I dunno, Leona Lewis or some shit?

A man passed me on the bus this morning looking much like Twenty Major would if we were about fifteen years down the line and Twenty Major had taken up shrinking and Buckfast for breakfast. (Yes, I am that deeply embedded in the Irish blogosphere that I know what Twenty Major looks like.) Tenuous blogger lookalikes aside, it was the man's folded newspaper that caught my eye. 'SPLITS WITH FIANCÉ' is all I could read of the front page. Or perhaps 'FIANCÉE' - I pay little heed to gendered French vowels first thing.

And do you know what I thought? I thought to myself "I might just have enough time before work starts to pop into Dunne's and scan the tabloids to see who has split with whom."

I didn't have time, really, and am still none the wiser. It was one of those mornings where a Korean student hands me a banana at the eleven o'clock break and says "Take care of yourself, Andrew." Feel free not to enlighten me. I feel a profound fucking distaste for myself most mornings, I must say.

mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann

“Nationality is respectable only when it is on the defence, when it is waging wars of liberation it is sacred; when those of domination it is accursed.”

-Rabindranath Tagore

Growing up in Cork, as I did, tribal loyalties and nationality were as straightforward as it comes. I was from Cork and from Ireland and I loved Cork and Ireland and knew that they were the best places in the world, ever. This despite being of stock with roots in Dublin, Belfast, deepest rural Roscommon, and yeah, England.

Living briefly in Birmingham and then in Tanzania made my sense of nationality all the more entrenched. No-one sported more green than me on St. Patrick's Day, no-one thrilled to the exploits of the Irish team in Italia '90 more than me. I learned of them weeks after the fact, through cuttings from the Irish Times my grandfather posted us. Weeks later. That may seem antiquated beyond belief, but there it is, that's how it was.

Katrina, an older Australian girl, once took a handful of rough, small stones and scrubbed furiously at my neck with them as punishment for claiming that photographic evidence from our homelands proved that the Irish rugby players of the 1991 World Cup squad were clearly better-looking than the Aussie Rules players of the same vintage. An admittedly bold statement, born out of a blend of national pride and awkward nine year-old flirting, I guess.

Flash-forward, if you will, twenty years, and I am slinking away from my workplace on Dame Street, my efforts to teach having been hampered all morning by soundchecks for the Jedward/Obama extravaganza due to take place later on. Every other person is going in the opposite direction. An admirable man is going to take to the stage, and everyone will describe him as "inspirational", even if he merely makes farty noises with his armpits for five minutes. He is an intelligent man, vastly preferable to the idiotfuck who preceded him, but our desire to be loved by him means there does not appear to be so much as one voice of dissent at the visit of a man who presides over the most capitalist country in the world, a country of relentless cultural imperialism, a country still embroiled in two unnecessary wars whose only tangible upshots of any kind have been the violent deaths of two tyrants.

I forget about it for a while (and you should too, for this post is not about anti-Americanism or anti-Obamism) and listen to music and read back at home, before curiosity gets the better of me and I tune in for the last few minutes of his speech. I can't have been the only one cringing at the squalls of approval every time Barack Obama says the words 'Ireland' or 'Irish', can I? And the squeals of delight when he utters a few words in 'Gaelic', before rapidly translating them into English, because Barack Obama and his scriptwriters are savvy enough to know most of us, me included, are proud that we have a national language but not proud enough to learn to speak it? Our Taoiseach (who apparently now considers a tribute act to be an appropriate warm-up) will be making moves to lessen its usage, as soon as he thinks he can get away with it.

"Inspirational!" roared whatever chimp TV3* had anchoring their coverage. I was left feeling cold by his words, though impressed by his subsequent 15 minutes of handshakes and baby-cuddling. Perhaps missing the start of his speech meant I hadn't had the chance to get swept up in the whole thing, but what he said certainly reads an awful lot like candyfloss, designed to elicit cheers from an expectant crowds and play very, very well amongst Irish-American voters - a fairly key demographic in a country where around 20 percent of the population recently claimed they believe Obama to be a Muslim.


I'd love to feel all superior to a country with that level of fear and misinformation, but around the same percentage in Ireland are happy to proclaim in a survey that they would deny citizenship to members of the Travelling Community.

Never mind the 'death of Anglophobia' that the visit of Queen Elizabeth is purported to have brought about, we live in a country practising something akin to apartheid, and we don't talk about it. I'll say more on this another time, should cogent words come to me. We, all human beings, are born on bits of land from people most likely from some other bits of land and we put names on them, and ascribe to them characteristics and personalities that can't really exist on a geographical basis and tell ourselves that certain bits of land are better than others and draw lines in the sand and makes flags and laws and borders and piss all over each other in our haste to mark our territory. May there be no more flag-waving for me.

*I know. I hadn't realised what channel I was on for a few minutes. I suppose someone has to make them feel better about themselves.

show you what all the howling's for

I had a slight need to take a leak before I left work this evening but I decided not to go at work, knowing that after the 20 minute walk home the piss I would take would be ultramega satisfying. You get your kicks where you can, don't you?

In other, less urine-related, news, this blog is three years old today. I really don't know how that happened. Like most things, I think I hopped on the bandwagon just as the whole thing had reached saturation point and was becoming terminally uncool. Once I finally succumb to Twitter you can be fairly sure that that's over, too. Twitter was just getting going back then, and quickly started to gobble commenters who had stuff to say and then the kind of bloggers who only did this as a means of chatting to folks they didn't know and saying 'check this motherfucking dog video out!' Which is good for everyone, I guess, though it's certainly changed the landscape a bit. Nevertheless, blogs are still usually the best place to read articulate and uncensored writing by people without a political or commercial agenda.

I didn't do this expecting to be read by anyone much, so the readers I have picked up are an unexpected bonus. Especially as blogging by its very nature is a reverse narrative, so it must often be unclear as to what the fuck I'm banging on about. And I must surely have exhausted the goodwill of just about every longer-term reader out there by repeatedly going on about how I met my wife through blogging and how much I love her.

Anyway, I wish I had more to say right now. But I don't, so I'll just peter out in much the same way way as my wedding speech by saying "Umm...thanks" with a crack in my voice, and sitting down.

days of enjoyment to which everyone cheers

Friday

I get my first taste of the royal wedding at around 2 o'clock in the chipper in Georges' Street Arcade. The rolling loops on Sky News are muted, but the man behind the counter offers his own commentary.
"I'd have hor and hor sister, an' I'd take a little flower girl, too. I'd just have hor watchin'."

Saturday

An unspeakable lack of whiskey.
Later, fly to Pakistan.

Sunday

Arsenal beat United. Too little, too late.
I kill Osama bin Laden. It was surprisingly easy: I burst in on him watching Cash in the Attic, offered him a Werther's Original and then kicked him in the hip.


Monday

Dinner with the parents.

On going one better

"Do I get presents?" asked my wife meekly, in response to my post celebrating her 11,000th day on earth. I like buying Rosie presents, she's always surprised and appreciative of whatever morsels I bring her home. Biscuit, our recently adopted cat, wouldn't have dragged home as sorry an article as I did this time around, though.

The key to buying a present for someone you live with, I've always thought, is getting them something you would be perfectly happy to enjoy with them, but that doesn't appear to be an act of self-interest thinly disguised as generosity (like if I came home and presented her with a weekend trip to London, then mentioned that most of it would be taken up with an Arsenal match, for example. I haven't done that, yet).

I can often strike the right note with music, as we have some similar tastes and some contrasting ones, though rarely contrasting enough to cause upset. Rosie likes ambient music and minimalist electronica a fair bit, while I enjoy it perfectly well, but wouldn't be inclined to spend money on it for myself. So when I saw the Buddha Box in Tower Records and read the slavering blurb on the wall about how it was the future of ambient music and other such guff I reckoned it might be just the ticket.

It wasn't. Essentially, I was under the impression that it might be able to do something as super fucking deadly and addictive as this magnificent thing, only in a more portable form. It does not. The latest incarnation of the Buddha Box fizzles and crackles inexplicably and plays very short, downbeat loops of a Chinese instrument called a Qu Gin. The pitch of the instrument can be altered slightly, in a manner akin to detuning a guitar. Left thrumming introspectively to itself for a little while the yoke starts to create a soundtrack to 'Futility: The Movie' and the largely ignored sequels 'Despair: Gazing Deeper into the Navel' and 'Less Than Nothing'. She politely let it play for about half an hour or so as we sat on the couch and pondered unacknowledged trees falling in the Yangtzai forest and the cubed inside of a table tennis ball, while Biscuit glared angrily at it before flopping abjectly on the floor.

A night or two later I was searching the shelves of Spiceland!*, the local Asian food shop for exciting new curry powders when my eye, invariably drawn to things of a sugary nature, alighted on colourful boxes of custard. "Rosie likes custard," I thought, "so I shall go one better and get her banana custard." €1.50 for a massive fuck-off box of it, it was, which may well have been the first portent. The second was when I opened it after dinner, gleefully announcing "I got you something special for afters," just as an acrid puff of manky bubblegum powder hit my schnozz. Undeterred, I added warm milk. I had no answers as to why it was lurid green now. I stirred briskly and fretted over whether I was doing it right, as I do when I < open scarequote >cook < close scarequote >anything new. She couldn't eat her bowlful. I couldn't blame her. I couldn't eat it either, but I did anyway, and then hers. The point I was proving escapes me at this juncture, though the resulting stomach cramps barely have.

That night, as we lured Biscuit out of the bedroom with a turkey stick and turned in, Rosie reminded that she wouldn't be home until late the following night as she had a meeting in Kilkenny. She looked anxious. "That's grand," I said, "I'm playing poker tomorrow night instead of Thursday."

"Oh, thank fuck. I thought you were going to sit there all night listening to the Buddha Box and eating green custard with the cat like a piece of conceptual art."



*Exclamation mark my own, as I feel it really adds something there.

Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible

She won't know it until she reads this, and she may not thank me for pointing it out, but today is Rosie's eleven thousandth day of life. It's not that I have Rain Man-esque abilities, it's just that during a recent chat with some similarly-aged friends, I realised that we hit our ten thousandth day sometime after we turn 27 and grew curious about exactly how many days old I am. This site does the job nicely, but make sure you enter your date of birth in that backwards way that Americans do. Days are more significant than years, if you think about it. You don't remember the year of your first kiss, or the year you got shitfaced drunk and made a holy show of yourself in a Spanish karaoke bar, or the year someone ripped out your heart and pissed on it, do you?

We've still only been together a little less than a thousand days, Rosie and I, but we both have had a fair idea of what's gone on for the other one in every single one of them. Speaking personally, they were when things suddenly got a fuck of a lot easier. The first 10,000, though, are the ones we really talk about, slowly.

Once again, you've embarrassed me in front of real people

The thing about blogging is that there's every chance that once you've been doing it a while you may well end up meeting other bloggers and even get to know the blighters. The upside to this is that you might just make some new friends. The downside is that you now feel like you can't put up a post entitled 'cracking wanks I've had lately'. Which, given the face-achey dose of Nose AIDS I have at the moment, is about as much as I have to offer right now as I think I've already ruminated on the gibbering wonders of Deal or No Deal here.

Tell me, do other bloggers out there let real people read their blogs? Like, people they work with and non-blogging friends and stuff? My sister drops by pretty regularly, as does one of my cousins, but my brother just gave me a look that said "wow, you're far more of a spa than I thought" when he heard I was at this lark. People in work sometimes ask how I met my wife and I tell them it was through blogging. They then ask what the blog's called and I start this little dance of pretending I really don't want to tell them until they've asked a third or fourth time. It's a lot like Peter denying Jesus, really. If i tell them then they lose interest and say "Right, I'll check it out sometime", before realising that some of my posts are an awful lot longer than a Facebook update and that I might just be a little bit weirder than they thought. And then the whole thing never gets mentioned again. One colleague was quite happy to tell me that the whole concept is self-indulgent. It is. The irony was that she somehow felt that the novel she is working on, which will (as is inevitable) contain multiple lengthy fictionalised aspects of herself that she will one day hope to sell to people, isn't.

I dunno, the sooner we accept that we're all just confused souls pouring stuff out into the ether and hoping that one or two other confused souls get it, the better for all. And, furthermore, what does it tell us that Blogger's spell-check doesn't recognise 'bloggers'? 'Floggers', apparently, is fine.