Friday, September 29, 2006

Bantry Fair Day

In the town of Bantry by the sea, there is what's locally known as a "Fair Day" every Friday. It used to be the first Friday of every month, but lack of any sort of organisational legislative sensible, organised approach to leglislation on the matter has meant that it's far from organised. In a nutshell, what I'm trying to say is that it's a bit of a mess, where every nutter empties the contents of his attic and possibly his bin, and tips it onto the lovely square, which is made from sand-coloured Belgian stone. It's actually not so much square as a kidney-shaped thing, but that's beside the point.

Amongst all the dross (which is incredibly varied, I'd have to say), there are still some good things; some great things, even. For example, a bunch of foodies have now taken over the stretch just off the square along New Street (which is, effectively the main street, but not Main Street, which is perpendicular to it) and they sell a super range of stuff, which isn't exactly cheap, but not exactly mad dear either. You can buy yourself a fine 6-course meal with desert and coffee and then go onto the square and eat it, chuckling to yourself as you survey the trash. The rest of it is the usual mixture of clothes, shoes, tools, books, geese, other fowl and, of course the obligatory selection of items stolen by itinerant salesmen from a variety of premises elsewhere in the country.

But, above all else, the unbridled and unregulated Bantry Fair illustrates quite clearly how underdeveloped our whole republic is. Those who took over the reigns of power of the fledling state in 1922 didn't really do things whole-heartedly, I suppose. Anyway, the thing is that there is almost no town in Ireland that has real political autonomy to simply look after itself in a property day-to-day manner. Even the capital Dublin doesn't have a proper set-up for self government, with an idiotically-titled "Lord Mayor" (another depressing hangover of British rule) who can never stay in office long enough to actually see through any project.

Anyway, for the time being, I'll enjoy the disorganised chaos of the Bantry Fair.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Technorati Stuff

Nothing much happening today, except that Technorati rules...

Technorati Profile

Monday, September 25, 2006

The Town I don't love so well

Dunmanway is a town that I never particularly liked, and, since that incident at their municipal pool some months back (see "NOT a Pervert" blog), I've been festering an ever-deepening resentment and putrid hatred for the place and all of its inhabitants.

If you don't believe me, take a drive through it some time. Like a lot of places in Ireland these days, it has an inexplicably neat and sort-of invitingly clean facade about it. But that's just what it is; a facade. Catch the eyes of the locals as you drive through. Observe the twitching curtains. Observe the Deliverance-invoking eyeballing stares you get. It's a place where a new bridge has been widened or made (I can't remember which), yet 10 metres away, a crucial junction remains with its road unmarked for about 10 years now, so that only regular users of the road know that the main road to Bantry swings right and the road that appears to go straight on is, in fact, a more minor road that goes to their yokel-infested hotel and somewhere else after that. In Dunmanway, the boy racers drive about at speed in a completely unhindered fashion, driving as fast as they possibly can from one end of the town to the other to meet their fellow boy racers with whom they talk shite on their mobile phones without fear of fine or penalty points. It's a place where the Garda Síochana (Irish for Keystone Cops) are even more invisible than they are in other Irish towns, because their superiors force them to live in a pigsty of a condemned building.

I may not be an oil painting myself, but then neither are any of the Dunmanwayans that I've seen. To say that they're all inbred might not necessarily be true, but I would reckon that about 98% of them are - and it's only the influx of Polish and Latvians that's keeping the statistics at a relatively respectable level.

If you still don't believe me, then go the swimming pool some Saturday morning and just observe how they park. Even though there's a large car park around the back, the Dunmanway fuckwits dump their cars along the entrance road. They don't even have the sense to park them parallel to the footpath; they plonk them perpendicular to the path to ensure that they make a proper job of blocking traffic. I tried glaring at a few of them yesterday but got only vacant inbred stares into space in return.

When you read accounts in the paper about civil wars, you often hear about atrocities where such-and-such a village was levelled and where such-and-such an ancient building was razed and a nice lawn established over it. And you think; "What sort of inhuman scum are they?!" But the truth is that they are perfectly human. I, for one, know exactly how these military commanders feel. Yesterday, for example, as I seethed driving slowly through a West-Cork town called Dunmanway, I found myself praying for a civil conflict; the only possible scenario, I think, where I could get away with bombing the shit out of Dunmanway and wiping the snot on the nose of humanity that it is off the face of West Cork.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Great Golf-Crashing Gales

Isn't the weather wonderful? We've just had the calmest, warmest, driest, sunniest summer that Ireland has known since 1995. So the montonous droning bores that think golf is fun have been planning to host the Ryder Cup tournament in Ireland for years. Years and Years. Padraig Harrington himself has spent so many countless nights lying in bed in his jim-jams (the one with the golf clubs and love hearts on it) dreaming of the day when all the rectal, whooping, overfed fuckwit American golfers would come over to Europe to join their equally lobotomal European counterparts for a mind-numbingly overwhelmingly boring bore-fest.

But all that intricate planning can't account for the weather, for which there's no accounting for. I laughed like an evil maniac this morning when i saw some golfing "fan" squinting and softly lamenting at the state of the weather which prevented him from going out on the course to see his heroes sigh deeply and whack a small white ball. Squinting and softly lamenting is what golfers and golfing fans do, whether a hurricane destroys the club house and lays waste all the unfortunate "players" caught in the storm, or whether they've just missed a put by a centimetre. Playing golf and watching it on tv (which the plain people of Ireland will not be able to to do, as they've sold it all to that Sky pack of cunts) does dull the brain, as is evidenced by the sloth-like demeanour of any of these fuckwits that you see either in conversation or on the television.

So, with a bit of luck, these warm storms will continue and the whole stupid uber-bore will be cancelled. Personally, I find it all excellent weather for skinny dipping: the water's fine, there's no-one else at the strand, and the warm gales dry your body in no time.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

George "noo-ku-lur" W. Bush

I don’t really like people who mispronounce things. By things, of course, I mean words. Mispronouncing words is not a good thing, generally speaking. There are a lot of fuckin’ eejits out there who live long lives and die without coming around to the realisation that the word “what” for example, is not pronounced “wha’” or “I have a cat who sleeps in a cot” is not pronounced “I go’ha ca’ who lives in a co’”. I know that these are specific enough examples but they’ll be familiar to the average Irish man (or woman), although not, perhaps, to the fuckwits who talk like that.

Anyway, the point is that there’s a man who makes regular appearances on the telly and who is an important leader of a large important country which goes around smiling and making friends with countries they like, while establishing their companies and persuading the relevant ministers to give them tax breaks until people get wise to their shit and tell them to fuck off and then they go to a country more desperate for their money, and with the countries they don’t like, they send a large army of fuckwits with expensive military gear who listen to death metal music while they butcher them with a sort-of Hicksville-style slack-jawed indifference. This fella has been mispronouncing things for years now, and someone has surely pointed it out to him on more than one occasion. He probably pays people to point these things out to him, in fact. Yet he still feels no shame whatsoever in standing up in front of the world (the real world, mind, not America) in the UN Chamber (please move it back to Geneva) and talking like a right fucking eejit about Iran’s “nu-ku-lar” programme (or should it be “program”). Nobody bats an eyelid. It really does say something about the state of fear that the rest of the world is in when not one of the hundreds of delegates stand up and say: “For fuck’s sake! The word is nuclear! Nuclear! Nuclear! Say it, you fuckwit! Say “Noo”. Now say “Klee”. Right, now say “Ar”. I don’t know… I’m grammatically concerned and terrified at the same time. There is no war. They make it up. America has now descended to requiring a constant state of war just to exist. It has rabies. Stay away. This warning was issued 50 years ago by Jean-Paul Sartre. Nobody heeded it then, and it remains unheeded today.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Lashings of Lebanese

I know someone who knows someone else who knows the right person, with the result that last weekend, even though I can ill afford it, I ended up staying 3 nights with my best girl in the rooftop penthouse in one of the best hotels on the Croisette in Cannes. In addition, the car hire company had run out of little peugeot 205's or similar and instead upgraded us to a large Mercedes saloon, so hurray for fortune!

Anyways, neither of us had ever eaten Lebanese food (apart from the odd Taboulet), so around the corner we went to a place that seemed popular with the local Lebanese ex-pats and sat ourselves down. The missus has no French to speak of or to speak with, but the waiter says "I can speak whatever language you like - i am very clever." Now as I looked around the place on the street terrace, taking it all in puffing a cigarette, I noticed that everyone working there came from the same family - uncles, cousins, etc. They also looked exceedingly relaxed and well fed. So, it was no surprise that they considered it "normal" to give us as much food as they did. Twelve dishes - all containing some salad and a sprig of mint - came out pretty much at the same time. We began to divide and eat in between sips of wine. By the time the 7th one was done, we were beginning to feel very full, then they hit us with a great big fucking plate of cooked chicken and lamb. Then, at the end, one of the younger lads actually forcibly brought us across the road to where his uncle had a whole shop full of "baklava". Well, fuck me pink if I didn't almost explode with the stuffing I had that night. I felt like a goose on a foie gras farm.

The next morning, I vowed never to go to Lebanon or to another Lebanese restaurant again. I still managed to pack away a decent amount of breakfast though.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Four x Four Feckers!

I remember getting a spin in one of those behemoths once, no there was another time now that I think of it. But the thing is, each time I got a spin, I was happy to find that it was most uncomfortable.

I was trying to sell a broken-down house (probably to some gullible Brit) for a cute hoor from Cork who had a four-by-four vehicle. At the time, I used to do this sort of thing for a living, you see. Anyway, I don't remember what make of yoke it actually was, but it looked very sleek and powerful from the outside. At the time, I used to admire these vehicles and, to a lesser extent, the people who owned them, God help us. Before mounting the yoke, I stood back and said "God, but that's a fine vehicle!"
- "It cost enough!" He professed in a tone markedly tinged with regret and delivered from the side of his mouth that was planted around the middle of his red face.
- "I'd say it did, now." says I, giving a conspiratorial wink as I leaped energetically inwards, narrowly avoiding a potentially painful collision between my head and the frame of the doorway of his impressive automobile.
I sat smiling with satisfaction for a moment, taking in the height from the earth's surface, the leather on the seats and the dusty debris that littered the cabin. Oh, my! This was living! It felt like being high on a dusty seat on a cushion of air, if one could possibly dream of such a thing. The big bastard of a diesel engine snarled into life and she began to move along the relatively smooth public road.

But, guess what? It began to bounce and throw me in every conceivable direction. I had imagined that with this much height and power, all bumps would be absorbed by the time they travelled the considerable distance from the road surface to your arse. That should be the idea behind such a design, I would have thought. Surely, says I to myself in my head, that is the very reason why these large yokes exist in the first place. But, no; not the case, as it turned out. In fact, the opposite is true - The bumps and lumps are magnified with distance, much like the way a film projector might magnify the size of the image on screen.
"Are we there yet?" I enquired hopefully, as I bounced off the roof of the jeep and landed on his left shoulder.
"Another bit-een East of here and we're right," He explained helpfully.
I hurriedly closed my window for fear of being bounced out onto the unforgiving rugged stone-scape of West Cork.

The second time was a little better, but that's only because I was drunk and I was in the back of the thing, with 3 other drunken people who were able to cushion my repeated falls. I do remember that it was a Land Rover, though - a new type one that looks really comfortable from the outside.

The whole point of this perhaps seemingly pointless meandering is to get across my puzzlement as to why these things are so popular. It seems to me that people with large egos need an extra-large vehicle in which to drive them around. 15 years ago, it was only farmers that had them, but now the majority of the jeep-users are those who don't need them. The fact is that I couldn't afford one of these things (or maybe I could - I haven't made the necessary enquiries) but if I had money to spend on a fine car, I'd get something really fast and comfortable and not too expensive to run.

In this country, we've gone from openly taxing people to doing it by stealth - not a good sign for any republic and not a good example for the younger citizens. No, no. I think we should be more open about it again and tax the shit out of the four-by-four fuckers who guzzle around in their ridiculously over-sized contraptions.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

NOT a Pervert

I have 3 small boys of my own and they attend swimming lessons every week at a public pool not far from where I live.

Anyway, last year, I had been bringing the lads for a few weeks in a row and my wife happened to be working, so she was missing out on their heartening progress (ahh... it would make you cry, so it would; like watching them learn to walk all over again, although it does scare you a bit to see them able to swim with better technique than you and thinking it's only a matter of time before they'll b able to pass you out in the pool).
- So, says she, why don't you take the camcorder with you to the pool?
- Really? says I, Don't you think I'll look a bit weird?
- Not at all! says she, sure I'd love to see them swimming.

So, I agreed to do it.

Off with us to the pool - me and my three ducklings, as I sometimes call them as a joke to their faces. They don't find it funny. Anyway, in they go - the 2 older ones in the big pool and the little guy (who's 5) into the baby pool.

So, anyway, I'm there in the public viewing area that overlooks the pool, videoing and waving back to the lads, who do like being noticed and admired by their father. I'm thinking : "She's going to love this, so she is." After racking up a good 20 minutes or so of top class footage, and as I lower the camera once again, a broad smile of satisfaction on my face, the woman who's sitting on the seat next to me leans over and says "Ehh, excuse me, but are you going to be doing that for much longer?" indicating with her scabby finger that by "that", she meant using the camcorder. My blood ran cold at this point because I recognised it as a confrontation and my normal reaction in any such confrontation would be to run away at speed. "Well," I said "Why? Is it bothering you?"
"Well yes, it is. It's just, like, in this day and age, you know, I wouldn't feel that comfortable... you know..."
I stared blankly at her for a second, before pointing out that I was filming my sons and I indicated where the three of them were around the pool.
"Yes, my little daughter is there too. If you don't mind..." she added with a painful persistence.
Now, what the fuck was I supposed to do? On the one hand, I can understand the paranoia of some parents, who are by their nature, constantly scouring their known worlds for dangers of every sort and discussing them in grand detail, focusing in on the horror headlines of the British and Brit-style tabloids that they're stupid enough to pay any attention to. So, I reserve a certain amount of sympathy for them, even though they've possibly conditioned their minds to believing that they're living in South-East England, when in fact they're living in peaceful West Cork.

But, on the other hand, I was angry with this open accusation of me. This bitch had just labelled me a pervert. She felt uncomfortable, but without thinking logically, she had decided to dump her stinking bucket of discomfort on top of my head and stuck a label saying "Pervert Suspect" on me for good measure. And anyway, even assuming that I was a pervert (which she obviously did), what did she possibly imagine that I would do with images of children swimming in a public swimming pool? Did she think that there would be a perverts' market for such a thing? I mean, it wasn't like I was filming in the dressing-room, for fuck's sake!

So, what I felt that I should have said at that point was something like: "Oh, which one's your daughter? Is it the one in the sexy yellow number or the little hotty with cute arse beside her?"
However, instead I succumbed to the fact that this dimwit felt uncomfortable and switched off the thing. I spent the remainder of the time glowering with the humiliation and the stupidity of it, while she rattled away talking to her stupid friends.

The next week, there was even a notice at the entrance "No camcorders allowed". Paranoia has set in and it's here to stay. People are too thick to look around them and engage with their immediate environment and they imagine that they are under attack, living as they do in the fantasy world created from the conditioning of their constant use of foreign media. They don't have enough respect for their fellow citizens to counter their fears.

The perverts have won.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Oh me achin' back!

Let me tell you - it is a sore thing. Got up, and everything was fine, went to work. Sat in a chair. Went to get up and,.. Jesus! It was sore and continued all day long like that until I got herself to rub deep heat into me later on in the evening. Much better this morning; downing Arnica tablets like a map fucker all day.

But every time I get a back pain, I always think of that public safety ad of many years ago about a character called "Big John". He was big and powerful and a cheerful country-and-western tune told us how all heavy objects were just a "a barrel of fun to old Big John. But he never gave a thought to his back-bone...." and then John would go "Oh, me achin' back!" After repeatedly doing this at the end of every verse, for the final verse, John delivered his lines from the hospital bed. He sadly turned his face to camera and delivered his final line with mighty morososity, if there exists such a word.

A wonderful advert; informative and entertaining and a series of images that give a helpful insight into social and working life in Ireland of the 1970's, where everybody wore long hair, beards, bell-bottom jeans and emigrated to Britain. If that advert can be bought, I'd pay good money for it now, if I had it.

My back is feeling better already.

Friday, September 01, 2006

Explosive Night on a Donegal Island

Back in the crazy, extra-warm summer of 1995, when it was about 35 degrees every single day (or so it seems in my mind's eye), I experienced a near-death experience, so I did.

The day started with the usual blazing sunshine on the island of Inishfree Upper. This was not a normal summer, so it wasn't. During normal summers on Innishreed Upper, you would have each day greeted with a little rain and a little wind, mixed with some cold. But anyway, after checking the growth of my week-old beard and the skankiness of my sun& salt- bleached hair, I puffed out my chest and exited through the creaky door to inhale the revitalising scent of the sea. After a short fried breakfast was prepared by others and eaten by me and others, it was decided to head inshore for some supplies. This was usually code for "going to the port for some early beer and not forgetting to buy a loaf of bread and whatever else was on the shopping list that the girls had prepared before going back to the island sometime later".

Well, the sea was as calm as a labotomised Buddist monk that morning, which made our thirsts more pronounced than usual.

I sat with my 3 companions outside Ned's, reading in the Irish Times how the Croatians had been preparing all along to kick out the Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia and that they'd fucked them up goodo. Someone mentioned between slurps of stout that there was a festival on in Inishmore that day, so after another couple of hours involving drinking, talking rubbish and playing pool, we decided to move the bandwagon offshore. We got a lift on a half-decker over to Inishmore and on the journey I remember meeting some charming crusties with whom I shared a bottle of whiskey.

After that, things went a bit hazy, but suffice it to say that by the evening when I somehow ended back in the house on Innishfree, my world had become a very different place and I would estimate that I was the drunkest I have ever been and ever will be.

We all retired to the living room (there were about 10 in all), where talk was had and the fire was lighting. The candles were also lighting as there was no electricity on the island then (although there is now). I quickly fell into a sort -of coma. Around midnight, the fireworks on the mainland (to mark the end of the Mary-from-Dungloe Festival) were set off. These could be seen and heard from the island (only 2km away across the Bay) so everyone went out to see the show, leaving the door ajar. Repeated vigorous efforts were made to rouse me from my deep and dribbling slumber, but all were unsuccesful. With each little explosion and flash, everyone went "Ooh!" and then "Aah!". The house was by the beach and they stood admiring, ooh-ing and aah-ing on the strand with their backs to the house. All of a sudden, instead of a "pop!" or a "crack!", there was instead a thunderous-sounding "BOOOM!" and the funny thing was, it came straight from the house. They all turned around to see flames and thick smoke emanating with alarming energy from the room in which I was sleeping. Inside, I remained sleeping without having moved a centimetre, while burning debris and smoke was falling around me. The candles on either side of the fireplace had, with the assistance of the breeze from the open door, burned the frill which set fire to the timber mantle piece, which then began to burn with a real vengeance. The whole place would have gone up if it weren't for the little ancient tin of gunpowder that was on the mantle piece, which when it exploded, alerted the fireworks-watchers to what was happening inside.

The next morning, I awoke with a peculiar cough and a sore throat. The moral of the story: you never know when a little tin of gunpowder will come in handy.