cheap holiday and knew they could stay with us for free”. I am not terribly enamoured of any of my relatives, as regular readers will know. My aunt is very boring and talks exclusively about the number 8 bus route in Birmingham. She has even given a book on the subject to He Who Knows Everything who was disproportionately thrilled by it.
She and her husband are also vegetarian. They eat eggs and cheese (vegetarian for preference) but not fish. This is rather unfortunate as I have a habit of adding greater or lesser amounts of Worcestershire Sauce to everything I cook.

I do not enjoy cooking. I can think of many better ways to spend an hour than over a hot stove and construct meals by picking a carbohydrate, adding a meat based product and boiling up anything green I can find lurking in the bottom of the salad drawer. It suits me just fine. Other people tend to avoid coming to my house for dinner but that also suits me just fine.

One of the major troubles with vegetarians is their habit of attempting to convert meat eaters to the cause. I have met one who doesn’t but his vegetarianism was a by product of his Buddhism and so does not count.
Mammy is still keen on getting some chickens but is somewhat put off by the prospect of maggots and the like. Any would be too much. At dinner, just as we meat eaters were tucking into some tasty poultry, Aunt, with the smug smile of one who feels she is about to win points for creating a convert, felt the need to point out we would no longer be able to eat chicken if we also kept them.
As it happens, she is wrong about this. I know where my meat comes from. It comes from the murdered carcass of an animal bred in outdoor based captivity whose only destiny is to provide me with protein. I am very comfortable with that.

The McCartney’s have also been attempting to turn us away from meat with their Meat Free Monday initiative. They are disguising it as a climate change drive but I suspect it may primarily be to drive up the sales of Linda McCartney ready meals sold to lazy flesh eaters like myself.
Although I have not looked it up to confirm my suspicions, I am comfortable asserting that any quotes about the like for like energy needs of beef verses lentils are deeply flawed. While cows do produce methane and are collectively farting the planet to death, growing lentils is not a carbon neutral exercise. Any crop has to be planted, sprayed, harvested and processed. Until a hybrid tractor is invented, this will involve petrol and other evil planet destroying things. Once lentils have been grown, they need to be shipped to from Canada to the rest of the world.
By contrast, my beef steak has been grown just up the road, slaughtered just up the road and sold in a shop just up the road.

Another point to consider is that the usefulness of a cow does not end with its iron providing taste sensation. Leather is a by-product of the beef industry. While walking around in wooden clogs may suit the warmer regions of the world, leather shoes are a must for a European winter. Can lentils give me footwear?
It isn’t as though a cow gets electrocuted and the bits we don’t want are thrown away: every single part of an animal is used for something. It’s true when they say the only part of a pig you can’t eat is the squeal.

It’s all very well holding press conferences about things but it doesn’t help that nobody thinks things through properly. I remember reading some time ago that recycling may be doing more harm than good because it used far more energy than creating things from scratch but nobody was quite sure because nobody had bothered to work it out.
I’m pleased that the McCartney family are raising awareness about climate change and attempting to come up with a simple and effective idea everybody can incorporate into their lives without too much difficulty. I would just be happier knowing that somebody, somewhere, had done the accurate maths to find out if it will actually help.

in the style of Pheonix Wright OBJECTION!

2009-06-15T19:51:00.000+01:00

There are many tedious ways to spend an afternoon. It was decided that He Who Knows Everything should get to spend his in one of the most tedious ways we could think of: calculating water run off and how high a berm is needed to shield noise carried on a prevailing wind. You see, a planning application has been made near the farm and we have put in an objection.

The application defines itself with the rather vague description of “Driving School” but when you look at the planning map, what it shows is a giant track spread over 6 ha of farmland. Knowing of the applicants’ interest in rally driving, we are somewhat worried that they plan to also use it as a racing track. While I wouldn’t mind having a zoom around it myself, it is a mere 300m from our own property so you can understand why we are less than keen.
Of course, nothing can be kept secret in Ireland for very long and the applicants’ soon got wind of our intentions and decided to pay us a visit to dispel our fears on this matter. Unfortunately they didn’t realise they would be having this conversation with Mammy who cannot be fobbed off, who knows instinctively when somebody is telling porkpies and who was wearing a skimpy vest and no bra at the time.

According to the applicants, the Irish government has plans to bring in a law (in a few years, mind) that provisional licence holders will not be allowed to drive on a road without first having a number of lessons on a private track built for the purpose. This piece of information sounds stupid enough to be true. It is an idea so flawed that I can’t even be bothered to explain what is wrong with it. It’s up there with BNP leader Nick Griffin’s argument that barring non-whites membership to the BNP is only the same him not being able to join the Black Policeman’s Association (whites can join the BPA. If Mr Griffin is having problems with his application I imagine it is probably more due to his not actually being a policeman).
The applicants then went on to assure us that the driving school was for teaching children to drive. I don’t understand why anybody would pay money to have their 12 year old taught to drive a car, but there you go. Apparently, the reason they have a number of coach bays in their car park is so that coach loads of school children can arrive and be sent around the track with an instructor. Noise pollution would also not be an issue as there would only ever be two cars on the track at any one time.
All well and good you might think. Except for a number of things. If what the applicant says is true and the track is aimed at school age children, why isn’t there any kind of educational centre? The only buildings are an office and a garage. What exactly are the children who aren’t having a go on the track supposed to do? Sit in the coach? Also, why are there 63 car parking spaces and 3 formal coach bays? It is no wonder we are asking questions.

Having spoken with the applicants and disbelieved everything they told us, we went ahead and put in the objection. We were going to do it anyway but were spurred on by they fact that the applicants had gone to all of the neighbours and told them they had spoken to us and we were no longer going to be objecting. If what the applicants told us was true, why would they need to do that?

Unlike the UK where planning applications are decided by committee and it is possible for applicants and objectors to attend the meetings to know what is discussed, Irish planning applications are decided by one man who does not discuss anything with anybody and for whom brown envelopes full of money can be discretely left on the shelf outside his office door. It’s why the Waterford planning official was replaced.

As the applicants are multimillionaires and therefore capable of offering officials more money than we can, He Who Knows Everything has come up with a cunning plan. He has always wanted to be a sub-editor on the Sun newspaper and wants to write a press release for publication by anybody he thinks will print it. He has even come up with a headline: DEATH CRASH DRIVER PLANS DRIVING SCHOOL.

You see, last July one of the applicants was had up in court charged with death by dangerous driving. He was found guilty, fined €5000 and banned from driving for 5 years. Curiously, this ban does not appear to restrict him from competing in rallies.
The sentence seems particularly light when it is considered that the person killed was his wife and that the crash was a Porsche 911 which hit a wall at more than 142 km/h. The Garda were unable to test the blood alcohol level of the driver as he was sedated at the hospital and the testimony of the bar staff who had served him drinks all night was not sufficient testimony to charge the driver with drink driving. The unofficial (and scurrilous) version I hear is that his wife was the designated driver who was on the water all night but that her husband was drunk and wanted to show off to his mate (also in the car, barely hurt) how fast he could drive his brand new car.

Anyway. The objection is in. There is no way on this earth that the application can be put straight through without the planner addressing any of the points we have raised.

If it does, I will go and sit the applicant’s hedge with my camera until I get a photo of him driving while banned. That’ll learn him.

Lifestyle Jackets

2009-06-08T19:52:00.000+01:00

Since spending an unfeasibly large amount of money on a DSLR camera, I have decided it would be best all around if I learned to use it and spent some time taking photographs of things. It would be terrible waste if it just sat in its jaunty case and got stroked occasionally.
Unfortunately, having taken photographs of things, it is then necessary to process them and convert them from RAW files to TIFFs or JPEGs so that they may be shown to people whom I know can be counted upon to look impressed. This does not include Mammy, by the way. She can only be counted upon to say “Oh Goodness, that’s brilliant. What is it?”
Of course, it is not necessary to shoot them in RAW format. I could just leave the camera switched to record JPEGs but as I am still not entirely clear on this whole White Balance and Exposure Meter nonsense, it is often necessary to adjust them using the rubbish software which came with the camera. In addition to being rubbish, the software manages to tie up all of my computer’s processing power for over half an hour while it attempts to load an image, then for another half an hour while it compresses and saves it. As a result the blog has been somewhat neglected.

Anyway. For some time I have been seeking a new jacket. When I say “some time”, I actually mean “since March before last”. At the moment I am sporting either a denim jacket which makes me look like a B*witched tribute act, or a leather jacket two sizes too big but which makes my hair look fantastic. The reason I have not been able to find a new jacket is due to being fat, fussy and full of hatred towards shopping.
If you are very thin, shopping must be wonderful. There are communal changing rooms to show off in and the reflected, envious gazes of the shop girls through the chink in the curtains which you can never manage to close fully. You can also waltz into any high street chain confident their clothes will go up to your size; unless you are really thin in which case you can be treated to the pleasant sound of “No, I’m sorry, we don’t go down to a 6.” Mind you, if you are a size 6, I would like to take a moment to beg you to go and eat some pie or something. Really. Being that thin is distinctly unhealthy. Plus, if you are size 6 and you have two matching sized friends, walking down the street together could bring about the apocalypse. You don’t want to be responsible for that now, do you?

Attempting to shop in my neck of the woods can also be a trial for other reasons.
I’ve lost count of the amount of times I have heard somebody (incidentally, often somebody of the male persuasion) complaining about the generic identity of the British high street. Go to Swindon and you could be in Coventry, Cambridge or Carlisle, they say. All the shops are the same, they wail and beg for some originality.
I live in a place with originality and, let me tell you with all my heart, it is terrible.

Wexford town has only a handful of chain stores but over the last few years they have been increasing in number. The majority of shops are still individually owned boutiques, which is a nice thought until you attempt to buy something from them.
You see, boutique owners do not sit in their backrooms running up haute couture garments. Twice a year they go to a trade show to buy clothing they think will sell in their shops. Many are the times I have had a proud shop owner tell me they source the clothing in Paris. Sourcing clothes in Paris doesn’t mean anything. Paris just happens to be a larger trade show than the Birmingham one and for the Irish it is easier because everything is already priced in Euro.

The trouble with shopping in an individual boutique is you become severely restricted in the language you can use to describe things. When a helpful Mammy holds up a garment for inspection, not even I can bring myself to say “Why would I want to spend €145 on something which looks as though it has been used to administer to a really sick bird?” Instead I will take a deep breath and search for something more neutral, such as “Gosh. That’s… interesting.”
It is at this point that the shop owner will leap forwards and start rifling through the rack looking for my size and forcibly herding me towards the changing rooms, grabbing other items as we go. It’s hard to tell people that you don’t want any, especially when their eyes are telling you that parting you from the contents of your purse is the only way their children are going eat tonight.

Happily, with the advent of the interweb and overseas postage, it is now possible to purchase items of apparel via my computer. It’s great. I can look at things while I drink tea. If I see something truly hideous I can call everybody around the screen for a chortle or share it with the email inboxes of chums. Some websites even offer the space to insert a droll comment with your sharing.
There is a downside though. Interweb shops do not try to sell you clothes; they try to sell you a lifestyle.

I am a sucker for a lifestyle. It must be because I don’t have one. I’ve tried to develop one in the past but then I realised that if I had a lifestyle, other people would begin using it to describe me. While I concede descriptions can be useful, more often they are misleading. Consider “Dark haired vegetarian who was christened a Catholic.” You could be describing Paul McCartney or Adolf Hitler.

The jacket I like is on the Boden website. Boden is a whole lifestyle choice in itself. The jacket I like is called the Photographer jacket and the instant I saw it I wanted it. It would look great with my camera. Unfortunately, I am confident it would look rubbish on me. It’s too boxy for a lady of my curves.
I also quite like the corduroy jacket they have. I was very tempted to a cord jacket from the M&S Per Una range last year, but hated the diamante buttons. This jacket has big wooden buttons on it. Big wooden buttons are good. I’m not very keen on the lifestyle it offers though. It is more of a drinking coffee lifestyle. I want an exciting lifestyle offering exotic locations and hunky girlfriendless rugby players.
If only they offered that on the Boden website.

Vote for Me! I live down the road!

2009-05-27T19:37:00.002+01:00

As you may or may not be aware (and should you be a European, I sincerely hope it is the former), next month sees the European elections. Here in Ireland, we also have local elections on and due to the rather tumultuous political events of recent times, the local candidates are hard at work begging us all for our votes.

Ireland uses the enormously confusing preference voting system which involves picking from the list of candidates in order of preference. As I understand it, although don’t quote me on this one, the ballots are gone through awarding the number one votes to each candidate. The process is repeated awarding the number two, then the number three and so on. When a candidate has amassed a required number of votes, they are in. This counting continues until the correct number of candidates has been reached.
This system requires a certain amount of tactical canvassing by the candidates. There may be up to four candidates running from a single political party so they have to let you know which order to vote for them in. It is all most mystifying.

As it happens, the voting system is not even the most mystifying thing about it. It is the candidates themselves.
In Ireland there are two main political parties, Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael. One is descended from De Valera (thought we should all live in hedges and speak Gaelic) and the other from Michael Collins (keen on hedges, a little more flexible about the Gaelic). I still have no idea which is which.
Naturally, I am keen to rectify this gap in my knowledge so when Candidates called round to find out who we would vote for, I dispatched He Who Knows Everything to the front door to speak with them. I would have gone myself but, for complex reasons I won’t go into here, I was wearing a shirt covered in egg and didn’t feel they would take me seriously. HWKE was far more appropriately dressed: An inside out vest half tucked into visible underwear. He’s been taking style tips from Pat the Farmer.

HWKE explained he was foreign and had no clue what the parties stood for or who he should vote for. Rather than explaining which party he was from, what he stood for and what he was going to do should he be elected, the candidate explained he came from down the road and had been elected on previous occasions. When he found out we had come here from Wales, he told us his son took part in the ploughing championships in Pembroke. Then he told us that in the 70’s, he went to Wales and got to shake hands with the Queen.
About an hour later, the candidate from the other main party called around. He hadn’t been to Wales or shaken hands with the Queen but he came from down the road in the other direction and had been elected before as well.

I read carefully through the promotional leaflets both candidates had left. One contained no policies at all but did mention all the years in which the guy had been elected; the other contained a list of when the bloke had been elected and mentioned how fond he was of sport.

Call me an idealistic fool if you will, but I had rather hoped for candidates who would have some kind of plan for the future. I fear it is just not meant to be.
I did have huge sympathies for the candidates of the moment. That was until the doorbell rang halfway through writing this and I answered it (in an egg free shirt) to find my local Sinn Fein man, John Dwyer, asking me for my vote. I told him that I had ruined my paper last time around due to none of the candidates having any policies at all. I explained that I don’t care that candidates come from down the road. I asked him what he planned to do on a local level. I asked him about what he felt he could do for New Ross and told him I felt that there was a great deal which could be done locally for tourism (citing the Ros tapestry project as a hugely wasted opportunity for the town and saying “I thought it was an emigrant ship, not a famine ship” about the Dunbrody). The poor man couldn’t wait to get away. Maybe he was just busting for a wee.

John Dwyer is a great turn in the local paper providing many amusing sound bites at council meetings. My opinion of him, based on what I have read of his activities, is that he is a genuine worker for the local people who have problems with local issues. I do feel that sometimes he makes too much fuss over petty issues which don’t matter to the majority of us. While they may matter to the people he is working on behalf of, I personally would prefer to see somebody who is moving things forward instead of getting bogged down about the order of the council minutes. He may consider it a bonus to be a lone voice standing up to the big guns at the council meetings, I say it doesn’t get anything done. He may give me a confidential look and tell me that he isn’t paranoid when he says the reduced four seat town council is designed for two members of each of the main parties, it isn’t going to make me vote for him. Push forward with fresh ideas. Not just you John Dwyer, everybody.

The trouble I had is that he seemed unable to tell me of anything specific he had achieved. It is all very well saying “Oh yes, we created 5000 jobs, some in cottage industries”, but I want to hear “We did this and this other thing is what we want to do and this is how we are going to do it”.
When I talked about the wasted opportunity that is the Ros tapestry (longest tapestry in the world, or at least it will be) and mentioned how poor the website was, he mentioned the funding it had been given and how supportive he had been to the project. I said you could throw money at anything you liked, it didn’t help. He also mentioned how he had long conversations with the Countess (the leading force behind the project) on the matter. I think I may have supposed to have been impressed.
He talked about schools for a while. I think he assumed that because I am female, I must have children. It would have been much better to ask me what issues are important to me. In case you are wondering it is mental health services, job creation, teaching Irish people to stop being so racist and the queue outside the post office. Start small and world domination can be achieved in no time.

It is important to stress that John Dwyer is by no means unique. This is exactly what all of the politicians around here seem to be like. They hand over the policy free leaflet and run away. They don’t want to talk because they don’t have any answers.
I am a wavering voter. How can I vote sensibly if the best options I am given are “Vote for me because they don’t want me in power” or “Vote for me, I’m from down the road”?
I’m not an idiot. I understand the economic situation. I know it is hard and that any candidates with promises of funds for hospitals or improvements in education are not going to come good.
There aren’t any answers but I know that I would definitely vote for a candidate who could at least tell me what the questions were.

Either that or Alan Kelly:

Blogs win Prizes

2009-05-22T20:37:00.001+01:00

Ordinarily it takes me a certain amount of effort to think of something to write about on this blog. Amazingly enough, not every single day of my existence is filled with unusual and blogworthy events. You’d have thought the universe could be a bit more considerate than that, but there you go.
Happily, the lovely Sarah over at http://sapporosarah.blogspot.com (check her excellent blog out for the latest in Japanese Kitkat flavours and general Japan based amusement) has awarded me, your gracious host, the Awe-Sum blog award. This makes me Awe-Sum, which is a phrase deserving of a jaunty exclamation mark if ever I saw one.

The rules run as follows: I list seven things that make me awe-sum(!) and then pass the award on to seven other people whom I consider to be worthy.

Here we go:

1) I am a genetic mutation. Really. Mammy has blue eyes while He Who Knows Everything has brown. Mine are green. If I didn’t look so much like the Paternal Welsh Aunties I would probably be a bit suspicious by now.
2) I can recite my family tree back to the 1530s. That is back to the reign of Henry the Eighth, history fans. We’re a little bit posh I’m afraid. Highlights throughout my family tree include being hideously insulted by Jane Austin, naming children King when their surname was Fisher and getting murdered on the Isle of Mann. Granted this doesn’t make me personally awe-sum, but I am part of my family and, frankly, will never come up with seven things otherwise.
3) I can move my left eye independently of my right. It is quite painful but jolly useful for impressing boys. Next!
4) I am perfectly capable of holding a conversation while fully asleep and have done on several occasions. I suspect it is connected to my (very infrequent) sleep walking. This is a useful skill I would recommend you all master, although I would also advise you try and learn how not to answer a ringing phone in your sleep. Otherwise you will inadvertently agree to things without thinking them through first and people will assume you only speak in monosyllables.
5) I failed my first driving test with 6 major faults. I then failed my second with only the one minor. Driving into white van men one roundabout before the test centre is not allowed, apparently. I also scored a fat one hundred percent pass on the theory test. Not a total failure then.
6) I am a cruel and heartless daughter. Mammy broke her foot last year and was in a wheelchair for two months. She was deeply unhappy at being so confined to chair and bed and unable to do anything without assistance that I immediately went to the bookshop and got her a copy of Stephen King’s Misery to read. I also got very annoyed with her at one point and wheeled her out onto the decking and left her there. Even Mammy could see why I did it. Upon reflection, she may have just been saying that so I would bring her back inside out of the chill wind and growing drizzle.
7) I have moles everywhere. If you ever need to identify my charred remains, check my ears for two on my right and one on my left. I don’t know anybody else who has moles on their ears. It is ridiculous. I also have one on my right palm at the base of my middle finger. Were I a contortionist, I could probably create some cool dot to dot body art. As I am not we shall just have to wait for a willing volunteer to step forwards and see what they can create on me.

There we are. Seven things. Madam Merrywhether, Donna, Strider, Jo, Aimee, Lily and any board ladies reading… I CHOOSE YOU!

Boom-shanga-nonny-doo-dah

2009-05-17T16:01:00.000+01:00

If you have a large amount of free time at the moment, you may well have decided to occupy yourselves with organising the inaugural Confused Continent Identity Championship. I would urge you to save yourselves the bother; it is quite obvious that Europe would win.

Depending on the context, the term Europe can refer to several different places. To begin with there is Europe the geographic continent. This is simple. There are probably tectonic plates and things to tell us where Russia stops being Europe and begins to be somewhere else entirely but having paid very little attention in geography class, I’m not positive where this is.
There is the Europe of the European Union; a collection of member states whose citizens can travel and work (mostly) freely between them. The EU is also a massive body of complex bureaucracy which has no idea how many people it employs or what they all do. It was based in Belgium to help the Walloons and the Flems stop arguing about who was best and instead unite against a common antagonist.
Then there is the Europe of the Eurovision Song Contest. For some reason, Italy doesn’t exist in it but it does include that well known bastion of European Culture, Azerbaijan.

54 glorious years ago it was decided that the best way to help Europeans become Better People was to pit the various nations against each other in a grand sing off to decide who was the best. So it was that Eurovision was born and it is, by far, the best thing ever to have come out of Europe. It is a chance for each country to represent itself to the rest of the continent. If Albania wants to do that with break-dancing dwarves and a man rejected by the Blue Man Group for wearing turquoise, who are we to tell them they shouldn’t?

Every country gets to field a song. Each country then has a vote to decide who they thought was the best awarding a score of 1 through 8 points, 10 points and 12 points to the top acts. At the end of the night the winner gets to take home a shiny trophy created by the host country and the honour of paying for next year’s gig.
In recent years, due to political forces and the eagerness of various nations who cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be counted as Europe, the number of countries taking part in the competition has reached a dizzying 42. So that nobody feels left out, a new regime of qualification was instigated. We now have a quarter final, a semi final and the grand Saturday night affair. Your qualification is based on how well you did the previous year unless you are France, Germany or the UK who get automatic qualification based on the fact that they fund the thing.

For some reason, large parts of Europe feel that the UK does not take the song contest as seriously as it ought to. I can’t imagine why. I think it might be because we like a theme and have the habit of sending an act with a gimmick. Notable mentions include the school girls with knee socks dancing around a working class white rapper and the camp flight attendant who enquired if the audience would like something to suck on for landing.
It wasn’t always this way. We used to send Cliff Richard, Lulu and Sandi Shaw. Then communism ended and all of a sudden Eurovision was filled with new countries who all voted for either each other or for Mother Russia. In the olden days all we had to contend with was the Greece/Malta/Cyprus love triangle and the Scandinavian coalition, now there are huge subcultures of bloc voting.

In an effort to break the Iron Grip of Russia and the Baltic states, this year the voting was split between the phone vote and a jury vote. Encouraged by this (and presumably by Russian Premier Vladimir Putin’s promise that if we did it properly, Russia would vote for us), Andrew Lloyd Webber got involved. He wrote a tune, he got a lyric writer to put some words on it and he had an X-Factor style competition to find a vocalist. It worked. We came 5th.

To be honest, it doesn’t really matter how seriously we take it, we are never going to win. We know this and, what’s more, we are comfortable with it. Eurovision isn’t about the winning, it really is about the taking part. It is about the show and the spectacle. It is about sitting at home saying “Fyrom? Who on earth thought that would make a snappy name for a country?” and “Wait… didn’t Serbia and Montenegro used to be one place?” It is about costumes that do things and arguing whether the Israeli entrant was born a man.

This year was great. Our gracious Russian hosts had last year’s winner running on a treadmill and through a wall. The interval act was some kind of Argentinean circus troupe who made odd shapes in swimming pools suspended above the audience. Moldova taught us what the daughter of Red Sonja and Michael Flatly would look like. Our new best friend Greece had a light up coffee table which doubled as a cherry picker and Germany brought Dita Von Tease with them.
Ireland wasn’t in it on account of fielding a puppet of a turkey called Dustin last year and a mediocre girl band this. Girl bands only work in Eurovision if they do belly dancing. There was much griping that this would be the year Ireland won and much relief all around when they didn’t make it through to the final. They really can’t afford to stage it at the moment.

In the end it was bookies favourite Norway who took the Russians exquisite frosted glass microphone shaped trophy away with them. It was only to be expected. Their singer was from Belarus.

Dear Dave

2009-05-12T19:41:00.001+01:00

To: The Leader of the Conservative Party, The Rt Hon David Cameron MP

Dear Dave,

I am a voter. I am a voter with a problem. You see, I am something of a hippy and, as a hippy, I have always voted Liberal Democrat. However, without Charlie at the helm they have lost their way. Ming did an okay job for a while but, let’s face it, his popularity was based entirely around his nickname. Nick Clegg must be good at something but whatever it is escapes me.

You can see where I am going with this Dave; If I want Labour out of power, I must vote for you.

This troubles me, especially in the light of recent revelations about MPs’ expenses. You missed a trick there Dave. It’s all very well pre-empting the trouble and giving sound bites claiming the system is to blame for allowing such things to happen, but that is simply not true. The truth is that the members of the house deliberately exploited the system for personal gain.
You are not journalists Dave, you are democratically elected representatives of the people who are paid more than enough to meet the costs of fixing your own dry rot and cleaning out your own moats. Maybe you should suggest abolishing the MPs’ expenses altogether and give everybody the use of a one bedroom flat in their constituency and a room at the Westminster Ibis when in session. Austerity is character building. Remember that Dave.

Obviously, as a voter, I want to know that you are going to address the issues that matter to me. Sadly, you don’t. None of you do. As an overseas voter, my vote is cast in my last constituency. There the candidates are sound on matters of the NHS, schools and the Welsh language but less sound on the issues I care about.
Dave, we ex-pats need out own MP. Who am I supposed to complain to about the price of passports from the embassy? Seriously, €145? That is the same as it would cost me to take a boat to Newport and stand in line at the passport office. It would be cheaper if I lived in Bolivia. There I would only pay £124 sterling.
An MP for ex-pats would be a valuable ally to your future government Dave. We can vote in the home EU elections. We can subvert the entire system if we get together. An MP for ex-pats could organise this for you. The Empire can live again

Think it over. This is your big chance to win my vote, Dave. Here is what you need to do:

1) Start railing against Sinn Feinn. They claim expenses on London flats (for which they pay their Irish landlord twice the going rate) and they refuse to sit in parliament. Stand up and tell Gerry Adams to get over himself. Ireland was never a united nation and we were paid to conquer it over 800 years ago. The people of the north know where the border and its 22% VAT rate is if they don’t like it.
2) Get somebody you know at the BBC props Department to give you a false nose for a day and go and sign on at your local job centre. This is the only way you will fully understand the depths of humiliation and worthlessness all job centre staff are trained to fill the newly unemployed with. You will also appreciate why the country isn’t getting off its knees anytime soon. The job centre is of no use to graduates. If you can’t find them jobs, they won’t pay their fees back and that will be another big hole in your finances. Point this out to people before Labour cop on.
3) Scrap the electric car scheme. It isn’t going to work. Even if it did, it is only good for people who live in cities. People who live in cities don’t need cars because they have public transport and legs to take them where they want to go. If you watched Top Gear you would know by now that Hydrogen is a far better bet.
4) Refuse to allow any kind of religious basis for any decisions. Do not be influenced by religious leaders. Have a lackey handy to pass out copies of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins to any community leaders who want more respect for the needs of their religion. When people criticise you, become a devout Pastafarian. You get to dress as a pirate on a Friday.
5) When you are canvassing and people approach you to complain about things, ask them if they have a full set of limbs. If they do, tell them to be grateful; if they don’t, assure them science is onto it.

Yours etc

Theo

In which Theo Clears out the Cupboard

2009-05-08T20:47:00.001+01:00

You find me in something of a posh mood today. He Who Knows Everything has received a letter from a young man named Chris Fellowes who styles himself a “Retention and Loyalty Manager”. It opens with the words “Why give one gift to Ms Theodosia when you can give 13?”.
Young Master Fellowes mentions, rather familiarly it must be said, how sure he is that Ms Theodosia is still very interested in the subject matter. The coy lad even slips in a joke, claiming that a magazine subscription is not the same gift as last year as a magazine changes with every issue. The stage has clearly missed out on a great wit.
I am very pleased with this new moniker. I would henceforth instruct all people to refer to me thusly, but as it would mean an end to gender based confusion, I don’t think I will.

Anyway. Maybe it’s because Spring has sprung and the sunlight is occasionally streaming through the sunroom windows and necessitating the wearing of sunglasses indoors, maybe it is because when I opened the top cupboard next to the oven a bag of rice fell on my head; whatever the reason, I have been sorting out the kitchen.

My kitchen is stuffed with what many in my area would regard as highly improbable foodstuffs. You would not regard them so, but that is because you are devastatingly attractive and cosmopolitan. I once heard Waterford City described as cosmopolitan by a good looking gentleman friend of mine and have yet to figure out if he was being drier than Michael “I gave up homosexuality because it made my eyes water” Gambon or was actually being serious. I fear the latter.
Some time ago, at Mammy’s instigation, I became an expert in Asian cuisine. My Beef with Broccoli and Ginger could bring a tear to the eye of many a Michelin starred chef. If the Chinese government had offered the pro-democracy demonstrators a bowl of my Sweet and Sour Chicken, tanks would not have been necessary to clear Tiananmen Square. Still, Mammy liked it and that is the main thing. The fact that Mammy’s palette only responds to salt and coriander is neither here nor there, as far is she is concerned I am a top chef.

As a top chef in foreign cuisine, any meals out in foreign restaurants are immediately followed by a request from Mammy to recreate the dish at home. Unfortunately, living in a field, basic ingredients are rather difficult to come by. Up until 10 years ago, you couldn’t buy an avocado south of Wicklow so you can appreciate that my local supermarket can be rather remiss when it comes to stocking such exotica as Shaoxing rice wine or noodles which are not based around eggs.
To solve this, when we go to the UK, we take a trip around the gargantuan Tesco and stock up on various exotic goods. Mammy grows wildly enthusiastic at such moments and encourages me to throw goods into the trolley with growing abandon. Occasionally I attempt to ask a sensible question such as “Are you sure you want that? When you tasted it before you said it was like eating slugs”, but Mammy is blinded by the bright lights and myriad choices of marmalade and can only respond with a vague “Yes I am. Get lots!”

When we return home to our silent field, Mammy looks at the spread of ingredients.
“Can we have spaghetti bolognaise for tea?” she asks.

From time to time I attempt to interest Mammy in the prospect of rice noodles but she refuses to eat them because it’s like eating slugs. Eventually I give up and the ingredients sit neglected in the top cupboard until one day, a bag of rice falls onto my head and I regretfully find a bin bag and begin clearing out the things no longer edible.

The amount of food I had to throw away was so disgusting that I have instigated a new rule. If you insist on buying it, you are eating it. So far we have endured Tikka Masala made from instant spice sachets and several jars of *Meat of Choice but Probably Chicken* Tonight.
We have a Bombay potato spice mix earmarked for next week.

Maybe slugs would improve it.

"Wow! This Product Realy Works!"

2009-05-04T20:27:00.004+01:00

Once upon a time I must have been less cynical. I’m sure I wasn’t born into this world with an instinctive reasoning that anything demonstrated on the television in front of a studio audience must, by default, be a lie. At one time I must have been able to marvel at power juicers and mandolins which prevent your fingers becoming an attractive side dish, even if I was too young to articulate such amazement at the time.
As it is, years of broken promises and presenters suffering from hyperthyroidism have destroyed any belief I may once have harboured that a copper coin can truly be returned to its original factory sheen using only the power of oxygen. I could be forgiven, then, for regarding Mammy’s latest cleaning product acquisition with less than total enthusiasm.

Mammy is not a cynic. When she is told that something is going to happen, she believes it will. When she sees an oven cleaner labelled “Wow! This Product Really Works! No Mess! No Smell! Simple To Use!”, she immediately thinks of how much I will enjoy using it and of how her oven will become so clean, she will be able to cook her dinner in it.

Having been presented with my new gift, I read the instructions tentatively. They specify coating the inside of the oven in the liquid and leaving it for a minimum of four hours, or overnight if you want what they refer to as “truly amazing results!”. I don my rubber gloves and set to work.
The liquid itself is gloopy and puts me in mind of egg whites; egg whites with a very faint chlorine smell. I apply it to the inside of the oven. Things go well. I am able to inhale without fear of burning my nose hairs off and there is none of the light-headedness you get from using Mr Muscle in an enclosed space but never mind.
I turn my attention to the oven shelves. Large plastic bags are provided into which you put your shelves, add half a bottle of liquid, expel the excess air from and leave for two hours. My first problem is finding somewhere to leave the bag where inadvertent leakage won’t cause damage to flooring, worktop or the world’s nosiest one-eyed feline. I settle for the utility room as the tiles in there are already ugly.
My second problem is attempting to expel all of the air without either ripping the bag or covering myself in what the packaging swears is a deadly chemical. Eventually I manage it but only once I have dripped several fluid ounces of liquid onto the kitchen floor. As it fails to strip the patina of my medium price clicklock flooring, my doubts increase as to how effective the product will manage to be on the burned on fat on the bottom of the oven.

Four hours later I return and examine the oven shelves. With the small encouragement of water and sponge they are clean. Spookily so.
I turn my attention to the oven. None of the liquid has dripped onto the carefully spread newspaper. It still doesn’t smell. When I begin to wipe it with a wet tea-towel, to my amazement, the dirt comes off. I spend half an hour on my knees with my head in the oven, wondering why anybody would chose this as a method for drawing their life to a close (although, to be fair, if that was your state of mind I suspect you would probably be less concerned than I was about leaning on the oven door and breaking the hinges). When I am finished, the inside of the oven is really clean.

So, there was no mess, there was no smell and it was simple to use.

It has to be a sign or portent. The End of Days is definitely upon us.

In camera news: I have very nearly learned how to use the camera on auto mode. When I can remember to leave the anti-shake turned on, I will be photographically invincible.

Here is a (very slightly out of focus) picture. I call it “All Your Nuts Are Belong To Me”.

So this is it, we're going to die.

2009-05-01T20:10:00.001+01:00

As promised, He Who Knows Everything brought me my new camera. I love it. It is, quite possibly, the best thing ever. It will take me, at a conservative estimate, from now until the Armageddon to learn how to use it properly but that’s okay because the good news is that the Armageddon is already upon us.

Happily, Ireland has only the one case of Swine Flu so far. The news reports helpfully specify that the recipient lives in the east of the country and has just returned from Mexico so we shouldn’t all panic just yet.
According to the Chief Medical officer, Dr Tony Holohan, the Government has enough antiviral drugs put by for half of the population. This sounds like a lot until you consider that there are only 4 million people in Ireland and 1 million of those live in Dublin. Maybe Bono will step in and buy doses for those of who don’t live in the cities. For years we’ve let him pretend he is Dutch for tax reasons. He owes us.

The World Health Organisation is promoting helpful advice to help prevent the spread of the disease, such as washing your hands and throwing a tissue away as soon as you have used it. Personally I would suggest sneezing into the inside of your elbow (so germs don’t sit on your hands) and getting an alcohol gel to clean your hands with before eating or drinking whilst out (find them in the soap dispensing aisle), but then I am a lot better looking and much more clever than the WHO boffins.

While I am certain that this is not the start of something which will end with me being drowned by my own mucus filled lungs, part of me feels slightly concerned that I may be wrong. This is for two reasons.
The first is that I had a bad dose of flu a couple of years ago and still remember how awful it was. I was unable to sleep. I had constant pain in my legs, a fever and a spell of delirium in which I was mentally trapped in a game of Advance Wars DS at which the computer kept cheating so I couldn’t win. Since then, I haven’t been able to play it with any enjoyment.
I also couldn’t eat. Even once I had recovered it took a week before I could eat anything. It wasn’t down to nausea, I just could not eat. If I had a mouthful of food, it took the hugest effort of will to swallow it. Bizarrely, I didn’t feel weak from lack of sustenance and I didn’t loose much weight either.
Maybe I am stating the obvious, but flu is the one illness I really don’t want to get. It is unpleasant. The universe knows this and, I am concerned, may feel inclined to send some my way just so that it can watch my reaction. It is already visiting hay fever upon me in the guise of sore throat, runny nose, headache and thick lungs. If I had been to Mexico, I’d probably be worried by now.

The second reason is because of literature. Some years ago I read a quite good book called The Last Town On Earth by Thomas Mullen. It is about a town in Washington state which quarantines itself during the 1918 pandemic. Every description of the Spanish flu in that book seems to be coming back to me now. If you are very ill and on the verge of Swine Flu related death, I thoroughly recommend it as something to read while confined to your bed.

To be honest, I’m having a little trouble being worried about this. Mind you, that is me all over. Severed limbs or economic disaster I remain unfazed by; a single woodlouse on the kitchen floor and I will be behind the sofa hyperventilating in the panic that there may be more somewhere.
Mammy seems worried and found the announcement that we were at level 5 pandemic alert (or whatever they call it) rather scary. I, whose school career was marred by criteria marking, remain slightly more blasé about it. At least I understand the numbers and what they mean. Announcements that the terrorist threat level has been raised to dark magenta give me no knowledge at all.

Anyway. As with all things there is a bright side. Everybody who still has a job will catch swine flu from their colleagues and die.
The unemployment crisis: Solved.

The New Camera - Decision Time

2009-04-26T11:39:00.000+01:00

If you have been paying attention and/or memorising this blog, you will recall my desire to squander a large amount of money on a Digital SLR camera. In order to save myself 7% on the list price in VAT alone, I instructed He Who Knows Everything to buy it for me while he was in Cardiff.
The only problem with such a move is that, obviously, I am picking a camera based entirely on interweb research and the opinions of people I don’t know (but who seem divided between the Sony and Cannon EOS 450D). I would have been happy to do this. At the end of the day, I reasoned, when the button is pressed, a picture gets taken. I managed to take fantabulous photographs with my old Pentax K1000; I will take fantabulous photographs with this.

Part of me, though, was still cautious, so I decided to head into Wexford town, go to the Sony Centre and have a go at pressing all of the buttons on the machine which would soon be mine. I would also, I decided, go up to Sam McCauley (which is a Chemist, or Pharmacy depending on which term you understand) and play with their Cannon.

The Sony Centre is not the best place in the world to go if you require information about a Sony product. While they are all lovely chaps and most industrious about asking if I would like any help, none of them work at the Sony Centre because they have a life-long love affair with the brand and are desperate to share their knowledge and enthusiasm with the public. They work in the Sony Centre because it has pleasant décor and a staff discount.

I held the camera. I looked at the flippy out screen. I pressed the button. I induced a moment of panic when I asked if he had a 70 – 300mm lens he could put on it for me (he didn’t, but he did have a 55 – 200mm). I admired the superior AV live view.
Then I asked how to adjust the depth of field.
He swallowed.
“What exactly would you mean by “Depth of Field”?” he asked.
“The relationship between the objects in the front of the frame and the back of the frame.” I explained.
He didn’t say anything.
“On the old cameras you adjusted the fstops.”
He still didn’t say anything.
“There was a clicky bit here.” I said, and pointed to the lens.
His mate jumped in. “To be honest, you probably know more about it than we do. We mainly get trained about the TVs. My ex-girlfriend was into photography and used to talk about stuff like that and I had no idea what she was talking about. If you go on the Sony website, you can download a PDF of the instruction manual. That will answer all of your questions.”
So they didn’t feel as though it had been a total waste of time, I asked them to write down the prices for me, which they did on a shiny brochure. The shiny brochure told me everything about the camera. It demonstrated how happy you could be if you had one of these cameras and used it to take photographs of an ethnically mixed group of children in football uniforms. It doesn’t show the following minutes in which the Rozzers arrive to arrest you and Daily Mail readers form an angry mob outside your home, but I’m sure it would have if space allowed.

In the interests of fairness, I went up to play with the Cannon and was immediately shocked at how much lighter it was. Obviously, I am strong from years of hefting plasterboard above my head so such a thing matters not to me, but even so… makes you wonder what on earth Sony have put in theirs.
The Cannon was very nice. It didn’t have a live view and it didn’t scan your retina so it knew what you were looking at, like the Sony. It costs more money and the lenses are more expensive because they have the anti-shake built into them rather than into the body, but they make much less noise when they are focusing and, being Cannon, there is a huge range of lenses and accessories available both new and second hand.
I asked the lady which one she thought was better, the Cannon or the Sony, and she said the Cannon. When I asked her why, she said it was because Cannon made all their cameras in-house as oppose to Sony who subcontract it to other companies and only make things like the chips themselves (which probably explains why the live view on the Sony is so good). I must confess, that doesn’t sound to me like a reason to buy a Cannon, that sounds to me like Sony are being sensible about things.

Interestingly, while in Cardiff, HWKE has been to two camera shops, Jacobs (a smallish chain) and the Cardiff Camera Centre. In Jacobs, the salesman recommended the Cannon as superior whereas in the Cardiff Camera Centre, the Sony held the favoured position.

So, HWKE went to the Camera Centre Cardiff and got me the Sony. He got me a Sigma 70 – 300mm lens, two UV filters and a Polarising one, a Memory Card, a natty bag to put it all in and a tripod. I had no desire for a tripod but he thinks that if you have a camera, you should have a tripod. He also pointed out that he gets very shaky hands due to his arthritis so he would need one. He will be arriving, with my camera, tonight. Hurrah!
When I sent him an email with my instructions telling him what to buy, I told him that I didn’t want one of the cameras that arrived with a lot of pictures of Strider on the memory card. He replied with “Okay. I won’t get the limited edition “S” series then.” He is such a wit.

I, and just about anybody else who lives in Ireland, complains at length about the price of things over here. When I was pricing up the cameras, I always knew that it would be cheaper in the UK because of the lower VAT rate and the weak pound. What I didn’t realise was that HWKE would be able to go into the Camera Centre Cardiff and get me all of the above for slightly less than just the camera would have cost me if I had bought it from the Sony Centre in Wexford town.

One last thing: A recommendation.
I bought my camera from the Camera Centre Cardiff. They are a third generation independent shop which has been in business for over 60 years. The owner bloke HWKE spoke to was super knowledgeable and jolly helpful in all matters. I have also heard good things about them from other people, so it wasn’t just a case of good humour directed towards a Brummie with a beard.
Their website can be found at http://www.cameracentrecardiff.co.uk or if you Google Camera Centre Cardiff you will find them; they also ship all over the world, whatever their website currently says, so there is no excuse for Johnny Foreigner not to take advantage of the exchange rate this instant.
I personally feel it is important to support independent shops. They offer specialist knowledge based on familiarity with their stock that you just don’t get in the chain stores. Let’s face it, nobody runs their own shop because they are guaranteed a wage packet at the end of the week. They aren’t. If they don’t know about what they sell, they are not going to still be going strong after 60 years.
If you have any kind of independent shops in your area, why not think about spending your hard earned currency there?

Proof of Existence

2009-04-24T19:33:00.000+01:00

Today, for the first time in forever, I was asked for ID. I would explain what I was doing at the time and why the person asking me felt it a necessity to do so, but then I’d have to kill you and my weekend is too full of happy plans to disturb it with an around the world serial assassination mission.

Usually, if I need ID, I will take my passport with me. Its flimsy red plastic cover may be nothing compared to the beefy hard-backed blue one I had in my childhood but it is instantly recognisable as a piece of personal identification and usefully mentions that if I get into trouble, marines will descend from helicopters to rescue me. They have to. It’s what citizenship is all about.
However, as you may realise, I do not carry my passport around with me on a daily basis. Such a thing would be ridiculous and anyway, I am one of the few people in the world who has a decent photograph in theirs so if I lose it or it gets stolen it will have to be replaced with a glary biometric image of me. I can’t afford to replace it anyway. You have to go via the embassy and pay €145 for the privilege; twice the price those on the mainland pay.

Fortunately, what I do habitually carry around with me is the card section of my driving licence. Unlike the UK, when you are motoring in Ireland (as the citizens advice website so charmingly puts it) you must have your licence with you. If you are stopped by the Garda and you don’t have it with you, you will be taken to court.
He Who Knows Everything was once stopped at a Garda checkpoint. At first they seemed more concerned with eating their breakfast rolls than bringing motoring order to a small corner of Wexford, but when we stopped and asked them if they were a checkpoint they said they were so we played along.
“Have you your licence with you?” asked the Garda.
“I have.” He Who Knows Everything replied and handed it over.
The Garda looked at the driving licence. There was a long pause.
“It’s a UK one.” He Who Knows Everything said helpfully.
“Oh, right. That’d be one of the new ones then, would it? Right you are.” The Garda said, gave it back and returned to his breakfast roll.
The Garda have also been distinguishing themselves this week by failing to apprehend a burglar who stopped for a pint while 20 officers and a Garda helicopter attempted to find him. Really. (http://bit.ly/19vNsJ)

Anyway. Part of the problem with giving somebody my driving licence as a form of ID is that, because it is a UK driving licence, it has a UK address on it. This breaks the First Rule of Getting Through Bureaucracy Alive, namely: Do Not Give Any Information That Is Not Specifically Asked For Because It Will Only Cause Problems. This is why it is wise to use a passport as ID. It tells them who you are but does not show any extra worrying information which will cause them to frown, flag their Very Important paperwork and condemn you to an eternity of trying to prove you exist in real terms and not simply as an abstract concept.

What I really ought to do is transfer my UK licence to an Irish one. I am a little nervous about doing this because it means entrusting my very important documents first to the post office and then to a body which manages to have a 33 week waiting list for driving tests in my county alone. I don’t mean to imply that the Post Office is the slowest form of transport known to man and that it takes them longer to bring me something from France than it would take me to drive there and back to pick it up myself. Twice. I don’t need to imply it. I know it to be true.

The thing is though, what happens if I post off my documents and, while they are away gaining citizenship, I get stopped by the Garda demanding proof of my qualification to drive a vehicle on a public highway? In all likelihood, they will be so astounded that somebody would drive a taxed and insured car filled with petrol rather than pink diesel that they will assume I am some kind of drugs pigeon and tear my poor beleaguered Micra to pieces searching for the hiding place.

Still. I won’t mind. I’ll be having a good time with the Marines.

Factors of Life

2009-04-21T19:49:00.001+01:00

Let me begin by making one thing clear; while I understand it is a deeply unpopular viewpoint, I still really hate the summer.

For a start, I hate the heat. As I believe I have mentioned on one or two occasions, I am not a skinny waiflike girl who is unable to walk over a cattle-grid or stand up in a stiff breeze. Don’t be fooled by the low resolution image of me you can see on the side of your screen, that picture was taken from above with me attempting to look as thin as possible. I am a UK size 16-18, most of which is made up of my bottom. This baby got much back.
When you are, ahem, curvy, the natural instinct is to cover up. Covering up makes you hot which makes you sweat which makes you feel unpleasant and look even worse. I know that I am being foolish and that, in all honesty, nobody actually cares and that it is far better to feel comfortable than worry about being laughed at by 13 year olds. I know the importance of holding on to that thought. It’s just that whenever I get a grip on the idea, I usually see somebody dressed in clothing two sizes too small for them with a massive muffin top and bulbous quadrabreasts and I fear that I look like that and nobody has mentioned it because they are all too lovely.
I was in Wexford town the other day and I saw a nice looking girl in a white linen skirt which, when exposed to full sunlight, revealed a particularly intimate tattoo on her rear along with a certain amount of… crackage, shall we say. I’m sure she had no clue about it and, although I felt bad for her, I didn’t want to be the random stranger who walked up to her and asked her how long she’d had to eat standing up and mentioning that Marks and Spencer are good for underskirts. I hope one of her work colleagues pulled her aside at the end of the day and had a discrete word. Seriously girls, white linen of any description needs a bottom covering top or proper big knickers.

I also hate getting a suntan. Due to being pale, having light coloured eyes and more than one hundred moles on my body, I have to be very responsible about not getting skin cancer. This means having a suntan lotion with a high SPF, a very fetching sun hat which even a Provencale farmer would be embarrassed to put on his donkey, and generally staying out of the daylight until after 4pm from March through to October. Should I venture into daylight, I must ensure I am well covered up which makes you hot, which makes you sweat and so on and so forth and I really mean it, girls, about the knickers.

Every year I have a debate about which SPF I am going to choose. Mammy always tries to convince me that I should get a 20 so that I can go a bit brown “like a little sausage”. I then tell her that I don’t want to be a sausage and she goes all misty eyed with nostalgia saying “that’s just what you used to say when you were little. You used to cry because you didn’t want to be a little sausage”. Usually I opt for a 30 which, with the help of clothing, sun hat and the indoors, keeps the sun burn to a three day pinkness level (it takes three days to go from pink to slightly brown).

This year, due to the last two summers of total rain and abject misery on the faces of everybody who wasn’t me, I am even paler than usual. My face power, which is the palest one available from the nice lady on the Clinique makeup counter, is verging on too dark. That’s how pale I am. As a result, I am now wondering if I would be more sensible to opt for the mighty 50+ SPF.
This is not something I wish to get wrong. A bottle of Ambre Solaire costs €17.99 in Tesco. I could buy a cheaper, inferior brand but any money I saved would be drained from my pockets by the future chemotherapy such a move would necessitate. It is important to get this right.

While I have been procrastinating, the warm weather has rather snuck up on me. It has been clear skies and sunny days a-go-go around here this week, so yesterday afternoon I donned my sundress and spent some quality time with my decking.
Knowing from previous experience how capable I am of getting hideously disfiguring sunburn even in April, I lathered on an inch thick layer of Mammy’s bottle of factor 15. Knowing from previous experience that my legs are impervious to getting either tanned or burned and that it will take until August for them to show any sign of it, I did not bother lathering an inch thick layer of Mammy’s bottle of factor 15 upon them.

As it turns out, I may have been wrong on that matter.

As it also turns out, while socks with cows on may protect feet from chilblains and decking splinters (as well as looking really natty with a turquoise blue cheesecloth dress), they are not the most conducive accessory to even tanning.

The Great Camera Debate

2009-04-17T15:29:00.001+01:00

Something I love, but which I never actually spend any time doing, is photography. The main reason I don’t do any is because I don’t really own a camera. There is one on my mobile phone and shoved in a drawer somewhere is a digital one I received free with a PC I purchased in 1998, but I don’t own any sort of proper camera with which I can take pictures on a daily basis.

When I was very small, we had a Kodak instamatic camera which I would occasionally be allowed to take a photograph with. Unfortunately, my 5 year old self was not terribly good at holding a camera steady so the results were usually somewhat blurred and indistinct but my parents were very kind and let me have a go anyway.
The best shot I ever managed to take with that camera was of Hong Kong harbour as the plane came in to land. This was back in the days of the old airport which only pilots of several decades experience had the nerve to attempt a landing at. Half of the shot is taken up with plane wall but the half inch of view you can see looks smashing.

Eventually, the instamatic was put away and a new camera was purchased; one which didn’t require a Sherpa to carry the necessary flashbulbs. Instead it was a Canon whose battery compartment lid swiftly broke and had to be Sellotaped into position to allow photography to take place. The memory of the instamatic quickly faded in my mind and photography became inextricably linked with the difficult task of attempting to squeeze a battery case closed while framing a shot and holding down the button for the requisite two thousand seconds while your subjects competed for the Ms Rigor Mortis UK crown.

When I began studying for my A levels, I was introduced to photography as a medium and I realised what I had been missing. I loved the SLR cameras, the solid weight of it in your palm, teasing the lens to get the focus just so, cranking the fstops to get a huge depth of field, the satisfying climp of the aperture as you took the picture, the physical cranking on of the film and, when it was finished, the delightful toy-town winder underneath.
The only thing that surpassed my love of taking the photographs was developing them. In school, I’d tried to like chemistry, but it was complex and abstracted and full of diagrams I didn’t understand. In a darkroom there were all the fun parts of chemistry (measuring things out in their proper quantities, heating things to certain temperatures, bottles with hazard symbols on them) but without the boring testing-variables of scientific method. Plus, at the end of that day you had more to show for it than a nail which may or may not become covered in rust over the following seven days.
Once at Art School, I briefly flirted with the idea of studying photography as my specialism but decided against it. While I loved taking photographs for myself, I had no idea of how to take photographs as an artist. I had barely heard of Cindy Sherman, Man Ray or Henri Cartier-Bresson so instead I picked painting and spent 3 years in the frozen wastes of the 5th floor studios.

Between then and now, the world has progressed and photography has progressed with it. Gradually, digital cameras have become the norm. They are no longer the size and weight of a masonry block and more than 6 photographs can be taken before it becomes necessary to upload them from the memory card. From time to time, He Who Knows Everything and I mutter something to the effect of “We really ought to hasten to the shop and buy ourselves a camera”, but it has never happened.
The main reason for this is that we were never able to decide between a DSLR and a compact. The DSLR models were prohibitively expensive but the compact cameras would drive me, in particular, insane with their lag (Press button… wait… wait… picture taken… wait… wait…).
When Cos was here after Christmas, she brought with her a brand new Nikon Coolpix with which she attempted to take some photographs. She attempted to take one of me without my knowledge but I noticed and told her my image was a registered copyright and she would have to pay me to reproduce it.
He Who Knows Everything and I were cautiously interested in this camera. We realised the potential held in these new fangled devices. We wanted one.

He Who Knows Everything came up with a cunning plan. He has spent months subliminally suggesting to me that I might like to buy myself a digital camera. He got the half tree that is the Sunday Papers to run an article entitled “5 of the Best entry level DSLR cameras”. He has the local wildlife run in a photogenic manner across the lawn and pause to nibble cutely at the hedge. He buys the Saturday Guardian because it has a photography competition on the final page of the magazine. He caused the Bank of England to reduce the interest rates so much that there is no point in having money sitting in a savings account anymore.

The price is the main stay on my enthusiasm. The DSLR cameras I want are in the region of six hundred or seven hundred euro. Aside from cars, property and jewellery, I believe that would be the single most expensive thing I have ever purchased. It isn’t just the camera either, once you have the camera there is an extended warranty, the accessories… I could easily spend another two hundred euro on basic bits and pieces to go with it. Plus another several hundred on a second lens.
These are all very big numbers. Happily, He Who Knows Everything has planned a happy trip to Cardiff where there are a number of independent camera shops who stock a wide range of DSLR cameras at prices much lower than in the Eurozone.

At the moment I am favouring the Sony Alpha A350. I like the flip out screen and superior live view. I yearn for a 75mm – 300mm lens and a polarising filter. I wonder if I want a tripod as well but conclude probably not at this present time. It will give Strider something to buy me for my birthday.

Conversation

2009-04-14T19:40:00.000+01:00

Mammy: Do you remember that hamster you used to have?
Me: Yeah… Mrs Tiggywinkle.
He Who Knows Everything: Mrs Tiggywinkle?
Me: I think I may have been a little confused between hedgehogs and hamsters. I was only 7.
Mammy: Did you love her?
Me: Yes.
Mammy: Your friend killed her you know.
He Who Knows Everything: I’m not sure she did. They don’t live very long.
Me: Well that one certainly didn’t. I don’t think it helped that you then put her in the airing cupboard.
Mammy: I’d read an article in a magazine! They can sometimes go into hibernation and need putting somewhere warm. I thought it might help.
*pause*
Me: How did you think mummification was going to help a dead hamster?
*longer pause*
Mammy: It might have done.

In Which Theo Attempts to Thwart Cybercrims

2009-04-10T20:39:00.001+01:00

Some people are born to be writers. It wouldn’t matter if they wittered in a national newspaper or the walls of a public toilet, in their soul they are a writer and it colours their every approach. The same can be said of artists. It is not merely what you do; it is what your soul is.
I have the soul of a computer programmer. Show me anything clever and my first impulse will either be to try and break it with legitimate use, or else harness its power for a purpose other than the one intended. Back in the days when I learned Turbo Pascal, I spent far more time putting trapdoors into my programs than I ever did implementing bubble sorts and the like. The result was usually a very pretty menu system which, with a little help from my friend Aimee, would allow you to play tunes on the middle row of your keyboard if you typed “antidisestablishmentarianism” after option 4.

Everything was so much better back in the day. Even nostalgia. The interweb was a threatening DOS screen designed to exclude anybody who didn’t know the proper commands. Then came the golden days of Netscape when the only people you could find in a chat room were the computing students of Bournemouth Uni. The first thing I ever looked up on the interweb was a Meat Loaf website. It took half an hour to load before returning an error message. Good times.
Even the computer viruses were better then. I used to spend hours reading the help section of my PC’s virus checker just because it was so interesting. Remember the Cookie Monster virus? Or the Brain virus? These days it is all about the spying and the nicking credit card details. How many of today’s virus creators would give you poetry?* Sasser and Conficker may be effective, but where is the fun?

Naturally, I don’t want my system infected with viruses. Not even amusing ones. To prevent this I spent an afternoon downloading a virus checking software. Or, at least that was the plan.
Having gone to the website, my first challenge was to find the minuscule button which would lead me to the free download. Having found it, I then had to negotiate my way through the lengthy comparison tables which showed me all the things a paying service would provide me with, none of which I want. I told it, again, that I wanted the free one.
Grudgingly it took me to the download screen. It claimed my download would begin shortly. While I waited, it thoughtfully provided me with an advert letting me know I could have the Premium Service for $0.00, down from $35.99. Keen for something free, even though I didn’t want it, I clicked the advert. All I had to do was buy something else I didn’t want and freeness would be mine.
I hit the back button and waited for my download. When nothing happened I clicked the “Click here if it doesn’t work” button. A cynic might suggest this is the only way to get it to work at all and they would probably be right.

With the download complete, I had a cup of tea before attempting installation. Installation scares me. I am forever being prompted to install Windows updates but lack the nerve to do it myself as it tells me to back up my hard drive first. I have no idea how to do that. I instead rely on a combination of automated urgent updates and He Who Knows Everything’s disregard for warning messages delivered in bold fonts.
The installation Wizard asks me questions. It insists I read long and complicated documents which deal with US law. I only agree because if I break them, I know they will have to extradite me first. It offers me the chance to be helpful by letting them spy on what I do. I decline. It offers me a special tool bar which will warn me of nefarious websites before I visit them. Knowing Mammy’s innocent belief that the Google sponsor Ads will lead her to the information she desires, I agree to the tool bar. This leads to further installations and more questions.

Eventually I finish. I run a scan. It tells me I have 18 viruses, all sneakily learning my habits for the purposes of advertising. It also deletes about a zillion cookies which likewise track my moves. I can now visit websites without being invited to learn Arabic.

I reward myself with the paper and another cup of tea. The paper suggests everybody should have at least two virus checkers on their computer and lists a number of good ones.
I suspect I may be here a while.

The New Washing Machine

2009-04-07T19:38:00.000+01:00

In the great traditions of mechanical expenditure, my washing machine packed up. The washing machine and my compound mitre saw had made a secret deal to break within a day of each other but had forgotten that the saw was still under warranty. This is why you should not let household appliances run for government; if they can’t successfully coerce to cause stress in my life, they are never going to be able to create a world wide financial crisis.

Anyway. He Who Knows Everything was enlisted to take the washing machine apart, poke it for a bit, have a few cups of tea and clean up the mountain of mouse droppings lurking behind it. He concluded it was broken in an expensive way.
“It’s probably the motherboard,” he said sagely. Then he had a cup of tea.
A repairman was called. He was a very nice bloke who said a new motherboard would cost about €180 plus labour. He also recommended Bosch as a good brand for the future as he hardly ever got called to fix them.

If my washing machine hadn’t been so rubbish I probably would have had it fixed. All I wanted was to put dirty things in and have them come out clean but this was apparently asking too much of it. It probably didn’t help that I carelessly allowed the insides to be horribly coated in a thin layer of iron ore. Even so, I refuse to believe that magnetism was the cause of its intermittent flooding and 154 minute wash cycle.
After much deliberation, a decision was made to buy a new one and research into the matter was undertaken. With the research completed, the decision was reviewed. In Ireland, washing machines cost a lot.

Anybody will tell you we live in the Rip-Off Republic. They don’t mention that it is also the Monopoly Republic. It’s probably because that phrase doesn’t trip off the tongue quite so easily. There is no point in trying to shop around for the best price for anything because rather than competing with each other for the benefit of the consumer, purveyors of goods and services have got together and agreed to all charge the same outrageous price.
I went into the local electrical appliance store to see what they had in stock only to recoil aghast at the four and five hundred euro price tags on 1400rpm machines. To helpfully quantify this for your minds, in the UK such machines are priced at about two hundred sterling. If I needed more than one appliance, I would have hired a van and headed for the border. I may yet.

After a little more research and some time spent gaping at the Siemens and Miele twelve hundred euro plus selection (what on earth does it do at that price? Dress you?), the reluctant decision was taken to go to Curry’s in Dublin where a new machine could be procured for a mere hundred euro more than one would pay at Curry’s in the UK.
Dublin is a long way away. It is two and a half hours to Liffey Valley, two hours of which is spent on twisty roads behind tractors. It is a tiring drive. Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind because there is also a Marks and Spencer at Liffey Valley but I have no money to throw about in a frivolous manner. I’ve spent it all on a new washing machine you see. Liffey Valley without money to throw about in a frivolous manner is no fun at all.
A phone call to Emile at Curry’s was made. It was explained about the distance and our desire not to arrive and find he had sold all the machines in the model we wanted.
“Have you not considered trying a store closer to yourselves?” He suggested.
It was explained that he was the store closest to us.
“What about Carlow? Wouldn’t they be closer to you?”
He was commended on his knowledge of Irish geography and asked for further information on this mythical Carlow store.
“It’s new. They opened just before Christmas. They haven’t put it on the website yet. Would you like their phone number?”

A trip to Carlow was organised.
As Carlow Town is *whispers* a bit of a pit, I wore my diamonds to make the day a bit special. I also wore my knickers back to front but that wasn’t to make the day special, that was just because I’m incapable of getting dressed in the morning.
When we got to Carlow there was some discussion about exactly where Curry’s was.

“Didn’t he give you directions?” HWKE asked.
“Yes he did. He told me it was next to Homebase at which point you started dancing around in the background saying you knew where Homebase was so I stopped listening.” I replied.
“Hmmm. Well I think it’s this way.” HWKE said and turned left, taking us on a brief and worrying diversion into County Laois.
A number of U turns later and HWKE was sent into a garage to ask for directions.
“They said it’s on the Dublin road. They said you can’t miss it.”
Looks were exchanged. Each of us privately wondered how it could be on the Dublin Road without us previously noticing it. As it turned out, it could be on the Dublin road without us previously noticing it because the signage was all dark blue instead of the jaunty red we were expecting.

Having procured a new washing machine, the next challenge was to take it home and carry it into the house.
The thing about washing machines is that they are really heavy. This is because they have a concrete block in the bottom to prevent them from moving around your kitchen or utility floor in a lively manner when they hit the spin cycle. They are also bulky and have no obvious place to get a handle on them. I do not like moving washing machines.

When Strider had to buy a new washing machine, she cunningly waited until I and HWKE were available to plumb it in for her and take the old one to the tip. Her friend’s husband dropped by moments after I had collapsed on the sofa, incapable of speech due to having wrestled a washing machine up Strider’s very steep 15 step staircase. HWKE explained that we would get up but that we had just wrestled a washing machine up the stairs.
“Oh. On your own?” said the husband.
I, somewhat outraged, replied in the negative. I would have gone on to cross question him as to why he made the assumption that I had not just wrestled a washing machine up a staircase and was it because I was a girl, but it would have been rude and I was too knackered to say anything else. As a result he now thinks I am some kind of mad, grumpy, petulant, monosyllabic, 27 year old teenager who glowers at everything and wears shirts covered in curry. Strider assures me she has done nothing to dispel this impression.

When moving the washing machine, I noticed the pad on the forth finger of my right hand had a deep pressure groove in it from the metal edge I had been trying to grip. I also noticed the pad of the finger was now numb. I assumed that once I stopped moving appliances about the sensation would come back but I was wrong. I suspect at some point I am going to end up with a simply hideous burn on that finger as I can no longer feel if something is hot. Nevertheless, I am confident that this will, at some point in the future, prove to be enormously useful in the performance of some heretofore impossible and, possibly, deeply unpleasant task.

Anyway. The new washing machine was plumbed in. Having decided upon program three, dirty clothes were put it. 125 minutes later, clean clothes were removed. It’s perfect.

Sonnick! I Choose You!

2009-04-03T20:04:00.000+01:00

In this world of ambiguity, my broadband connection continues to offer one of two states: We Fixed It Last Week So This Is A New Fault or We’ll Definitively Fix It On Wednesday. As it happens, yesterday was Wednesday. It was also that happy date when French people walk around sticking paper fishes on each other because they are under the misapprehension that this is humour, so when I was told that it was going to get fixed that Wednesday, I assumed they were liars and charlatans and that it would only become fixed if it were allowed to break the following day.

Three and a half weeks is a long time for something to be broken. Fortunately, I am not alone. My GP is also having computer difficulties and their server has been offline for over a week now. They can’t access the appointments list and they can’t input or access the patients’ notes. The receptionist was telling me they are trusting that the people who turn up for an appointment do actually have one. She was also moaning that once the system gets fixed, they are going to have to manually input the information amassed while it has been down. Rather naively, I have yet to feel this is the most pressing problem facing them. Avoiding death through inappropriate prescription seemed a rather more important issue to me but then I am something of a pedant. They prefer a freer approach to the dispensing of drugs and will regularly manage to confuse repeats adding random prophylactics or hallucinogens as the mood takes them. I suspect the Prescriptions Witch is behind it. The Prescriptions Witch is 109 years old and likes to ask what a drug is for before she will give you the piece of paper which instructs the chemist to give it to you. She doesn’t do this to Mammy anymore though. Mammy had words, many of which are unrepeatable.
The last time I had dealings with her, it was to pick up a prescription for He Who Knows Everything. Foolishly, I began by going in and asking her for it. She fixed me with a beady look.
“Did he fill out the form?” She barked. “The yellow one? Did you see him fill out a yellow form? Did he fill that out and bring it in here?”
In the face of strings of questions that make no sense I reverted to my natural form: bewilderment.
“I don’t know what he’s done. He just asked me to come in and get his prescription for him.” I wobbled. “He said it would be here.”
“Well, where is he now? Is he at work? Where is he? If he’s filled in a yellow form it’ll be in these!” She held up an inch high pile of yellow cards. “Did he fill one out? Is he at work? Can you ring him?”
“I don’t know where he is now. I don’t watch him every minute.” I said “Can you not look through the cards?”
She huffed and shuffled through them. “There isn’t one here for him. Hang on, I’ll get your prescription now.” Then she went and answered a ringing phone and spent 10 minutes berating the person at the other end. Then she gave me the prescription from a waiting pile.

Anyway. In a moment of genius, it was decided to divert the attentions of our local TD away from drugs, bombs and the economy and towards our lack of broadband. Our local TD is Sean Connick. I have always though Sean Connick to be a rather nice chap and very nearly voted for him, so I was confident he would manage to do something for me.
In Ireland, there are two main political parties. One is Fine Fail. One is Fine Gael. One of them thinks we should all live in thatched cottages and speak Gaelic; the other one agrees with them.
Obviously, these days they have developed relevant policies about important issues like healthcare (will be improved), taxes (will be lowered) and education (will become the envy of the world). While all of these are jolly vital, during the election I couldn’t distinguish between the 7 parties without checking their logos so chose to ruin my ballot on the grounds that all the candidates were as rubbish as each other. Now I come to think of it, I believe Sinn Fein may have branched out a little and added something about banishing the occupying forces. Kudos Lads.

HWKE connected to the costly dial up and sent Mr Connick an electronic mail. 5 minutes later he realised he had sent it to Sonnick by mistake so sent another, correctly addressed this time.
A day passed. There was no reply from Sonnick.
“Maybe he doesn’t like being confused with a hedgehog.” I helpfully suggested. Then I began to gripe. “He could have at least sent an automated reply assuring us he wouldn’t be looking into it as soon as possible. He probably hates us because he thinks we’re English.”
A second day passed. There was still no reply from Sonnick.
A third day passed but this one didn’t count because it was Sunday. On the evening of the fourth day, there was a phone call. It was one of Sonnick’s lackeys.
Sonnick’s lackey had spoken to Eircom. Better yet, Sonnick’s lackey had managed to get some sense out of them. The story, as I fail to understand it, runs along the convoluted lines of “There was a bit that was broken which got replaced but was mistuned and when it was retuned it was the wrong bit anyway so they were going to replace the proper bit but it was windy so they couldn’t but they are deffo doing it Wednesday, ‘k?”
Ice was apparently the culprit. At first I couldn’t understand how ice could manage to break something practically at sea level but, as it turns out, the bit that was broken was the bit on top of Mount Leinster (796m). This also explains to me how it could have been too windy to go up the mast (height 122m). I’m very sorry I called you big girls’ blouses, Eircom.

So. Wednesday came. Wednesday went. In its wake… broadband which works. For now.

My thanks to the patient lads on the BT technical helpline and to Sonnick and his lackeys. No thanks to Eircom though. You are still rubbish and should hang your heads in shame. Be told.

The Problem with Eircom

2009-03-28T11:49:00.002Z

As it is St Patrick’s Day tomorrow, now seems like the perfect occasion to complain about an Irish company. The alert amongst you may have noticed a certain amount of calandrial confusion on my part as, in your worlds, Patrick’s day was long ago enough for your hangovers to have cleared but in mine, at the time of writing, Patrick’s day is tomorrow and this is getting posted some time in my future. Once again, my broadband has fallen over.

The Broadband has never worked properly. Ever since I subscribed, about 2 months ago, it has suffered with dozens of mini failures which force me to stop what I am doing and reconnect the modem to the system. Gradually the failures grew more and more frequent until reconnecting the modem no longer brought it back. BT believed the fault to lie with the modem and sent me a new one only to find the fault lay with the exchange. Eircom fixed the exchange only for events to follow an identical pattern over the following month until it died again on March 9th.

From my perspective, the problem is particularly exasperating. Eircom is the main phone company in Ireland and it is they who own the network and thus it is they who are expected to fix it when it breaks. I, however, do not have a telephone service provided by Eircom; I have a service provided by BT so when something technical goes wrong, as it so often does, all BT can do is log the fault and wait for Eircom to fix it. Meanwhile I am left hanging on Eircom’s pleasure and have the bother of remembering to ensure BT credit me for the time it has been offline.

There is a piece of paper somewhere in existence which claims that Eircom must respond to all faults within three to five working days. I’m not quite sure what happens if they don’t manage to do this. Presumably they don’t get any jam for tea. A greater reprimand is clearly needed because a week after logging my complaint, they still haven’t got around to fixing it.
He Who Knows Everything was charged with ringing up the nice folks at BT again to see if they had any news on when Eircom might get around to fixing it. He was somewhat surprised when the nice young man at BT told him that, as far as Eircom were concerned, the fault had been sorted last Wednesday and so when we had rung up on Friday for a status report, that had been logged as a new complaint which would therefore not get fixed until the end of the week.
HWKE was unsurprised. “When I used to work in IT, the tech guys used to clear their job lists on a Friday afternoon by requesting redundant information they knew people wouldn’t be able to give them immediately. As far as the system was concerned, the jobs were getting done even though they weren’t. Somebody at Eircom has ticked a box to say they’ve fixed it even though they haven’t.”

Fearful of becoming on first name terms with the nice people on the BT technical helpline, HWKE rang Eircom to see if they could tell him when they were going to fix it. First he tried the technical support only to be bogged down in their automated system which cut him off when it realised he wasn’t their customer. Next he tried the Customer Complaints.

For some reason, the Irish are, collectively, the worst nation I have ever experienced for customer service. I personally suspect it is something to do with being a Republic; once you abolish the upper classes and begin educating the serfs, they begin to think they are as good as you are and won’t take responsibility for anything. I once had occasion to complain about something to a member of staff in a major chain store only for her to reply “Well it’s not my fault, I only work the desk.” Rather than beating one of our heads against the nearest wall I carefully and politely explained to her that when I used the word “You,” it was in the context of “You, the company” not “You, the annoying and unhelpful person who is standing before me.” She still thought I was an idiot.
The Irish cannot bear to think they are beneath anybody else. Some years ago I had a job interview for a temporary post at Wexford County Council. When I was asked why I wanted the job, I told them I rather fancied telling people I was a civil servant as it would make them think I worked for MI6, only to see my interviewers blanche and stammer that they would never use the word “servant.” In the cheerful manner of one who knows they are being given a sham interview merely to satisfy outside regulations and that the post was already given to their internal candidate, I told them I would.

Eircom, it seems, continue the tradition of diabolical customer service and have topped it off with a degree from the Michael O'Leary School of Talking To People Who Are Unhappy About The Service You Provide.
The Customer Complaints department transferred him to the technical department who spent 10 minutes claiming that it was nothing to do with them and that we should speak to BT. Then they tried to claim they didn’t own the exchanges and that it wasn’t their job to fix them anyway. HWKE was deeply incensed at this blatant lie.
“I think you’d better transfer me back to the Customer Complaints people,” he said to them.
I couldn’t hear what they asked him next but as his reply was a stoic “So that I can make a complaint,” I suppose it must have been something deeply unhelpful.
Instead he was transferred upwards to somebody who told him that they could not tell him anything as he was not an Eircom customer. He offered to sign up to Eircom. He also offered to go and find an Eircom Broadband customer amongst our neighbours (At least 112 people are currently without broadband. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, bear in mind there are, at an educated guess, less than 900 houses connected to the exchange.) for her to give the information to. Then he asked if it was necessary to get the local TD involved. Lacking the will to battle his way through the acres of bureaucracy, he thanked her and gave up.
It isn’t even as though he wanted to take names. All he wanted to know was what the fault was and how long it was likely to take to fix it. Was it really beyond them to give him an unofficial hint?

I should not be so surprised by Eircom’s unhelpful attitude. Even when they ring me up to try and entice me back into their fold they are surly, unhelpful and hang up on me when I tell them I don’t want any as BT is cheaper.
When I applied to have a phone line put into my house, it took them 18 months to do it. I was not driven crazy by the time scale, I was driven crazy by the constant lies I was fed to make me go away and stop bugging them. At one point I was told the contractor would start work when the cable arrived from the North at the end of the month. At the end of the month I was told they had to find a new contractor because the original one didn’t have the correct equipment to do the job. When the new contractor was found I was told he also had to wait for cable from the North. At this point I offered to go and collect it myself but they wouldn’t let me.

The rumour mill tells me part of Eircom’s problem is that they simply don’t have enough engineers to fix the system and have to pay contractors to do the work on a day to day basis. This is why it isn’t getting fixed and even when it is, it isn’t being done properly.
Personally, I would much rather they put their hands up and said “Actually, this exchange can’t do Broadband after all” rather than all of this messing around. It would be a disappointment but dial-up is better than no interweb at all.

Tomorrow is a bank holiday so it won’t get fixed then. It is unlikely to get fixed by Wednesday as the engineers will be nursing hangovers. Fingers crossed for Thursday.

*UPDATE – The broadband is still not fixed. Eircom, once they stopped complaining it was too windy to go up the mast, fixed what they thought was broken only to find it wasn’t that after all. It is now in the hands of a big multinational telecoms company who don’t seem unduly concerned about getting anything done. Almost three weeks and counting.*

People who Follow then Don't Follow One on Twitter

2009-03-03T19:39:00.000Z

As I’m sure you know by now, I do love to be at the forefront of all the popular youth trends. I am totally down with the kids. Only yesterday, me and my “homies” were “kicking back” in our “crib.” Only Tory MPs are more with it than I am.

In order to maintain my position of lagging a fortnight behind all things “top drawer,” I have for myself a Twitter account. I know I may, in the past, have hinted with displeasure at the whole idea of the thing but, as anybody will tell you, I am ever open minded to new experiences. In fact, the only way I could become more open minded about things is with the assistance of an angle grinder.

In case you have been living under a rock or else are the munificent possessor of friends who exist in the real world and so have no need of this fickle interweb universe, Twitter is like having your own personal message board. You can post messages onto it of up to 140 characters long. Other people can subscribe to follow what you post. You can follow what other people post. It’s all most banal.
Happily though, celebrities exist to post their own banalities and make us realise that they are Just Like Us™.
Stephen Fry is the most well known Celebrity Twit (The people in charge of these things have tried to instigate the terms “Tweet” and “Tweeter.” It’s nice that they do that. If only I cared.). Barack Obama is, likewise, a Twit. Fictional Characters from popular televisual shows are Twits. Everybody who is anybody is a Twit these days. Including me.

Should you have any final, lingering doubts about Twitter, it may interest you to know that over Lent, the Church of England are Twitting daily suggestions for becoming a better person. So, effectively, Twitter is endorsed by God. Or, at least, by Dr Rowan Williams which is the next best thing. Or, at least, by Dr Rowan Williams’ lackeys which is the next best thing to that.
Suggestions so far have included “Today say something nice about someone behind their back” and “Give a home-made gift to a loved one” both of which are nice suggestions. I shall endeavor to consider doing something akin to one of them as soon as humanly possible.
Although I am not Christian, I am interested in what the Church has to say so signed up to follow them. As a result, I am now in turn being followed by them, Westminster Abbey and a Vicar in Canada. I’m hoping to somehow harness this new found popularity to make one of the daily suggestions “Start a Flame war with PopeTube.”

In addition to alerting strangers to the contents of your lunchtime sandwich, Twitter usefully doubles as a virtual method of walking into a room and handing out business cards to everybody. I have a car dealer in Ulster amongst my followers. I don’t live in Ulster and don’t want a car but if I did, I probably would have a quick look at what he has to offer so it isn’t a total waste of his time.
I have already had a random number of people begin following me and then, a few days later, stop. The people who have begun and then stopped, I assume, were people hoping I would read their blogs. When I failed to follow them in return, they quickly grew grumpy and rejected me. Nothing like being rejected by people you don’t know and are not interested in to dent a girl’s confidence.
It’s an odd thing to do. If you are networking, it is deeply inadvisable to go off in a huff because somebody chooses to file your promotional leaflet in the bin. Back in the days when He Who Knows Everything had a day job, he used to know about marketing and claimed that 0.01% was the anticipated response to a mail shot. Of that number of respondents, less than one percent would go on to buy the product.

Personally I hope that some of the people I don’t know who follow me will go on to read the blog having been inspired by my “witty” observations of less than 140 characters. Those who read the blog I hope will follow me on Twitter and recommend me to their friends. I feel I am nothing without a Utah based fan club.

My Twitter address is www.twitter.com/Theohrm and the feed is also linked in to the main blog at www.atrivialblogforseriouspeople.blogspot.com
If you are a Twit who reads the blog, give me a wave and let me know who you are so I can make sure to follow you. Think of it as a supremely unexclusive club with no benefits.

In Which Theo Considers What Makes Something the Best

2009-02-23T20:37:00.000Z

The amplified Cat had me out of bed at a little after six this morning. She was shouting up the stairs that she was going to be sick and could I please come and make a big fuss of her afterwards. I know you have all already got me pegged as one of those Demented Cat Ladies who think their animals are human and have proper conversations with them (which, to be fair, is a pretty accurate assessment of my character) but I don’t care because understanding the nuances of her miaows has allowed me to develop ninja-like reflexes with a sheet of newspaper. Think of that the next time you are cleaning cat vomit from your carpets and rugs.
Being sick was one of the liver related danger symptoms Richard the Rugby Physiqued Vet warned me about, so the Cat was duly returned to the surgery to have a deeply painful fluid injection, an antibiotic injection and a steroid enlivening injection. The last one definitely worked because I had to spend most of the rest of the morning unsticking her from the furniture.
Richard is pleased with the way her eye is healing. I didn’t tell him that the little tyke managed to jam her head against the edge of the sofa cushion, wriggle out of her lampshade and spend half an hour washing her face. If she does it again I will crochet her a leg warmer. Then she’ll be sorry.
Still. She is managing better with her lampshade. She’s still not terribly proficient with it and spent an entertaining ten minutes revolving slowly in the flower bed and getting stuck on the lavender plants, but she should only need to wear it until the end of the week. Providing she lasts that long of course.

Anyway. Amongst the many and varied things going on over the weekend that I have been failing to pay any attention to at all, were the Academy Awards.
I don’t like award shows. They remind me to be bitter that, despite no effort at all on my part, my desk remains resolutely award free. You’d think that somebody as good looking and clever as myself would get a prize for something. I used to get prizes. When I was 9 I won a netball trophy and when I was 14, I got a Cup for English Literature. That one was rather mysterious as I had no interest in the subject, did not read, indeed did not own a copy of, two thirds of the set texts and don’t recall ever completing anything approximating an essay.

The Oscars are something of an oddity to me. I usually see, at some point, the winner of Best Picture and usually, at some point, think to myself “Why on earth did they choose this one?” In later years I have come to realise that the answer is usually “Because they are best mates with/owe a lot of money to/sleeping with/were sent a complementary weekend in Venice by the PR company of the Director/Producer/Studio” and that is such a shame.
Take Gladiator, for instance. It is one of only two films I would have been happy to walk out of the cinema rather than watch the rest of because I was so bored. The other was the Da Vinci Code.
I never made it past the first half an hour of Crash because I was too busy rolling my eyes and shouting about things. Maybe it got better and turned out not to be laboured, clichéd dross. It’s something I’m never going to know.
A Beautiful Mind was only slightly dull, but the Best Picture released all year? I don’t think so.

All of this consideration makes me wonder, if I had the power to ban promotionary fruit baskets, what criteria would make a film worthy of being the “Best”?

Should a film be considered the best because it is original? Should it be the best because it has a lot of people looking earnest? Should it offer a new perspective on an old subject? Should it have big ideas and be rewarded for attempting them, even if they don’t work out? Should it be an example of how to get things right? Should it teach us? Should it give us answers? Or should it give us questions?

I think that the best way to consider the worth of a film is to let it state its intentions. Let it be what it wants to be as much as it can be, and judge it by how well it achieves that.
An art critic doesn’t walk into a Rothko exhibition and complain that he isn’t like Monet. When critiquing an artist, one looks at the mission statement and considers how the art responds to that. The mission statement itself is under critique as much as the work. The reasons you give must be good ones.

This year’s best picture is Slumdog Millionaire. I have yet to catch up with any of the other nominees so have no idea if it is a worthy winner or not but I do know this: It is a good film.
Yes, it is cheesy. Yes, we know how it ends. Yes, it brings nothing new to the party.
It is also honest about its intentions. It knows what it is and doesn’t aspire to be anything else. There are no tear stricken monologues edited with “And the Nominees are…” in mind. It isn’t elitist. It doesn’t revel in ignorance.
In fact, it’s better than a “Winner of 8 Oscars” tag.

The Cat Returns

2009-02-19T20:27:00.001Z

Happy the girl and happy She alone, She who can call today her own: She who, secure within, can say, “Huzzah! My Cat is not dead! She is back at home sporting a new lampshade accessory!”

As you might guess, I am most happy that my Cat has returned mostly safe and sound. Richard, the other Vet (who I like very much and not just because he has the build of a Rugby player), has done a sterling job on her eye and has sent her home with a warning about seepage and instructions that she isn’t to have any excitement for a few weeks.
What he didn’t tell us is the how the Cat is supposed to cope with a lampshade on her head.

It began happily. Once she realised she was home, she immediately started pressing her head against her cat box to be let out. I opened the cat box door expecting her to bolt straight to her dinner but she didn’t. Instead, she got stuck.
I held her lampshade steady so she could get out of the box and put a bowl of water down for her. It took three goes but eventually she worked out that she could fit the entire lampshade over the bowl and have a drink. This didn’t work with the plate of chicken. The bottom of the lampshade rested on the plate and, when she moved forward to try and reach the meat, pushed it along the floor. Once I’d stopped laughing, I fed her by hand.

Having had a few goes at walking backwards to see if that would get rid of the lampshade, the Cat decided to have a sleep on the sofa in the hope that when she woke up, the horridness would be gone. It’s a technique she uses with Strider.
Having jumped up onto the sofa, she found she was face to face with the back cushions and when she tried to rotate, was stopped by her lampshade. Then she couldn’t lie down properly, because of the lampshade. She spent a few minutes rotating until she worked out she could dangle her head over the edge of the cushion and be comfortable.

Some time later, she decided to use her litter tray. She’s never been very good at this. She spends a long time deciding where she wants to dig but doesn’t actually Go in the hole she has made.
So. She gets on the tray. She rotates. She tries to sniff the litter. She can’t. Her lampshade is in the way. She walks forward a little and gets it jammed on the side of the tray. She tries to rotate but can’t. She walks backwards until free. She rotates. She tries to sniff the litter. She can’t… and so on for eight and a half minutes when she gives up, Goes where she is standing and wees all over the floor as usual.

She decides that after all that effort, she needs another sleep. She tries to go back to the sitting room but walks too close to the door frame and gets stuck. I move her lampshade to allow her access and wipe it clean with a Kills Everything Wipe.
This time she wants to sleep on the rug. Every time she lowers her head, the lampshade gets stuck on the pile and she thinks she can’t move. After a while she gives up and goes back to the sofa.
I sit next to her. She briefly considers my lap but the logistics defeat us both.

Presumably she will get used to this. It’s only been a day, after all. The main difficulty is how she is going to be able to eat. At the moment I am periodically holding a plate inside her cone for her to eat from but that is clearly not going a long term solution.
I’ve found a very small plate and have put it on an upturned bowl, the idea being that she can fit the cone around the plate and lower her head enough to get at the food. This rather depends on her aiming ability which is, as you can tell, not great. She has already spent a frustrated few minutes pushing the new arrangement around the kitchen floor.

So, if you are an engineer, I would like for you to design for me a device to allow a lampshade wearing cat to eat. The Cat in question is very clever, if rather belligerent, and can learn providing adequate bribery is applied. She also has quite short legs.

Still. On the upside, having a cone amplifies every noise she makes. She is very much looking forward to her 5am sing.

The Cat: Still with Two Eyeballs

2009-02-16T20:32:00.003Z

You may know this already, but for those who don’t, I am the servant of a small British Blue Shorthaired Cat.
The Cat is very old. She is 18. This means she can vote but she doesn’t want to because she is an anarchist. She sometimes suffers from Hollow Legs which is a rare condition only curable by inhaling four packets of dinner and whatever she can steal from my plate. She is very fond of Marmite and of porridge, but only the latter if it has syrup on. She also likes cheese. She does not like Poultry flavoured dinners or the special Cat crunchies designed to clean her teeth.
Her favourite games are The Stair Game (sitting half way up the stairs and taking a swipe at the unsuspecting who pass below), The String Game (chasing a piece of string in circles until so dizzy she falls over) and The Faerie Game (leaping up walls after the reflections from peoples’ watches).
When not playing or eating, she enjoys sitting beneath the bird table with her mouth open, telling the squirrels off through the glass and going to sleep in the middle of a piece of furniture to prevent anybody else using it.

Over the last few years she has gradually begun to show the signs of old age. One of the symptoms was the paralysis of the cornea in her right eye, rendering it blind. Since then, the eyeball has gradually begun to swell and it is now at the point where it must be removed to prevent perforation and an infection to the brain.
Unfortunately, due to her age and her kidneys, it is not clear as to whether she can survive an anaesthetic.

This morning we took her to the Vet, Four Under Nine.
There are many wretched feelings in the world and one of the most wretched is the one caused by denying a Cat her breakfast, shoving her in a box and leaving her in a strange place with lots of other animals she takes an instant dislike to.
The eyeball couldn’t be removed today. Four Under Nine ran a blood test and decided that giving her lots of fluids over the next few days would improve her kidney functions, increase her chances and shorten the recovery time. Hopefully he will be able to do it on Wednesday.

This is one of the things I didn’t consider would happen. I thought I would be returning home either weeping quietly at the loss of my cat or else deeply relieved and laughing at her upside-down lampshade accessory. I didn’t prepare myself for leaving her there.

I keep thinking of her all alone in a strange place, meowing to be let out and nobody coming. I keep picturing her miserably hunched up in the corner of a cage, wondering what she did wrong to be abandoned by us.
Obviously this is the point at which my logic kicks in and reminds me that she is, after all, just a cat. She doesn’t have the acute emotions of a human being and anyway, she is probably being made a huge fuss of and milking Four Under Nine for every scrap of affection he can give. She is probably going to come home and turn her nose up at every delicacy I place before her and give me a look which very clearly says “When I was at Four Under Nine’s…”

Her absence has left me with a huge, gaping hole in my life. I hadn’t realised quite how much mental space she takes up. Every time I walk past the sitting room door I have to open it to check she isn’t on the other side attempting to open it with the power of her mind alone. When I finish this, I will go into the sitting room where I will not have to remove her from the sofa. She will not be stretched out in front of the fire. Her tongue will not flash in and out of her mouth as she dreams of mushroom soup. She will not wake me in the early hours demanding to be fed. She is just… not here.

That’s the problem with animals. People can take care of themselves. Except for when you are dealing with somebody very small, you can never consider yourself to be wholly responsible for somebody else. You are always responsible for an animal. You have to do the best for them but you can never be entirely confident that they understand.

I hope I will be able to go and visit her tomorrow, check she is doing alright and that the Veterinary Nurses aren’t the vindictive, power crazed lunatics Human nurses tend to be.

Until then, I miss her.

The Single Girl's Slightly Embittered Thoughts on Valentine's Day

2009-02-15T13:06:00.001Z

Love. It’s all you need apparently. I always thought a healthy balanced diet, fresh air and exercise were all you need but I’m happy to stand corrected.

For me, it doesn’t matter that everybody else in the world spent yesterday in the arms of their beloved. Even if the Very Good Looking Estate Agent had pitched up on my doorstep with an enormous bouquet of white roses and a pair of tickets to Saint Petersburg, I would have told him to come back another day. It was Wales Vs England in the Six Nations and Wales won because they are super.

Anyway. Valentine’s day is one of those odd occasions. Like a funeral. It’s full of things we are “supposed” to do. We are “supposed” to send cards, chocolates, forecourt bouquets and sky divers to the person we love so they know how much we love them. We are “supposed” to take them out to dinner, possibly asking for joint ownership of all their current and future possessions during dessert. If we fail to do these things, tears and recriminations will follow.
If we are single, we are “supposed” to not mind. We are “supposed” to be independent women who jolly well don’t need a man to have a good time because dancing around a handbag with our Girlfriends is far more kicking than being wined, dined and retiring to a hotel room filled with rose petals.

It helps nobody that the shops and newspaper supplements are full of suggestions for what to buy a loved one for the Big Day. It only re-enforces the idea that a plastic figurine of a love smitten penguin is how we are all supposed to feel about each other. Do you feel a plastic figurine of a love smitten penguin adequately expresses how you feel about your loved one? Of course you don’t. You are enormously generous and cultured and went for the teddy bear holding a satin heart instead.

I run into the same quandary whenever I am required to buy a card for somebody. If they don’t contain a grimly unfunny joke about beer or women, they have a deeply naff poem about how wonderful everything is. I usually go for those hi-larious cards with a nonsensical one liner on them; “Wendell just knew the dancing would result in a hat,” and so forth.

There is probably some kind of point to be made here about the necessity of telling people how we feel, about not leaving it because it may one day be too late and about not confusing penguins with affection. I could make it, but I’m far too fond of penguins to do that.

In other news: The cat may or may not be having her eyeball removed on Monday. I tried to come up with a pithy Valentine’s Day joke involving the literal application of her becoming unable to take her eye(ball) off me but couldn’t quite find the phrasing. Submissions welcomed.

New Shampoo

2009-02-12T19:59:00.000Z

As you can probably guess, I’m not really a girly girl. I don’t like pink, I don’t go “squee” over cute pictures of dogs or babies and I know all about the gold standard. Because I am not a girly girl, I don’t pay that much mind to lotions and potions and other things designed to part me from my hard earned dosh while making me irresistible to good looking men. Given my plans for Valentine’s Day, maybe I should start.

While a bit on the chunky side and the possessor of magnificently crazed hair, I am at least confident in my ability to leave the house makeup-free without causing people to recoil in horror or small children to tug anxiously on a parental sleeve asking “Mammy, what’s wrong with that lady’s face?” Mind you, I often have headphones in so they may already be doing this and I just haven’t noticed.
The thing about being on the chunky side, especially when you are a teenager, is that somewhere along the line there is an idea that it is okay to inhale donuts if you have a great personality and/or fantastic hair. Once you accept that only a world famine will cause you to ever see a UK size 12 again, you settle down and begin to cultivate one of these aspects of yourself, enjoying donuts as you do so.

Anyway. For some months now I’ve been using the John Freida “Chocolate to Espresso” Brunette shampoo. I bought a large quantity of it due to complicated reasons involving vouchers and a desire to Stick It To The Man (the Man in this instance being the man in charge of Tesco). In combination with the oats I eat, this has produced a head of very dark and shiny, if demented, hair.
Then I was in Boots. While in Boots I noticed they sold henna shampoo but it was not just any henna shampoo, it was shampoo with henna from Kew Gardens. Feel free to make impressed noises… now.

The nice thing about henna shampoo is that when I use it, it encourages the natural copper highlights I always claim my hair has without having to pay Niall the hairdresser enormous sums of money. The down side is that when you are in the shower, the tiles end up looking as though you have inadvertently sacrificed a small goat in there.

It is actually a very good time for encouraging my hair in a Ginger direction. Mad curls are already shaping up to be a big Look this year and with Paxman’s program on Victorian Art, the other one about the Pre-Raphaelites and the film Young Victoria coming out in a matter of weeks, I see chunky girls with red hair becoming very desirable indeed.

A girl can hope, right?

Sian: The Educational Hussy

2009-02-10T23:30:00.000Z

You find me in something of a distracted mood today. Strider is hanging around in the background complaining about Eastenders but I’m not allowed to tell her to naff off because she has just handed me a cup of tea.

The second reason I’m distracted is, of course, the Six Nations Rugby tournament which kicked off this weekend with victories for Ireland over France, England over Italy and, I am very proud to say, Wales over Scotland. If you’ve never seen a Rugby match I urge you to watch one at once. Name me any other sport in the world in which you can hear a commentator say “That’ll be a yellow card… when he wakes up of course.”

The third reason for my distraction is a certain amount of lingual confusion. You see, recently I have been trying to improve my Welsh in the hope of becoming a fully paid up member of the Taffia.

I don’t speak much Welsh. I can count, enquire after your health and follow a Rugby commentary but that is about my limit. Now that I have broadband I have been studying it via the marvellous BBC website.
Along with the usual vocabulary lists and a man name Dewi explaining grammar to you, there are a number of short films concerning the life of a woman named Sian. I am already hooked.

Her day begins normally enough. She gets up, puts the kettle on and glares at her children until they wish her “Bore Da.” Then the doorbell rings. Rather excitingly, it is Danny, the new postman. He has a package but first he must check she is not some stranger cunningly pretending to live in a house other than her own in order to intercept it.
“Sian Davies dych chi?” He asks.
“Ie.” She replies, looking confused. She’s already told him she’s feeling tired so maybe she isn’t quite sure of her name.
He seems unwilling to take her word for it but swiftly hands the package over once her geeky, bespectacled son appears at the door. He is holding a triangular piece of toast which, I assume, passes for a deadly weapon in Swansea.
Sian takes the package inside. The label has been printed by a computer. If I were Sian I would find this highly suspicious and examine the brown paper for grease stains, loose wires or the smell of almonds. Instead she blithely opens it to find a single red rose.

Our story continues with Sian drinking “coffi” in a deserted bar. She is wearing a very low cut dress with the rose stuck in the cleavage, even though it is only three in the afternoon. Presumably her children are off experimenting with intravenous drugs in a doorway somewhere.
A swarthy young man enters the bar. At first I assume he has got lost on his way to a wedding as he has a rose in his lapel, but it turns out he is there to meet Sian. He introduces himself as Ed. Sian waggles her eyebrows in a suggestive manner.

Later that evening, Ed presents himself at the leisure centre. It turns out his name isn’t Ed after all. His name is actually Edward. Now we know why Danny the new postman was so eager for Sian to confirm her identity earlier.
Edward tells the woman at reception he is there for “y cwrs Karate”. The woman checks her list.
The tension builds.
Edward is not on the list. The woman licks her lips nervously and asks Edward for his name again.
“Edward Morgan dw i,” He tells her.
She checks the list again. He is still not on it.
Edward takes a poster from his pocket and brandishes it in a wimpy non-threatening manner. He reads it aloud for the benefit of everybody.
Just when it seems as though disaster will occur, the woman realises she is looking at the Tae Kwon Do list! Oh how they laugh together. She wouldn’t be laughing so much if this wasn’t Edward’s first lesson; instead she’d be lying on the floor in a pool of her own unhelpfulness. She should watch herself.
She apologises and directs him to Room Three, pointing vaguely in what I expect will turn out to be the wrong direction.

So endeth lesson one. Next time: Exchanging information!

Trying to be Good

2009-02-06T19:49:00.001Z

While I appreciate and value the small dark side of my personality which makes horrible and cynical comments about pretty much anything you care to name, I do feel it is important that I make the effort to be Good. This is not just because I fear that when I die I will be met by a grinning dog waving a feather but because I feel it is the right thing to do; hence I slow down to let people in when I am driving (unless they are in a BMW or in an Audi with a suit hanging in the back), I let people go in front of me at the checkout if they have only a couple of things and I have a lot and should I make eye contact with somebody, I smile.
Something I don’t do is talk to people. If I wanted to make excuses about it I could claim it is because I am British, stiff upper lip and all that. It is, after all, one of the national characteristics to pretend that something unpleasant doesn’t exist whether it be a terrible meal in a restaurant, a large pool of vomit on the floor of a train carriage or a weeping person in need of some help. I always feel that it isn’t my place to get involved, that it isn’t my business.
Yesterday it was.

I was in the supermarket.
To be precise, I was in the fruit aisle looking at the Granny Smith’s before deciding on Braeburn instead. I had my stereo in my ears and began to walk forwards but, for whatever reason, I happened to turn my head enough to see that behind me a woman was sitting on the floor, her phone pressed to her ear and a man crouched beside her looking concerned. After a further surreptitious glance I realised she was utterly distraught and crying into her phone.
I stopped. I pretended to examine the rhubarb. I wondered if I should go over there and see if there was anything I could do to help. The very British part of me was saying no, that there was already somebody with her and that it wasn’t my place to. I glanced over again.
She was crying harder and the man looked uncomfortable, clearly unsure of what to do. I looked at her and a number of thoughts occurred to me.
First: That girl needs a hug.
Second: That man can’t hug her because he is a man.
Third: If Mammy were here, Mammy would already be hugging her.
Fourth: Mammy is not here.
Fifth: I have arms. I also have a hanky.
Sixth: Mammy would want me to help her.
Seventh: A word or a gesture can do more than you believe it will.

I gave her the hanky and I gave her a hug.
She was incoherent with grief and barely aware of what was going on around her. She answered the phonecalls on her mobile automatically without any real consciousness of what she was doing, reassuring the person on the other end that she was going to finish the shopping and then she’d be right there. From what she was saying, I understood her to have just been informed that a close male relative, or friend, had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
She was my age or maybe a little older. She had a child whom she had to pick up from Playzone. She had black hair and blue eyes and an accent that sounded Anglo-Irish at times. When a member of staff brought her some water, her hand was shaking so hard that she could barely drink it.
She kept repeating it: “He’s got Parkinson’s. He’s only 31.”
I hugged her and rubbed her arm. I told her it would be okay.
I said it to her again as she went with the staff to have a cup of tea but I have no idea if it went in. I hope it did and I hope that she understood what I meant.

Things are always okay. That is their nature. Everybody copes with whatever gets thrown at them because nobody gets the choice not to. You do it well or you do it badly but you always do it. Eventually.

It would be fatuous of me to indicate my hopes for her and her family but nevertheless, I still hope that she finds the strength and the peace within herself to do more than she thinks she is capable of. I hope she is not alone in this and I hope she can do what she needs to.

Which Animal which may or may not be found on a farm are you?

2009-02-02T22:32:00.000Z

Following on from the resounding success of “Which method of wasting valuable office time are you?” we are proud to bring you this: a personality quiz so accurate you may feel the need to gasp and finger the back of your skull to ensure we are not peering into your brain.
As before, simply add up the number of each letter before looking to the bottom of the page to reveal the inner You. Pencils at the ready?

1) Your boss has decided to give all his staff an interview to decide if he would employ them if he was given his choice again. Unfortunately, he has delusions of being an Oxbridge tutor and has asked you the following: “If you were a fruit cut into the shape of a star, what kind of knife would have been necessary?”

a) A Bread Knife
b) A Butcher’s Knife
c) A Swiss Army Knife
d) A Stiletto
e) A Machete

2) Oh dear. That didn’t go well. You are now on the unemployment scrapheap and the only food you have is a jar of Chicken Tonight which has lurked at the back of your cupboard since time immemorial. The jar suggests that adding raisins and yoghurt will make it Tasty. You have neither. What will you add instead?

a) Grass. Just Say No, kids.
b) Some vegetable peelings, extra vitamins you see.
c) Anything. I’m not fussy.
d) Something sweet. Sweetness is good.
e) I have some Chocolate cake with chilli in it. That’s bound to make it taste great.

3) That combination turned out to be a grave mistake. Good job the hospital is so close, eh? Continuing the good news, your doctor has decided to let you be a guinea pig in his mad experiments until you’ve paid off your toxicology bill. He’s even given you a choice as to which one you will take part in. Which type of experiment do you choose?

a) The one requiring you to digest food four times.
b) Some kind of SAS course where you live in trenches and enjoy fresh air.
c) The one where you are exposed to Julie Andrews until you become a Better Person.
d) A Mathematical one involving interlocking shapes and the like.
e) The one where you attempt to translate the ancient writings of lost empires. Just like on the Krypton Factor!

4) Ah. You didn’t sign that document waving your right to sue him did you? Right. Well. Never mind. What pattern of sock would you like to clad your jaunty new extra foot in?

a) Black and White.
b) Pink!
c) One made out of the curtains.
d) Pringle; it’s the sock of golfers.
e) I’ve got a bit of an Aztec vibe going at the moment. Got anything Peruvian?

5) Gosh, what a week it has been! I think you should cheer yourself up with a spot of karaoke. To which track are you going to leap enthusiastically up on stage and shake your booty?

a) Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West) by Benny Hill
b) Flying Without Wings by Westlife
c) Some old school Celine Dion. Back before she had her teeth nicened.
d) Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm by The Crash Test Dummies
e) Anything by Shakira

Added up your answers? Then let’s see what you are!

Mostly A’s – Congratulations! You are a Cow!
Cows are lovely, just like you. Everybody loves a cow even though they smell a bit and have a tendency to get huge amounts of snot over their friends, just like you. You don’t seem like the sharpest tool in the box but it is all an elaborate façade. Behind that placid gaze you have the cunning dexterity of a Polish Sushi Chef.
Your Lucky Disease is Creutzfeldt-Jakob and your Lucky Newspaper is the Daily Mail.

Mostly B’s – Congratulations! You are a Pig!
Pigs! The practical jokers of the world! You like nothing better than leaving the tracks of your cloven hoofs around the houses of Mormons to trick them into believing the Devil has been. You are also very practical and down to earth which makes you enormously popular in Yorkshire. Only your irrational dislike of mirrors is preventing your conquest of the world. Maybe you should put more effort in.
Your Lucky Fish is John Dory and your Lucky Paint Chart is Farrow and Ball.

Mostly C’s – Congratulations! You are a Goat!
Mobile dustbin, producer of cheese, ward of Heidi; you are all of these things and more. While your truthful wholesomeness is endearing, your pedantry is not. This is why you get blamed for things which are not your fault. You probably work in a post office and if you don’t, you should definitely consider it as your next career move.
Your Lucky Government Department is the Inland Revenue and your Lucky Home Shopping Network is QVC.

Mostly D’s – Congratulations! You are a Bee!
*sings* Oh what a glorious thing to be! A healthy grownup bizzy buzzy bee! *desists from singing* You are exacting and precise, working behind the scenes to make things happen. You are very good at counting up to four. Some people fear you but others are enchanted by your distinctive fashion stylings. Best cut back on the velvet though. It’s so 1998.
Your Lucky Gardener is Bob Flowerdew and your Lucky Historical Document is the Order of Execution for Lady Jane Gray.

Mostly E’s – Congratulations! You are a Llama!
Exotic. That’s how you are best described. You do things your own way and spit at people who try to make you do any different. You care a great deal about your hair and spend many hours polishing it to ensure it is soft and shiny. My top tip would be to eat more linseed. It’s what they give to horses you know.
Your Lucky County of Missouri is Ozark and your Lucky Telephone Provider is Talktalk.

Libraries win Prizes

2009-01-30T21:49:00.000Z

In these increasingly currency restricted times it has become necessary to find some forms of free entertainment. One of my favourite forms of free entertainment is the Library. My Library is not just any old Library though; my Library has won a prize.

Bizarrely enough, especially when it is considered quite how many basic things the Irish manage to get as wrong as it is possible to get them without a lightning rod (Irish potatoes, anyone?), my local Library is really quite good.
Back in my childhood, my local Library was a tin hut filled with Catherine Cookson and Stephen King novels. It also had roughly 18 copies of Watership Down because Richard Adams lived three doors up and presumably gave them a discount. The Librarian was an ancient harridan who was so unsuited to her job that she not only filed Bridget Jones’ Diary under J, but also kept their copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover beneath the counter.
Once I returned to the homeland I was delighted to discover a vast Library spread over many floors and usefully positioned next door to Iceland where I could buy frozen unnamed meat. Cardiff Library was not the best place to find interesting and readable books but it was a great place to find a band to join.

It was with some trepidation that I approached New Ross Library when I first moved over. I had driven past it several times and was deeply alarmed by its corrugated iron walls and Car Park carpeted in broken glass. Once inside I shuffled up to the counter and asked what would be required to let me join. They asked for my name and address and invited me to pick myself out a swanky Library card from a choice of six. I was thrilled. In the UK I’d had to fill out long forms in triplicate and promise to be a good and upstanding citizen who would not bring the Library into disrepute.
The second thing that shocked me was the staff. They were human. They were, dare I say it, nice. The Head Librarian always asks after my Mammy if she sees me, which more than makes up for her calling me Theodosia (a name which is three syllables too long for everyday conversation).
The third thing that shocked me and which continues to shock me to this day was the selection of books. They were really good.

Recently, the Library has been trying to improve itself even more. There were plans for a mezzanine floor above the office but I’m given the impression they got half way through the work before anybody twigged that it wasn’t going to work without spending a great deal of money re-enforcing the floor. Instead they built themselves a new porch with a fancy automatic door and a new sign.
The new sign is very classy. It is green. The writing is in white. It also features something I had never previously assumed one would need on Library signage.
Braille.

It’s not that I don’t think blind people use the Library. I’m sure the blind population of New Ross avail themselves daily of the fine selection of audio books. I just feel fairly certain in my mind that any blind person in a library is going to require some assistance from somebody who is not blind and so, therefore, is probably already aware that they are entering the Library. I could be wrong of course. Maybe there are people who like to play Audio Book Russian Roulette. We all have to get our kicks somehow.

Anyway. The award was from the National Disability Authority and it was given for Excellence Through Accessibility.

Good to know the Braille achieved something.

Happy Birthday Robbie Burns

2009-01-26T20:05:00.000Z

Ask any English or Welshman of your acquaintance and they will gladly confirm what I am about to impart: The Scots are weird.
Normally I would never dare to make such a sweeping statement about an entire nation and certainly never about one whose people will happily kick themselves in the head if there is nobody else’s head available. Fortunately though, today is a day when I can safely make such a sweeping statement because today is the day when all the Scots are safely horizontal from a combination of whiskey, haggis and really bad poetry. Yesterday was Burns night.

Robert Burns, for those of you who are too lazy to look him up on the Journalists’ Friend, was apparently a Scottish poet. I say apparently because his poetry is written in the low Scots dialect which is incomprehensible to anybody south of Carlisle and so we only have their word that it is, in fact, poetry. He is most highly regarded in Scotland due to being the only Scottish poet anybody has ever heard of.
To celebrate his birthday, the Scots will gather in any place they are confident of not being thrown out of where they will drink and recite poetry at a haggis. As if that wasn’t enough of an affront to the noble beast, they then eat it.

Haggis is one of those dishes born of the necessity to use up every single part of the animal. Basically you take anything that a surgeon can’t identify, add some rusk or breadcrumbs and any herbs you can find which will disguise the taste, put it in a stomach (I believe a sheep is usually the unwilling donor) and boil for the length of time it takes for you to become hungry enough to eat it.
Believe it or not, haggis is not the worst dish the Scots have ever come up with. As far as delicacies of the British Isles go, it is fairly normal. I’m never going to be thanked for pointing it out but sausage doesn’t get made with prime pork loin. It’s why it tastes so good.
Instead the very worst of Scottish cuisine is the unholy trinity of deep fried Mars bar, deep fried Bounty bar and deep fried Pizza. If anybody ever invents a time machine, forget going back to doink Hitler on the forehead with a spoon, go back and find out who introduced deep frying to the Scottish nation and prevent them from doing so by any means necessary.

I’m not averse to experimental cookery. Until I was tall enough to reach the stove I had very little choice in the matter due to Mammy’s predilection for substituting similar coloured ingredients should she have run out of the needed foodstuff. Fortunately she also liked to add a good hour onto the cooking time of any instructions so everything tasted much the same by the time it reached the table. I’m not joking when I tell you that I was 19 before I realised a Chicken Kiev wasn’t supposed to be mysteriously hollow on the inside.
Learning to cook is a vital brick lying in the middle of the road to Adulthood. Some may say it is never a good idea but I say where would we be without the ceremonial rite of passage that is getting drunk and attempting to cook whatever you have in your cupboards at the time? Without the Antipodean Meat Pie and Mushy Pea combo, that’s where.
Once upon a time in my student days I can remember attempting (in rather cash strapped desperation it must be said) to make a meal of Alligator Jerky and microwave popadoms. I wasn’t drunk at the time but it probably would have turned out better if I had been.

Maybe next time I’ll try deep frying it.

Let there be (Government Approved) Light

2009-01-26T20:03:00.000Z

Good things come into my life. I know this. Unfortunately they are very often followed by the removal of said Good Thing, most usually once I have spent some time getting to grips with it and reached the stage at which I wonder how I managed without it in the first place.
So it came to pass that the Gods of Broadband unleashed a plague of Fail upon my modem.
To begin with I assumed it was the wind. It’s usually the wind. Wind is the first of The Five Afflictions which remove electricity from the lives of me and my neighbours. If it isn’t the wind it is down to fire, flood, lightning or pigeon.
While the plague of Fail may have begun via the wind, I suspect its total and catastrophic failure may not have been helped by my manually resting the modem 10 times in half an hour in an effort to make it go. Anyway, the nice man in Nepal assured me a new modem would be with me within 3 to 5 working days and please could I send the old one back to the offices in Dublin so they could find out what broke it.
After 3 to 5 working days the new modem duly arrived but still didn’t work. BT have asked Eircom very nicely if they would possibly mind rounding up a couple of their engineers and sending them down to the exchange to fix whatever has broken. Knowing Eircom as I do, this may take a while. Given that you are reading this, it is probably mended.

Obviously I am quite pleased with my lack of interweb. As it turns out, every time you search for something on Google, a baby seal gets clubbed to death. Think of that next time you idly look up the principle exports of Bolivia simply because you are bored.
I, of course, could have told you this ages ago. I recall an article in the half tree that is the Sunday Papers about the New Face of Eco protesting. The New Face of Eco Protesting turned out to be an intensely middle class blond girl who will need to eat more pie if she wishes to be able to stand upright in a stiff breeze. One of the things she spoke winningly about was the utilisation of Facebook in the spreading of the Word and in the organisation of various Eco friendly protests. At no point did she or any of her youthful chums seem to deduce that encouraging a couple of hundred people to log on to Facebook every day is possibly not the best way to actively curb carbon emissions.

The Government are very keen to reduce carbon emissions. They have decided the best way of reducing carbon emissions is to make us all sit in the dark feeling depressed. To aid them in this plan, we are no longer allowed to buy 100 watt light bulbs.
While I appreciate the effort to do something as oppose to nothing, I’m slightly disappointed that this was the best they could come up with. On the face of it, if every household replaced their 100 watt bulbs with 60 watt bulbs, the cumulative effect over a year would probably save the same amount of energy it takes to boil a kettle to make me a nice cup of tea; except I’m not certain that it does.
In my house we tend to turn the lights on when it is dark. The lights we turn on when it is dark are lamps. Lamps shouldn’t have 100 watt bulbs in them. If we have the overhead light bulb on it is because we need to see what we are doing except now we can’t see what we are doing because of all the 60 watt bulbs. I suspect we will have to strap a miner’s torch to our foreheads just to peel the potatoes from now on.

Help is on the horizon. Rather cunningly, the Eco Boffins have invented for us an Eco Friendly light bulb. It gives 100 watts of light but only uses 20 watts of energy. It also has a lifetime 57.593 times longer than your common or garden variety of bulb. If you replace every single bulb in your home, over the next 12 years you will save yourself possibly four euro and twenty six cent on your electricity bill. That’s enough the buy a majority share in the Anglo-Irish Bank and a KFC on the way home.
On the downside you can’t put them in most lamps because they either don’t fit in the lamp shade at all or they project an inch over the top of it and look distressingly ugly.
They are also intrinsically flawed.

Some of the flaws I don’t mind. I don’t mind waiting for them to warm up before they get to full brightness. I don’t really mind the faint humming sound they produce. I do, however, mind the harsh, unflattering, headache inducing light they produce. It’s as bad as the “daylight” bulbs. If I wanted daylight, I’d go outside.

To show willing, I’ve installed an energy saving light bulb here in my study. It’s awful. It makes the room look as though somebody has turned the contrast dial to maximum. I’m certain the shadows are secretly plotting some kind of coup.

So, if you are an Eco Boffin I would really like it if you could invent for me a better Eco Friendly light bulb please. Failing that, a device for the vaporisation of whoever had the idea to implement them into my life will be just as acceptable.

A Lady of a Certain Age

2009-01-15T20:41:00.000Z

Every day is special. Try hard enough and you can find a reason to celebrate the day you are alive in. Today, for instance, is special because the Long Tailed Tits returned to my bird table, because ER is on and because my Cos mentioned over dinner that she respects every single religion, “Even Judaism.” It could also be considered exceptional because I awarded myself a small prize for shutting my mouth very firmly at that point and not reopening it until I was ready to fill it with Yorkshire pudding.
Today, though, is an enormously special day because it is my Mammy’s birthday. If that wasn’t special enough, it is a most special birthday indeed because Mammy is now officially an OAP. Please contain your enthusiasm as I confirm that yes, my Mammy is 60 today. Happy Birthday Mammy.

For many people, such a milestone would be rather depressing but Mammy, as I am sure you are aware, is not many people and has thus spent the last year in a state of mounting excitement. All of her life she has worked hard and paid her own way. Now she can finally begin leaching the government for every penny it is worth. Mammy has her pension.
Amongst the other benefits now available to her is free bus travel, an OAP discount at The Codfather chipper near Strider’s and 10% off at B&Q on a Wednesday. It has taken many years but at long last, my Mammy is of some practical use.

Mammy loves being a pensioner. Her cries of “Help me up, I’m a poor crippled Mammy!” have been replaced by “Help me up, I’m a poor crippled pensioner Mammy!” She has bought herself a foldable walking stick which nobody can work out how to fold up. Whenever we try it springs apart in a lively manner not entirely unlike the time the cat fell in the bath.
She has also bought herself a fetching pink shirt. She doesn’t like it and intended to take it back to the shop but found herself wearing it despite my heartfelt entreaties not to.

To celebrate her birthday, Mammy wanted to go to the farm and set fire to things. Then she wanted to cook sausages on the barbeque and eat them in proper sausage buns with plenty of brown sauce. Yesterday was another wet one and she was rather concerned that everything would turn out to be too wet to burn but I reassured her that combustion on this scale is merely a matter of petrol. Unfortunately, while the rain had stopped by this morning, the wind had not and in the interests of not causing large amounts of fire related damage to the surrounding buildings, we put that plan on hold.

Disclaimer: If any of the Garda or Environmental Helicopter people are reading this, I would just like to make it clear that we don’t burn things recklessly or have bonfires and if we do it is only because of the dry rot which makes it totally legal. I checked.

Lacking a celebratory conflagration, we initialised a backup plan. We plied Mammy with drink and rented Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from the video shop. I have to say, it was great.
When it was released I seem to recall everybody claiming it was rather rubbish. To be honest, it was rather rubbish. The storyline was ridiculous; the girl was annoying and pointless; Cate Blanchet was doing her best but we all know that a boiler suit looks good on nobody; nevertheless, I loved every hackneyed second of it. It was definitely an Indiana Jones film.
We also took Mammy to see Slumdog Millionaire at the cinema yesterday which is also great. Be prepared, it is quite cheesy but who cares? It has a fantastic soundtrack and brilliant photography. Danny Boyle is always interesting even when the end product doesn’t quite work. This is definitely a Danny Boyle film and it definitely works.

Brrrr

2009-01-12T20:07:00.000Z

My talents are many and varied but something that is currently beyond me is the ability to know what you lot are all looking at when you take a peek through the nearest window. If you are, like me, in the northern hemisphere, chances are when you look through your window today you will be seeing a cold landscape into which you are reluctant to venture.
Currently I am experiencing a rather blustery day. It is very wet. It is very windy. It is really quite cold. I also have no heating.

In rural Ireland, we don’t have sensible things like a mains gas supply. Instead we have LPG canisters available from the garage to run the hob from and a big tank of kerosene to run the boiler. The problem with this is the necessity of remembering when the last time Seamus came to fill it up for you was. I am not terribly good at this.
To be fair, the tank was checked before Christmas when it was half full but then there was a cold snap and now the tank is almost empty and Seamus won’t be able to come by with his tank of liquid until he has visited the 64 other people who have got themselves into an identical situation.

Fortunately, I have a backup plan. I have a plug-in oil filled radiator borrowed from John Who Knows Everything and a fire lit in the sitting room. Or at least, that’s what I was aiming for.
You see, flagrancy is not one of my many and varied talents. For many years I paid close attention to Ray Mears as he demonstrated how to burn half a Rainforest down armed only with a pointed rock, three blades of grass and a small aubergine. I nodded sagely as Bruce Parry showed me how to peal an armadillo and bake it in an oven built from its own intestines. Why then, do I remain unable to set light to a small pile of prehistoric compressed plant fibre?

The fault, I feel, lies not in my own inability to control flame. I believe it lies in the ancient hereditary regard of warmth as something frightfully decadent. Warmth is akin to comfort and comfort sends you straight to hell.
In order to prevent this eternal suffering, Brits invented firelighters. Firelighters are small lumps of white stuff saturated with a strong smelling flammable liquid. You put them on the fire and set light to them. They burn merrily for eight and a half minutes taking all the kindling with them before leaving you with a pile of smoking, unlit coal. Thus heat remains uncreated and as we wait for the hypothermia to set in, we comfort ourselves with thoughts of the everlasting joy which shall surely be our reward once death overcomes us.

Cold I can cope with, anyway. Cos can’t. Even before the heating went off she was sitting huddled on the sofa with eight jumpers on and yet she lives in a part of Canada that is covered in snow for 7 months of the year. If she can’t cope with the puny Irish winter, how does she manage over there?
While I can cope with cold, it turns out that my poor beleaguered flesh can’t. I am well used to having lavender fingernails and digits which don’t move properly but as long as I can still touch my thumb to my little finger in less than two goes, I don’t worry about it. My feet are another matter.
Being, as they are, far from my head and on the other side of my lovely lady lumps, I don’t see them that often. When I do they tend to be a worrying grey colour which I am sure is either dirt or very poor circulation. It’s probably a bit of both. A couple of weeks ago I woke up to find that my feet were their usual worrying grey but that the centre toe of my left foot was red and swollen and that if I spent 10 minutes poking it, also quite painful. I decided I probably had joint ill, which is what calves get, and thought no more about it. Several days later the experience had spread to all of my toes and was accompanied by strange itchy lumps on the undersides.
I complained to Strider who recommended I stop using James Herriot books as a diagnostic tool and look up chilblains on the interweb instead.

Chilblains are ulcers caused by exposure to cold and humidity which damages the capillary beds in the skin. Redness, itching, inflammation and blisters all feature. Sticking your frozen feet next to something hot in order to thaw them out is one of the worst things you can do to set them off, apparently. This probably explains their manifestation in my life. I have a habit of walking around outside on the decking in bare feet because I can grip with my toes and not fall over, bang my head on a chair and require 6 stitches.
Due to the chilblains, I am now required to wear either socks or slippers at all times that my feets may remain at a temperate level and further outbreaks avoided.

So, while I may have Chilblains, a complaining relative in situ and no heating, my carbon footprint is diminishing rapidly.

If only I cared.

The Broadband Revolution

2009-01-08T19:43:00.000Z

I have often complained that if my interweb connection was any slower, it would be going backwards. It is with great sadness I concede that I am no longer able to do so. Broadband has finally entered my life and it is marvellous.

It was a few days before Christmas that the news was announced. After months nay, years of broken promises and blithe assurances that they would definitely get it done just as soon as the engineers re-emerged from the pub, Eircom have come good and performed the 10 minute task on my local exchange.
For reasons I don’t understand and am not asking for an explanation about, it is necessary to be within a certain distance of said telephone exchange. This led to many worried looks between myself and He Who Knows Everything. We were almost certainly right on the edge of the acceptable distance. Were we to be thwarted once more? Would I have to take matters into my own hands, crank up the JCB and remove the picturesque hill which stands between my house and a DSL connection?
Happily, we turned out to be within the required distance. BT managed to send us a modem as promptly as could be expected with Christmas in the way and it all worked after only one call to the nice Customer Service man in Nicaragua (You must unplug all telephones not routed through the special beige noise deleter thingies, apparently).

I am currently listening to BBC Radio 3 and feeling most grown up as a result. Donald Macleod and Bruce Wood are considering how Purcell responded to two very different reigns: the Catholic James II and the Protestant William and Mary of Orange. I quite like Purcell. The only times you ever hear Purcell on Dorsexburyshire FM is when they’ve run out of Mexican music or the when third violinist is from Sligo.
Earlier on, I was listening to Ray D’arcy on Today FM which, admittedly, I can do anyway but now I can do it without going all the way upstairs to get the Radio and spending 10 minutes adjusting the tuning. If I cared to attend my desk first thing in the morning, I could listen to Terry Wogan on BBC Radio 2. I can probably listen to him at a time of my choosing with the BBC iplayer.

Broadband also means I can now spend the rest of eternity watching videos of laughing babies on Youtube. Previously if I had wanted to see such a sight, I would have had to drive to my hairdresser’s house and hit him with a tea towel in front of his son. This way is so much easier.
Looking at things I don’t want on Amazon now takes a fraction of the time that it used to. The Journalists’ Friend can stream fraudulent information into my brain at a near constant rate. People can ring me up at any time of the night or day and actually get through. There is no end to the possibilities.

In other news: Cos is slowly driving my brain into a state of near collapse. During every hour of the day and night she intermittently emits a highly pitched sighing noise. The frequency of the noises is directly proportionate to my levels of enjoyment and relaxation.
Imagine for a moment, if you will, trying to watch a tense and emotive television drama which is continually punctuated by small squeaky noises in your right ear.
“We have only four seconds to detonate the bomb or everybody in London will be killed!” *squeak*
“‘Alright Constable,’ she said, ‘but please be gentle.’” *squeak*

I have never been more thankful to not to be watching The Exorcist.

Obligatory New Year Resolutions Blog

2009-01-03T22:45:00.000Z

There is something comforting about the diurnal course we tread through life, the gentle rhythms of day to night, winter to spring, Larkrise to Candleford and so on. It has always puzzled me, therefore, why we feel the need to take a break halfway through the Christmas festivities and start attempting to make ourselves into better people via the medium of list.

If there is a good time to consider where one is going wrong in life and make a plan of the best way to correct it, I have yet to find it. I’m sure there are people who like to sit at a desk with a pen and paper, vigorously underlining the things they write down and positively applying them to their lives. Obviously I don’t know anybody like that because if I did I would have to move to Hull in an effort to avoid them and I really don’t want to live in Hull.
It follows that the worst time of all to plan ways of improving what is going wrong, is halfway through a gluttonous week of celebratory goodness. Dropping the box of After Eights you have been scoffing at the stroke of midnight is only going to depress you and make it feel like Christmas is over. Christmas isn’t over until Epiphany and the last great calorific splurge of the Epiphany cake (which is, by the way, the only thing the French ever got right. It’s a shame they ruined it with the obligatory Gallic humoured “game” of slicing.).

I don’t usually make New Year Resolutions. I already fail to drink, smoke, swear (much) or take drugs. Promiscuity is my only available vice and, to be honest, that’s not working out so well in a Catholic country. Strider has told me I’m a Straight Edge but Strider says a lot of things.

I’ve thought about this and decided that in order to make resolutions, one must first identify areas for improvement. I understand that weight is the traditional area for girls to aim for a reduction in and while I understand the importance of a healthy lifestyle, it’s quite cold and I need my fat for insulation. As long as I can climb the stairs without getting out of breath, it’s all good. If you think about it, being chunky is probably saving me several tons in carbon emissions each day. I should probably get some kind of medal.

Careful observations suggest it is also traditional to remove something enjoyable from one’s life. As I’m a crotchety miserable auld wench who enjoys nothing, this is clearly impossible to achieve. I’m not sure I understand what the point of it is either. There are many ways to demonstrate strength of character without depriving oneself; a jaunt to the supermarket with my Mammy, on a Friday during half term, for instance.

The third thing people tend to resolute is the reversal of a less than agreeable aspect of their character. Now, I am very clever and good looking and, being very clever and good looking, I know there are many deep seated flaws within my character. Some of them I already attempt to change and the ones I don’t are the ones I am comfortable with.
Self righteousness, for instance, has long been cited by Strider as my second least attractive quality. The first, it goes without saying, is my face. The thing is though, I’m not self righteous. I have aspects of self righteousness combined with a lack of sympathy for anybody in a situation less serious than gangrene of the head. If you have a problem, grand so, come on down, I’ll do what I can to help. If you don’t, then please stop moaning and get a grip because you are letting the side down.
I suppose I could stop making deeply evil, snide and horrible comments and show a little more tolerance towards the deeply annoying. When Cos, for instance, said she believed John Edward was a genuine medium and that he had passed scientific tests and was very highly thought of by other mediums, was it really necessary for me to reply “I believe Hitler is most highly thought of by some of the words top dictators”?

I suspect that this New Year Resolution malarkey is going to take some more thought.

In other news: I thrashed Strider at Scrabble. I’m usually keen to play a nice game of Monopoly but we’ve all avoided it this year. It’s probably for the best. A small plastic house lodged in the forehead can often offend.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-24T23:14:00.000Z

It’s not that I’m a useless lazy wench incapable of organising my way out of a paper-bag let alone the biggest event of the year, but I must confess, I am not yet totally sorted out.
The trouble is, when you are standing at the top of the ladder at the top of a flight of stairs, turn around and see the 20 odd foot drop behind you, one becomes rather more concerned with not experiencing a messy death from height rather than making time to ice the Christmas cake. Having avoided the aforementioned, one becomes rather inclined to tea based reward rather than any of the hundred other things on the increasingly ominous To Do list.

However, Christmas is not about getting things done. I am a hippy and understand this. Not for me the last wild-eyed dash around the shops in commercial desperation; I am perfectly happy if I get the chance to just drink tea, heckle the Queen and give the Cat enough turkey to make her sit really still for a very long time.
Unfortunately other people are not so keen on this philosophy and insisted that I had to help He Who Knows Everything bring the tree in and then help Mammy and Strider decorate it. I offered a decorative stick but was rudely rebuffed.

They were quite right to insist of course. The tree is lovely and smells divine even if they did begin decorating it in my absence and went for a tasteful and colour co-ordinated look which was too late to change by the time I turned up to help.
Throughout our childhoods, Strider and I held a yearly battle over the Christmas tree scheme. She always wanted to do it tastefully in red and gold whereas I fought tooth and nail to have every decoration we owned placed upon it, including the naked plastic cherub with the satanic expression. In later years when we began buying a real tree, I would have the 4ft plastic one in my bedroom. The cat would spend all Christmas attempting to ascend it in the hope of destroying the jaunty pantyhose fairy on the top but I maintain repeated fallings over added to the Look.

Strider and Mammy rejected both my purple fluffy fairy lights and my white fluffy fairy lights. They have even rejected the Lights Which Do Things but this is probably down to my unfortunate habit of switching them to Caffeine-Overdose mode. Instead it is simple and elegant and won’t take 4 hours to remove everything once January rolls around. I am most disappointed.
They did, however, allow me to do the grand Switching On. Strider said that because I’ve done TV I am officially a Z list celebrity and that I should be glad of any gig I can get.

He Who Knows Everything is my only ally in rubbish Christmas decorativeness. He has stung some fairy lights in a tree near the fence. He said he was going to put them on the well-house but saw the tree and changed his mind.
I like them very much. If you squint really hard they look like a dislocated rabbit.

Anyway.
To all of you, my very best wishes for peace in your lives and happiness always. Where ever you are, whoever you are with, make your moments enjoyable.
Find the people you love and tell them so. Find something to love about the people you don’t. Let go of bad feelings and imagined slights. The benefit of the doubt can be given for free.
Extend your hearts to those in need. Preserve a space for yourself. Endeavour to do more even if you think you can not; you can do more than you imagine with a word or a gesture.

Show only the best of yourself to the world.

Nadolig Llawen, Happy Christmas

Give yourself something Nice this Christmas

2008-12-22T20:30:00.001Z

There are many things my Mammy does which cause me mystification. Only today she was sorting the 18 identical white milk jugs which live in the back of the plates cupboard and putting them in a different cupboard. I didn’t ask her why she was bothering because I know from long experience she would have claimed she wanted everything to be sorted out “for Christmas.” I’m not convinced the 18 identical white milk jugs care which cupboard they spend the yuletide in but who am I to question the logical workings of Mammy’s head? Much less to ask her why she isn’t doing something that would actually prove useful and give me one less task to complete; putting the sofa covers in the washing machine for instance.

One thing in particular which causes total mystification is her habit of repeatedly leaving messages on other people’s answer phones.

I’ve never fully accepted the answer phone as a gadget which can be usefully inserted into my everyday life. Although I have one, more often than not unanswered calls get shunted to the mysterious Eircom mailbox which I haven’t set up to receive messages because I am unwilling to crowd my brain with the superfluous knowledge of how to do so. I have an answer phone which will do the job for free. In any case, my telephone is supplied by BT, not Eircom, hence the mysteriousness.
When I do receive a message it is usually delivered at speed and so garbled I am unable to tell whether I am being invited to join a civil war re-enactment society or sternly told to renew my car insurance. I don’t really want to set up devices to enable more confusion to be delivered into my life.

Mammy seems to enjoy leaving messages for people. When I was a student, I would regularly arrive home to find two messages from her on my answer phone, the second of which would be “I’ve just left a message on your mobile as well because you’re still not answering.” I never had the heart to tell her how irritating it was.
For all I know she believes that if you are away from your phone and a message is left for you, a bell will go off in your head and you will instantly become compelled to run to the phone, hear the message and return the call that instant. Then again, maybe that is how things are and I’ve just been left out of the loop.

Now that everybody has a mobile phone of course, we can all be instantly accessible to everybody else.
Let’s play a little game. I bet you the junk on the left hand side of my desk (a number of free DVDs from the half tree that is the Sunday papers and a comedy pen in the shape of a fish) that the first thing you do when you get back to your desk, car, wherever, is check your mobile phone for missed calls or received texts. I will also bet you the junk on the right hand side of my desk (a beetroot jar of miscellaneous screws and my last phone bill) that when you receive a text on your phone you immediately read it and reply to it even if you are in conversation with a person who is standing directly in front of you.
Worse is when you pick up the phone and a voice tells you they had a missed call from your number. Is everybody seized of a fear that something is happening they aren’t a part of? Do they not understand that if I care, I will ring them back at another time? It is forgivable in plumbers and the like because it is a business but the rest of you might like to reconsider before making that call.
I once received a phone call at 11:30pm on a Sunday evening from a woman who said she’d had a missed call from my number. I explained there must have been a mistake because I hadn’t made any calls that evening. She replied it had been from Saturday morning. I was too bewildered and frightened to shout at her, but at least I now know there are two kinds of phone calls which arrive without warning at unsociable hours.

It is all the fault of the interweb of course. Just about anybody can become a feature columnist and amass a following in Utah. When you are spewing drivel into the ether, it is easy to believe you are somebody jolly important who should definitely respond to all text messages the moment you receive them because otherwise society will collapse. Don’t even get me started on Twitter.

How about this instead? Why not give yourself the gift of unavailability?

I dare you all to try it. Learn to not check your phone until you are ready to. If you are in the middle of something and it rings, ignore it. It’s okay to do that, really it is.
We’ve become so obsessed as a society, maybe it’s time we all understood that missing a phone call isn’t going to cause terrible things to happen. If somebody can’t get hold of you, it isn’t a disaster. They will catch up with you later. Nothing is that important that it will irretrievably collapse because you failed to answer your phone or respond to a text the moment you received it.

Unless you’re waiting on a new kidney. Then it’s probably important.

Far too much to do

2008-12-16T19:42:00.000Z

It may come as a surprise to virtually everybody, but I exist in a near constant state of having a lot to do. While it may look like I’m lying on the sofa with a mug of tea reading Douglas Coupland, I’m actually skilfully avoiding all of the very busy things I ought to be doing.

In case you didn’t realise, Christmas is next Thursday and because I’ve been so busy I slightly forgot. Ireland follows the same Christmas tradition as the UK; when the doors close on Christmas Eve they stay that way. Everything stops until after New Years when we re-emerge somewhat more rotund than before.

Part of the problem is that I have been theoretically preparing for Christmas for weeks and so failed to notice its impending arrival. I blame making a Christmas cake. When you spend two months poring brandy over an eight inch square brick on a weekly basis, you become so entrenched in routine you forget it is time to dig out the apricot jam and royal icing.

Being so fond of chaos, I have a very long list of Things to Do. This week alone I have to go to Dublin, go to Kilkenny, get my hair cut and go to a jolly soirée at the invitation of Pat the Farmer. I also have to paint the walls of the hall and of the upstairs landing.
Before I can paint the walls of the hall and of the upstairs landing, I have to paint the ceilings because otherwise it will make the whole room look tired. Before I can paint the ceiling in the hall, I have to rebuild the section of it I destroyed.

To be fair, it needed to come down anyway for complicated reasons involving bureaucracy and the hall was already covered in dust from sanding the woodwork and there was a crowbar handy and… well… things just followed a natural progression.

The trouble with decorating is that it is necessary to slot it in around all of the normal everyday things one is expected to do like cooking and shopping and all the rest of it. Being Christmas, one is also expected to make longs lists of necessary items and then go out and procure them. I’m just glad I managed to get the pickles sorted.

I’ve worked out that I need to get finished by Saturday at the latest so that I can have a clean and get the tree up on Sunday for when Strider claims to be arriving. Monday I will have to be tackling the ironing, cleaning the oven and sweeping the chimney. Tuesday I will be doing the final shop and baking for guests. Wednesday I will be slumped in a heap somewhere and feebly attempting to wrap presents before cleaning the house again.

There is one way I can get all of this done.

Omit sleep.

How Not To Vote

2008-12-12T22:36:00.000Z

I think it was Tommy Tiernan who best summed up the Lisbon Treaty Referendum. He said he had been under the impression that there were two ways to vote: Yes or No. As it turned out, you could either vote Yes or you could vote We Can Do This As Many Times As You Like Until You Chose The Correct Answer.

Ireland is one of two countries in Europe who have yet to ratify the Treaty. The other is the Czech Republic and they said they’d sign if we did. The ratification of the Lisbon Treaty rests solely on Ireland’s shoulders. The peoples of Europe are right to be worried.
The Government are all for it. They would like nothing more than to waltz into Brussels and put their X on the line but unfortunately, they can’t. The ratification of the Lisbon treaty involves changing the constitution and the Government aren’t allowed to do that without a referendum. Their main problem is that when they had one, we all voted No.

Naturally, the Government were a little surprised by this. They immediately commissioned people who know about these things to find out why. It turns out that we were all worried that the Lisbon treaty would negate Ireland’s military neutrality, effect its taxation and legalise abortion. Even as I write, guarantees are being sought on these issues to placate the electorate in time for the next referendum when we will all be voting Yes (or else).

This is all nonsense of course. The people who know about these things didn’t bother to ask me what I thought of it all. It’s a shame because, as we all know, I have a great talent for telling people exactly where they are going wrong.

To be honest, I think it all began to go downhill when the bloke in charge of it mentioned he hadn’t actually read the thing. While I admire his honesty and enthusiasm for the project, it was not the best thing to mention to the electorate.
The Government pamphlet explaining what it was all about didn’t help either. I have mastered Calculus, The Perfect Victoria Sponge and Flat Pack Furniture Assembly but I couldn’t understand a word of it.
In some desperation I passed it on to He Who Knows Everything and begged him to explain it. He couldn’t.
With a growing sense of hopelessness the Yes campaign tried a new tactic: Voting No On Lisbon Will Embarrass Your Government In The Eyes Of Europe. I’m sure I am not alone in saying that I am more than comfortable with that.

I still don’t understand where the idea that Lisbon would legalise abortion comes from. I didn’t see it being used by the No campaigners. Maybe they were afraid it would strengthen the Yes vote.

Anyway. The Government has promised the EU that they will sort out the population, buy all the votes they can, explain things properly this time and secure ratification.

We may not be part of the EU much longer.

Dear Father Christmas

2008-12-10T19:53:00.000Z

Dear Father Christmas,

This year I have given much thought to what I would like you to bring me. I suspect that even you are not immune to the credit crunch and so have kindly cut back on my superfluous desires. Rather wrenchingly have I crossed out a Sony SLR digital camera from the list on the grounds that it will give me something to buy if I win the lotto. Animal Crossing: Let’s Go to the City has also gone; as it is virtually the same game as one I already own, I will wait until I find a second hand copy at a bargain price.

Cutting back is just one example of what a kind and thoughtful girl I am. Throughout the year, I have remained good in accordance with our agreement; for instance, when the scary teenage boys and their father presented me with a framed photograph of their whole family as a “Thank you for allowing us to stay in your lovely home” present, I immediately displayed it in a prominent position upon my mantelpiece and did not shout “A photograph of your rubbish family? I wanted booze!”
I have also made a special effort not to tell certain people what I think of them, sometimes in the face of extreme provocation. I have encouraged Strider to be nice to our Cos because it will make Mammy happy. I have refrained from libelling people via the medium of interweb and have tried to understand the new rules of Rugby Union. I failed, but I tried.

This year I would like you to bring me a winning lotto ticket. Not a big one mind, five or six hundred euro in winnings will be fine. I would like to buy myself a Sony SLR digital camera. I promise to only use my powers of photography for good and not stalk minor Irish celebrities and their relatives.
I would also like to be able to eat lots and lots of chocolate and not gain shedloads of weight. This doesn’t have to be permanent, just for the few weeks over Christmas will be fine. Nobody likes a diet bore so really, you’d be doing lots of people a service by allowing me to eat all I want of peoples’ home baking. If the Karma Fairy objects, let the record show I am more than happy to accept this gift in the form of an overactive thyroid.
Finally, I would really like it if my soon to be visiting Cos could turn out not to be the racist, spoilt, selfish, emotionally ignorant cretin I fear her to be. If this turns out to be beyond your powers, please could you see your way to making the revelations of her character a little easier on my Mammy who is a kind hearted soul and doesn’t deserve any of it.

As a token of my thanks I will leave you some mince pies made with my special homemade mincemeat. You can leave in the stockings of children who have been Bad.

Lots of Love

Theo (Age 27)

P.S Don’t blame me for this. Ray D’arcy made me do it. He eats porridge and cares about road safety. Don’t be too harsh on him.

A Trivial Blog For Serious People

What the Libservatives should do for us

I agreed with Nick First

On attractiveness

In Praise of Alpacas

Mail Overload

The Book Snob

A Bit Lost

Thankyou, And Goodnight

Fancy Nominating an Irish Blog?

A Book, By Theo

Ice, Ice Baby

Dear Father Christmas

Traditions

In Which He Who Knows Everything Learns Where Not To Park His Car

Tell me Everything You Know About Squirrels

Pumpkin A-Go-Go

Things that go *Ding-Dong* in the Early Evening Time

The New Sofa and the Gap where it No Longer is

Welcome To The Blog

The Racism Problem

Scaring the religious

Look Into My Eyes

Theo Gets On After Depressing Events

The Cat

So, how does she smell?

A Trivial Blog For Serious People - Now in Animated Form!

Something to be proud of

The State of the Job Market

In which Theo talks about the Stuckists

Stupidity Will Be Punished

Go Shorty

Best. Farmers Tan. Ever.

Theo: Killing the Music Industry since 1989

Things that make you go "Ngggggghhhhh"

Oh. Good. Vegetarians.

*in the style of Pheonix Wright* OBJECTION!

Lifestyle Jackets

Vote for Me! I live down the road!

Blogs win Prizes

Boom-shanga-nonny-doo-dah

Dear Dave

In which Theo Clears out the Cupboard

"Wow! This Product Realy Works!"

So this is it, we're going to die.

The New Camera - Decision Time

Proof of Existence

Factors of Life

The Great Camera Debate

Conversation

In Which Theo Attempts to Thwart Cybercrims

The New Washing Machine

Sonnick! I Choose You!

The Problem with Eircom

People who Follow then Don't Follow One on Twitter

In Which Theo Considers What Makes Something the Best

The Cat Returns

The Cat: Still with Two Eyeballs

The Single Girl's Slightly Embittered Thoughts on Valentine's Day

New Shampoo

Sian: The Educational Hussy

Trying to be Good

Which Animal which may or may not be found on a farm are you?

Libraries win Prizes

Happy Birthday Robbie Burns

Let there be (Government Approved) Light

A Lady of a Certain Age

Brrrr

The Broadband Revolution

Obligatory New Year Resolutions Blog

Merry Christmas

Give yourself something Nice this Christmas

Far too much to do

How Not To Vote

Dear Father Christmas

Things that go Ding-Dong in the Early Evening Time

in the style of Pheonix Wright OBJECTION!