You could have it so much better

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

Idi Amin
Yahoo Serious
Bertie Ahern

Barry Egan

Pol Pot
Tony Blair

Rafael Trujillo

Lucinda Creighton

And that is all.

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

And you kept us awake with wolves' teeth

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

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

1909-2011

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

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