Friends

When you like someone.

I read recently that if you can identify a few people you have been friendly with for twenty years or upwards, you are doing something generally right. Most of the stuff anybody has ever read recently is generally bullshit, but this made me think. In particular, about people I have been friendly with for twenty years and upwards. And that is a lot of people, I am happy to say. And there’s a few at forty years and upwards which is gratifying too, and loads just after tacking around the thirty pin. So I take great heart from that.

My friends give me great pleasure. Someone once told me I treat my relations like friends and my friends like relations. Well, you can do sweet fuck-all about your relations, that’s a well known notorious fact. Only keep the fuck out of their way unless it is absolutely unavoidable and then be polite and have the car and children washed to give the bastards nothing to say.

Friends are people whose nicknames are in your mobile phone, so you can tell who is ringing you and say hello in a friendly tone of voice. Friends are people who have a folder all to themselves in your email, so that you get a moment of intense pleasure and anticipation when you see that little (1) after their name when you hit check mail.

Friends are people who look fine in their gardening clothes. Friends are people you get smashed drunk with once or twice a year just to regain your sanity and remind yourself you’re an Irishman and there’s fuck all wrong with busting your stress with a pint glass of good stout and a big fuckin’ Cuban cigar or multiples of the same in the company of like minded spirits.

Friends are people who would visit you in hospital if you were quite seriously fucked up and hooked up to a ventilator on top and a roches stores bag underneath, and keep coming back.

Friends bring back tools they’ve borrowed, as soon as possible. By fuck, relations don’t do that in my lengthy and exasperating experience, whatever is the reason.

Friends are people who you should meet as often as you possibly can and make the time to meet them as a conscious positive act.

I met a friend recently whom I hadn’t seen for twenty-seven years. It was wonderful.

I lost a friend just over two years ago. Still can’t believe he’s gone.

Friends are people you would trust to drive a boat while your kids slept below deck.

Friends are people you could trust to take your kid away shooting.

I’m already thinking of having a 50th birthday party when the time comes. To celebrate life, liquor, laughter and beating the bag. 'Caballeros y Señoritas – box cars, belt buckles and old faded Levis' will probably be the theme. Jeans and old boots will be the dress code because we all have them. Big belts and Wrangler denim shirts with the white pearly snappers because nothing less will hould back the beer bellies when the pressure come on and you’re out dancing to Paddy Quilligan singing Reuben James after seven pints, three small wans, a mighty feed of chicken kiev and a Monte Christo number 3. Paddy ’s band will hopefully belt out good country music for a few hours if the hoors have nothing better to do. We’ll all get drunk and smoke a few big fuckin’ Cuban cigars. Tony Murphy’s bus will bring the legless home. In the morning we should be all fit for the ventilator and the roches bag again if we get it fairly right.
I can actually think of about five hundred people already who will have to be there. Real men and lovely ladies. And a few wonderful kids. All friends, friends, friends of mine, I’m happy to say.

I’m thinking of doing it like the standard terms of reference for a Rathkeale wedding. If you feel welcome, you are.


Nuts

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

The Fool, the Hooch and the Hungry Tiger.

Long ago in school, I learnt a little verse.

There was a young lady from Niger,
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They returned from the ride
with the lady inside
and the smile on the face of the tiger.

Did you ever here anything so idiotic as the story of the girl who stuck her paw into a tiger's cage in Dublin zoo in the past few days? What a bloody idiot! It beggars belief. Now it seems that she was badly injured, and that's not to be ridiculed. But great God, what sort of free-range idiots are walking around? The morning after, the zoo's director was interviewed on Morning Ireland, RTE Radio 1, 9:45-ish am. Fair play to him, he got the killer punch in before you could say solicitor. He told the nation in a big chunky Dutch accent that the bottle of soft drink from which the girl had been drinking had been analysed, and it contained... alcohol. Bingo! All the sympathy of the nation flew out the window like Billy Connolly's girlfriend.

Now I'm deeply in utter admiration of the lateral thinking that was at work here. After the ambulance departed from the zoo with it's nenagh-nenagh going, after the tiger relaxed and went back to slurping its kit-e-kat, after the security guys put their hands back in their front pockets to check that nothing was missing in the hurly-burly and after all the wind-down, somebody was sharp enough to pick up the lemonade bottle AND SEND IT TO THE LAB!

Brilliant!

Now, why would the lab in Dublin zoo need an expertise in testing lemonade for alcohol I wonder? Not relevant at this time and not germaine to this thesis. But interesting nonetheless. Back to the story.

Anyway, on comes my man the boss of the zoo on Morning Ireland, and he got his chance to fire the crucial shot and scupper the litigation before it even began. He had some other shite about climbing over fences and all that, but you'd expect to climb a fence if you wanted to feed yourself to a tiger in the zoo, wouldn't you?
The interviewer next asked an incomprehensibly, dumb, assinine, dorky question. 'Will the tiger be put down now?'

And it floored the Dutchman. 'Not at all, it is a beautiful animal' was the lame off-the-cuff reply. Now, the merits of putting down an animal are not a function of its subjective beauty, are they? Supposing it was a crocodile, wouldn't the decision be the same?

Let's digress. Why do we have these euphemisms like 'putting down' and putting to sleep'? Why didn't she say 'will the tiger be shot/poisoned/electrocuted/ hanged/beheaded/euthanised/strangled or just plain KILLED? Why don't we say I'm taking the dog to the vet to be killed because he (the dog) is old and sick? It's a faux politeness I don't like, a bit like people who don't say bitch when they mean female dogs, and ladies who knit teacosies for their jacks rolls.

Anyway, back to the tiger. Dutchman fluffed an otherwise perfect media performance, because he was asked a question so dumb and bonkers he hadn't anticipated it. Now go look at the comments on the story on Radio Limerick's website. Thy are all about the tiger, and why it should not be put down, AFTER the bollix said it wouldn't be happening.

To analyse this further, let's consider for a moment why the question was put. If an animal exhibits behaviour that offends us, we deem it should no longer live. For example, if a rottweiler, a greyound or a cocker spaniel in my neighbourhood ate the arm off some child, I would shoot the dog myself if necessary. The reason is that it is morally unaceptable for an animal to ingest the flesh of a human being. Therefore to respect the primacy of the dignity of all our fellow human beings, the animal should not live and derive its being from human flesh, digesting it for it's own needs. It is not acceptable for a creature that shares our living space, such as a dog, to have eaten a person's flesh and bone, but the difference is that it shares our communal living space. I wouldn't enjoy shooting the dog at all if that unlikely scenario happened, but wouldn't hesitate to do it either. Morally the dog should get a large bullet in the brain, not a painful or cruel death, as there is no logic to punishment when the verdict of ultimate sanction is decided. The principle of distributive deterrent effect doesn't apply to dangerous dogs. I would use the skill I have with a suitable gun to do the necessary thing, but it would be a nasty experience.

Now, a tiger in a zoo is not the same thing as a dog in a housing estate. It is a dangerous creature, taken forcibly from the remote part of the planet it evolved in, and caged artificially in Dublin for our momentary gratification. If we as a society think that is acceptable, then the tiger has done no wrong by doing what any tiger in the same situation would have done. It is a carniverous wild animal, which was presented with something that smelt edible. The tiger is segregated from society because of its nature, and this girl positively acted to overcome that physical segregation by climbing fences to get at it. If a member of our society interacted with the tiger in such an utterly imbecilic way, there is no moral case for harming the tiger in any way afterwards. To sanction the tiger would be to wrongly re-apportion the blame and rersponsibility to some extent, away from the idiot of a girl.
But we now live in a society where people want to have every sort of bizarre and extreme experience, and if it goes wrong, they want to blame somebody else. If they take up hang-gliding, they'll sue the hang-glider manufacturer if they crash into a mountain. Same applies to bungee-jumping, white water rafting, and now tiger-rubbing.

It is not nice to speak ill of somebody who is in hospital with a serious injury, but it needs to be said. Girlie, you're a blithering idiot of immeasurable stupidity. Live the rest of your life more wisely. You will have a mark to remind you. Pat no more tigers in life.

But lets end with the beauty issue. The people who say the tiger shouldn't be put down because they think it's BEAUTIFUL, are equally shallow, moronic, utterly scramble-brained dozy dorks as the fool who presumably patted it for the same reason.

Think it all out. Then decide for yourself. Goodnight.

Nuts

Ministher Dempsey again.

I met Bock recently to arrange to go to devotions. 'Bock', says I, 'I took your advice.' 'Oh great', says he, can I borrow it next weekend because I'm remodelling the kitchen again'. 'Ah fuckit no I said, not about reconditioning the chainsaw with the nitrous oxide turbo kit, about the blog. I have my own one now'. 'Was that you you hoor you?' says he. 'Why didn't you go the whole way'?

Now in my distant and rapidly receding youth, that particular phrase had, certain connotations. People from Tullamore and Crossmolina used to write to Angela MacNamara in the Sunday Press about it. So it was time to tread cautiously on the thin ice on the extreme outer edges of the vast and deep oceans of Bock's wisdom. 'What d'ya mean by the whole way'? says I, with as much extreme nonchlance as I could muster.

Well, says he, why didn't you mention the way Dempsey adds h's to words. He makes wordsh out of them. So you get sentencesh like 'all the membersh of the consthruction indhusthry featheration have sent letthers through their local representhathivesh exshplaining the pershpectivesh they share on sthrathegic issuesh that affect the workersh rights to take indhusthrial action'.

Do you know Bock, says I, you're quite right. That's him.

And all the other decent robbersh lifted their pints in agreement. He's nothin' but a bollocksh, they agreed.

Nuts

Women, God Bless 'em.

If I ever retire to a small thatched cottage in the Burren, if there's any of it left in a few years' time, I'll spend the first winter's night drinking a bottle or two of good twelve-year old Redbreast whiskey, smoking a historic Romeo y Julietta No 3 cigar, or even a black Bolivar,and sitting before a sleán-cut turf fire. I need to buy a cottage to do all this, because I can no longer do it in Robert Cassidy's wonderful pub in Carron, thanks to the bloody smoking laws, and I could say a lot about that too some other time. Anyway, once I'm well settled, I'll write a book.

Women - The Workshop Manual!!!

How to figure 'em out. How to re-tune 'em when they're spluttering. Let's not talk about how to make 'em go quicker or handle better in case we get misunderstood by those of low motive. How to accept their need for handbags by the dozen, and shoes by the hundred. Why they need five hundred and seventy six little jars of stuff in the bathroom. How they can look at a stuffed wardrobe and howl 'I've nothing to wear' and mean it. Why candles in the bath make 'em dozy. Why a half-bottle of blue Smirnoff makes 'em everything else.

I reckon a book like that would make a million in the first week alone. Just imagine how it would go on Amazon dot com!!

Customers who bought this book also purchased:
'Advanced Rocket Science', auth. Werner von Braun, Pub. the CIA, [1945] Washington
'Brain Surgery made simple (for Engineers)' Einstein, A., [1958] Seattle WA
'DIY heart transplant techniques' Barnard C, 1970, Johannesburg

And more of that ilk.

'Be the first to review this book'! Just imagine! Doug from Douglas would be spouting Corkman's prose. 'Hey boy, I bought this book, right? I thought, well, just another book for the jacks, right? Well, I'll tell you, right? It's bloody marvellous, ok? Ya know what I mean like? I mean like it tells ya about women, like, right? Whoy they buy shoes, what they carry in their handbags, whoy they love getting shaggin' flowers and all that jazz, right?

It would be a best seller no doubt. But. Like Waylon Jennings said to the band on a live album...

Hold it down...

it's got a hell of a rythym....

Yeah...

I'm just tryin' to think of the first line.

Nuts

The Beginning

Hiberno-english

Greetings all. I just had a most interesting conversation with Bock The Robber and his famous Manchurian Skobe hound, and I was telling him how much I enjoyed his blog. Bock's, that is, not the hounds'. 'Why', says he, 'don't you set up your own fucken blog, it costs fuckall and you can let off steam about anything you like?' Which of course had the subliminal undertone of the unspoken closing phrase 'an' don't be boring the arses off us ordinary decent robbers and letting the suds go hard and yella on the tops of our pints?'

So here it goes. A blog where I can rant about all kinds of shit any time I like.

I'll start with Noel Dempsey the Ministher, who annoys the shit out of me anytime he opens his gob on the telly. You see, there's no h in ministher, neither is there one in considher or even in sthrathegy. But there is one in the, which he makes into de. So every time I hear him offering his version of standard FF clapthrap in response to some hoor with a microphone on television, I puke.

Let me tell you a little-known fact by way of short digression. Whenever a politician or a senior public servant, which is a distinction without a difference really, is up agin' the wall on something, you can gauge the depth of the shit by the length of the plan. So, a mildly challenging problem warrants a three-year plan, an intractable problem gets a five-year plan, but when they haven't a bull's fuckin' notion what the way out of the hole is, you get a full ten-year plan.

Back to Dempsey. I can just hear him now. 'The Department has considhered all de options to deal with de present sthrathegic crisis you have mentioned. As Ministher, I gan give you a cathegoric assurance dat sthructures will be put in place, and thraining will be given, and a full review of the ten-year sthartegic objectives will be made available as soon as de consulthants reporth is dhrafted and considhered by my Dhepartment....'

OH shit. I absolutely hate it. Maybe because he's the dude who gifted the nation a little-known phenomenon called betther local government. Some call it bitther local government, but I prefer buggered local government. And Dempsey done it, as he might say.

More on dhat later somethime.

Nuts