Smoking out the law-breakers
I believe that the mobile phone is one of the main semi-conductor based high-tech infrastructural assets of the late twentieth century, heavily underpinning the Celtic Tiger. Not to be confused with the Amur Tiger which is a dangerous bastard if you jump two fences, push through a hedge and rub it when you’re half langers on lemonade, by all accounts. No, the Celtic one is a different creature, related to the leopard, friend of the jackal and sire of a thousand Jaguars but good only in spots, like a Curate’s egg. I never saw a Curate make a nest, let alone lay an egg, but I’m still young. I wonder what sort of nest a Parish Priest makes? Answers on a postcard to the usual address. I've seen a Bishop's nest, on the ring of Kerry.
Back to the Celtic tiger and how it came to be. And it’s all down to the poor ould mobile phone, that and the Hyundai van. Your basic Nokia jobbie, with fuckall bells and whistles. All over Ireland, men in Hyundai vans are running little businesses with 'em as they sit in traffic jams. No little girlie in an office upstairs over a bookie’s office someplace, roaring into a radio like Danny de Vito in Taxi ‘long go. You want a plumber, a courier, a fitter or a hair and nail job, all you do is ring 087 whatever the fuck and on they come. Men in vans with no overheads and no underpantses either, most of ‘em, in my experience of builder’s cracks.
And now they’re all lawbreakers. No more phone calls on the road - did you ever hear such bullshit?
I have often travelled behind an oul’ fella, with a hat on in the car. Him not me. A very bad sign, when you see a fella wearing a hat in a car. Now the mild-tempered person might assume that there was a lake in the sunroof, necessitating the wearing of the hat, but the mild tempered person would be dead wrong. The’hat in the car’syndrome is also characterised by the two door mirrors being at an angle of forty-five degrees to the ditch, the interior mirror used to suspend Padre Pio’s passport photograph, taken posthumously on a warmish day, the indicators that all come on together when the brakes are pressed, and FINALLY, and this is the critical factor in differential diagnosis, the smoking of the hooky pipe, in motion.
Anybody who smokes a pipe when they’re driving is certifiable, but thousands do it. In fact some of ‘em are already certified.
To get a pipe going well, you have to first clean it out and give it a good scrape with a penknife. Then you blow through it, and clean out all the old carcinogenic spits saturated in nicotine, turn it upside down, and tap it to get out the dust. Then you go through your pockets for the plug of Condor, and pare that with the penknife, holding the pipe in your mouth.
You roul the parings with the heel of your hand, forming a sausage as you roul. You ease the sausage of nice stringy tobacco parings into the pipe, packing gently as you go. It is fierce important to get them all knitting together nicely – get this wrong and you’re back to the beginning again. Then you put some of the ash you cleaned out in the first place on top of the freshly compacted sausage, to act as a catalyst to aid the combustion process. Then you clamp the pipe hard between your teeth, put away the penknife optimistically, and search for the matchbox.
You keep taking out matches until you get a good one, a bit like being blackballed in a gentleman’s club. When you get a good match, you strike it, and let a good flame build up, holding the match head-down and rotating it slowly so that the leading edge of the fire traverses the unburnt wood laterally at a suitable rate, optimising the spread of flame away from the seat of the fire. A working knowledge of differential calculus would help here. Now you tenderly hold the flame 1.649568326 inches over the pipe, and start sucking and puffing, like a bagpipes player only the thrust is reversed like a jet engine trying to stop a plane and you usually needn’t go from leg to leg and pivot on your long axis which is tricky while you're driving tha car anyway because you're sitting down. You get the point. All going well, you get a few scrawny puffs of grey smoke before the match quenches. Fuck it. You have to put away the matchbox, and search again for the penknife. You use the long sharp thing for taking the stones from the horses’ hooves to rod the pipe and free up an airway. Penknife away. Matches out again. Another search for a good match. You light the match. On the edge your peripheral vision, a small fragment of sulphur peels off, and describes a most interesting and complex multi-curve trajectory before gravity reasserts itself, a bit like a misfire of a Korean nuclear missile. There’s a tiny, barely discernible, odor of singeing cotton and JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY it’s very hard to steer a car when a bit of incandescent sulphur lands on the top of your willy. Not to mention the 2 mm hole in the Armani suit. Thankfully, and this is a little-known fact, our ancestors had this problem too, and evolution has built in an instantaneous involuntary response mechanism in the willy whenever fire threatens the DNA. Long before hommers were invented, doctors used to put fire to willys to check for reflexes. Only when transsexuals joined the US army did the willy test become superseded by whacks on the knee with a hommer. You never saw a dead fella jump when fire was put to his willy, but you could whack his knee all day with a hommer and he’d kick back at you.
Meanwhile, the rest of the match is lighting, so a few more puffs, a good spit out the window, roll the window up again and we’re off. Big cloud of blue smoke hovering before your eyes. Big cough, hawk up a good gob of phlegm, roul the windy down again and let it off, out into the slipstream. ‘Take that, ye fuckers of microbes! How does eighty miles a fuckin’ hour feel now, ye bastards? Living inside in my fucken’ chest for weeks, ye perished hoors, until I smoked ye out, heh? Fuckin’ bacteria, ye’re fucked now, heh?
Nice bit of Music on the radio, Ronan Collins or Tom the Turk, and settle down to enjoy the smoke.
And all of this is going on on the motorway. Or the national primary road which is the same thing only with less safety features. And it’s perfectly legal. At one hundred kilometres an hour or the prevailing speed of the squadcar at the head of the line, whichever is quicker.
This morning I was stuck in traffic in AH-dare for over an hour. I needed to be someplace else. I needed to meet some people and be on time. I had a mobile phone, but if I used it, locked between a lorry and a Hiace van, I’d be at peril of compromising my generally satisfactory record of crimilal law contraventions, (detected/as in/ by policemen).
Think about it the next time you see an oul’ lad with a hat on in a car with turned-in mirrors. I’ll have more to say on this I think.
Nuts
Back to the Celtic tiger and how it came to be. And it’s all down to the poor ould mobile phone, that and the Hyundai van. Your basic Nokia jobbie, with fuckall bells and whistles. All over Ireland, men in Hyundai vans are running little businesses with 'em as they sit in traffic jams. No little girlie in an office upstairs over a bookie’s office someplace, roaring into a radio like Danny de Vito in Taxi ‘long go. You want a plumber, a courier, a fitter or a hair and nail job, all you do is ring 087 whatever the fuck and on they come. Men in vans with no overheads and no underpantses either, most of ‘em, in my experience of builder’s cracks.
And now they’re all lawbreakers. No more phone calls on the road - did you ever hear such bullshit?
I have often travelled behind an oul’ fella, with a hat on in the car. Him not me. A very bad sign, when you see a fella wearing a hat in a car. Now the mild-tempered person might assume that there was a lake in the sunroof, necessitating the wearing of the hat, but the mild tempered person would be dead wrong. The’hat in the car’syndrome is also characterised by the two door mirrors being at an angle of forty-five degrees to the ditch, the interior mirror used to suspend Padre Pio’s passport photograph, taken posthumously on a warmish day, the indicators that all come on together when the brakes are pressed, and FINALLY, and this is the critical factor in differential diagnosis, the smoking of the hooky pipe, in motion.
Anybody who smokes a pipe when they’re driving is certifiable, but thousands do it. In fact some of ‘em are already certified.
To get a pipe going well, you have to first clean it out and give it a good scrape with a penknife. Then you blow through it, and clean out all the old carcinogenic spits saturated in nicotine, turn it upside down, and tap it to get out the dust. Then you go through your pockets for the plug of Condor, and pare that with the penknife, holding the pipe in your mouth.
You roul the parings with the heel of your hand, forming a sausage as you roul. You ease the sausage of nice stringy tobacco parings into the pipe, packing gently as you go. It is fierce important to get them all knitting together nicely – get this wrong and you’re back to the beginning again. Then you put some of the ash you cleaned out in the first place on top of the freshly compacted sausage, to act as a catalyst to aid the combustion process. Then you clamp the pipe hard between your teeth, put away the penknife optimistically, and search for the matchbox.
You keep taking out matches until you get a good one, a bit like being blackballed in a gentleman’s club. When you get a good match, you strike it, and let a good flame build up, holding the match head-down and rotating it slowly so that the leading edge of the fire traverses the unburnt wood laterally at a suitable rate, optimising the spread of flame away from the seat of the fire. A working knowledge of differential calculus would help here. Now you tenderly hold the flame 1.649568326 inches over the pipe, and start sucking and puffing, like a bagpipes player only the thrust is reversed like a jet engine trying to stop a plane and you usually needn’t go from leg to leg and pivot on your long axis which is tricky while you're driving tha car anyway because you're sitting down. You get the point. All going well, you get a few scrawny puffs of grey smoke before the match quenches. Fuck it. You have to put away the matchbox, and search again for the penknife. You use the long sharp thing for taking the stones from the horses’ hooves to rod the pipe and free up an airway. Penknife away. Matches out again. Another search for a good match. You light the match. On the edge your peripheral vision, a small fragment of sulphur peels off, and describes a most interesting and complex multi-curve trajectory before gravity reasserts itself, a bit like a misfire of a Korean nuclear missile. There’s a tiny, barely discernible, odor of singeing cotton and JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY it’s very hard to steer a car when a bit of incandescent sulphur lands on the top of your willy. Not to mention the 2 mm hole in the Armani suit. Thankfully, and this is a little-known fact, our ancestors had this problem too, and evolution has built in an instantaneous involuntary response mechanism in the willy whenever fire threatens the DNA. Long before hommers were invented, doctors used to put fire to willys to check for reflexes. Only when transsexuals joined the US army did the willy test become superseded by whacks on the knee with a hommer. You never saw a dead fella jump when fire was put to his willy, but you could whack his knee all day with a hommer and he’d kick back at you.
Meanwhile, the rest of the match is lighting, so a few more puffs, a good spit out the window, roll the window up again and we’re off. Big cloud of blue smoke hovering before your eyes. Big cough, hawk up a good gob of phlegm, roul the windy down again and let it off, out into the slipstream. ‘Take that, ye fuckers of microbes! How does eighty miles a fuckin’ hour feel now, ye bastards? Living inside in my fucken’ chest for weeks, ye perished hoors, until I smoked ye out, heh? Fuckin’ bacteria, ye’re fucked now, heh?
Nice bit of Music on the radio, Ronan Collins or Tom the Turk, and settle down to enjoy the smoke.
And all of this is going on on the motorway. Or the national primary road which is the same thing only with less safety features. And it’s perfectly legal. At one hundred kilometres an hour or the prevailing speed of the squadcar at the head of the line, whichever is quicker.
This morning I was stuck in traffic in AH-dare for over an hour. I needed to be someplace else. I needed to meet some people and be on time. I had a mobile phone, but if I used it, locked between a lorry and a Hiace van, I’d be at peril of compromising my generally satisfactory record of crimilal law contraventions, (detected/as in/ by policemen).
Think about it the next time you see an oul’ lad with a hat on in a car with turned-in mirrors. I’ll have more to say on this I think.
Nuts
posted by The Bolted Nut | 12:12 AM
1 Comments:
Well, Nut, you hit the nail on the head. People in hats are fuckin lethal, and I learned long ago to avoid the bastards at all costs. Thank God there's few enough Morris Minors left on the roads, because an ould bastard in a soft hat driving Morris Minor at 15mph in the middle of the road was one sure guaranteed way to screw up your day. I might add that the other sub-category to avoid was the oldish ladies wearing tea-cosies on their heads. Four of them. Going to bingo.
They should all be forced head-first down a bog hole to present a puzzle for archaeologists of the future:
"This bog body appears to be an elderly man wearing a form of ceremonial headgear, but the extraordinary thing is that there's a wheeled vehicle shoved up his arse in some sort of ceremonial killing. Hmmm. Intriguing."
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