sometimes i feel like i'm over and out

It is one of the oddities of Dublin life that if one is fortunate enough to live close enough to one's place of work to only have to pay a €1.20 fare on the bus every morning then there is no other way to pay one's fare but by having that €1.20 counted out in exact change.* This morning, I finally succumbed to the eternal battle with change by not having any of the fucking stuff. So I hopped into Freddie's cornershop on my way to the bus stop and bought an 80 cent packet of chewing gum and a €1 scratchcard with a twenty, providing me with the requisite change. I was still on time for the bus and my scratchie showed three little €2 symbols, meaning I had covered the cost of the scratchie, endowed myself with minty fresh breath and netted a tidy profit of 20 cent.

Some days I swear I am invincible.


*Unless, of course, there is. I am open to correction on this.

"Well, it's not exactly the backyard, but it'll do"*

"Hello, I'd like to make an appointment, please."
"And what kind of an appointment is that?"

I swear I can hear a smirk in her voice.
"semen analysis"
"Sorry?"
"Semen analysis, fucking semen analysis, OK?"

 

 Go here if video won't play.

There is not, that I am currently aware of, anything wrong with my semen, but Rosie's polycystic ovaries and the havoc that they wreak mean that we are attending an infertility clinic soon. I find it difficult to talk about, but the only thing worse than talking about something like this is not talking about it. They tell me that men feel overwhelmed with gratitude after they realise the suffering their wives have gone through to bear them a child. I already owe Rosie a massive debt for the physical and emotional nausea she has to get through every day from the vicious medication that is supposed to give us a chance. Having to get up early in the morning one day to have my goo pored over by some dudes is a piffling contribution, and the only tangible one I have had to make thus far.

I will not lie to you, good people, the limits of my knowledge of the workings of semen analysis extend as far as the above scene from Naked Gun 33 1/3.(It was harder than you'd imagine to track that clip down, and funnier than you remember to watch.) Tragically, it turns out you do the donating bit no more than an hour before your appointment, and bring it in with you in a special little cup that I'll have to go in and collect from them some time beforehand. You'd think a sandwich bag or a bit of tupperware would do 'em. The lady on the phone did say they had a special room that I could make an appointment for, but, in a fluster, I declined. I couldn't then call back and say that I'd changed my mind about their special room, could I? I wonder what the people who work there call it? I'd go with 'Spunk Space', but that may very well be why I don't work in a fertility clinic.

They also send a letter that tells me I'm not to ejaculate for 2-5 days before. What the fuck are they thinking, giving a bloke a three day margin of choice? So yeah, next week, forty eight hours and one minute after the tetchy beginning of a fiddlin'and humpin' ban I'll be waking up, cracking one out, and bolting it across the rush houred city with a sticky cup in my pocket. Light a candle for me, won't you?

*The second option for this post's title was 'Juan Kerr Does Plenty'. Third, I suppose, was 'Seminal'. Fourth, now that I think of it would be 'Oh, Comely' because, y'know, it has 'come' in the title and I do love Neutral Milk Hotel so very much. Should anyone reading this happen to have an extra ticket for Jeff Mangum in Whelan's in November, let me know. I'll pay you. In cash. Or spunk. As you wish, really.

new adventures in advertising

One of the greatest benefits of digital television is the ability to pause and resume when you like. Not just so you can go off and take a shite without missing the lovely Mary Kennedy easing you into a story about cheese carpentry in Bagenalstown, but so you can leave it for ten minutes or so and then be able to fast-forward through all the ad breaks on whatever show you're watching. No more Pat Shortt singing some bollocks about something or other, no more Simon Delaney and Craig Doyle selling you everything, no more shit McDonald's ads that only serve to suggest that the future is nothing but manky food, mutants and morons.

It all feels positively utopian, quite frankly. I was starting to wonder if there's some sort of catch to it all, as though my refusal to watch these ads mean I'll have to suffer advertising in some other way. I'm soft on it in many ways, recognising its financial necessity in certain contexts. There are, for example, some bloggers who I appreciate need to feature ads on their sites in order to do what they do to the highest possible standards. So I click on those ads from time to time and, even though I've no intention of buying anything, dilly-dally wherever they've landed me for a while - just so the corporate bastards don't recognise that my click-through was executed without even a morsel of consumer intent. I also understand that TV funds itself through advertising, though I wish a state-funded station like RTÉ would be a little more BBC and a lot less ITV when it comes to poxy commercials.

Turns out that if you've found a way of circumventing telly advertising then the cinema is where the fuckers get you back. Captive in your big seat under a pound of popcorn and a three litre bucket of coke they will show you the gammiest, gratingest ads for about ten minutes before the trailers even start. They will show you one of those hideously unfunny Red Bull ads, and some weird fucker behind you will chuckle at it. Sometimes they'll show you a bizarre propaganda film for the EU, filled with the kind of sunshine and cornfields rhetoric that Pravda would have rejected for not being subtle enough. If you're anything like me you'll start getting thoroughly tetchy and take to groping your wife for distraction.

But at this point, fifteen to twenty minutes after the advertised starting time of the film, the trailers begin and you relax, because trailers make sense and are often what you'll base your next choice of film on. What you won't be familiar with, unless you've been to see Super 8 (or perhaps others) in Cineworld is Take That's cunty heads popping up on screen to introduce their new shit video to their new shit song from some new shit take on The Three Musketeers. Whereupon you think to yourself, "Why am I being forced to watch music videos? I didn't really even know music videos existed anymore, since MTV stopped showing them and went full retard on scripted reality shows instead. They're charging everyone about a tenner to be in here and another tenner for their snacks, should we really have to sit here and take this? Will I just slip out and go for a piss while this is on? You took a piss just before you came in, she'll just think you're masturbating if you go again now. Shit, why did I tell her Mark Owen was my favourite one, I feel a little gay now. Quick, grab her tit and then smile disarmingly so you get away with it. Nicely played."

This is what happens when advertising pounces in whole new ways and pushes us to the limit, my friend: innocent breasts get grabbed and ladies question the sanctity of certain vows they have made. But I believe there is a solution. Among the chin-stroking and musing over the causes of the London riots last week most commentators seemed to overlook Heidegger's trenchant maxim of Dickheads just gonna be dickheads, y'all and leapt into notions that rampant consumerism has led to a culture whereby kids just have to have blingin' trainers - be it by hook, crook or petrol bomb. So the only solution to my mind (and the mind of an Irish 29 year-old bloke who likes a bit of early Dizzee Rascal is exactly the kind of mind that should be consulted) is to ban advertising outright. Just fucking all of it. We'd all  shout at the telly less and go to the cinema more even though we could download films for free, we could put poems and pictures of flowers on buses instead, riots would be averted as teenagers all over the world  learn to just be satisfied with their lot, and mammary glands would be at least 27% less pawed. There is no downside.

From the excellent Photoshoplooter

"My friend had a hip operation and..." / Meeting People is Cheesy

A change of working scenery, if not of employer, has reintroduced me to the devilry that is small-talk. New EFL teachers, nervous before their first ever paid class, are the worst for it; simpering and clucking and cracking awful jokes before they wait to get started. They don't know each other and they think they don't know what's in store for them.

I've lost all tolerance for it as I've gotten older - preferring to say nothing than to talk utter fluff. It's not the fluff that's the problem, mind, it's the scutter that comes out of your mouth for want of something better to say. 90 percent of conversations are nought but fluff, but they do at least tend to be couched in your own terms. On starting a new secondary teaching job a few years back I was small-talking with another new teacher, who told me he was from Newbridge. "You'll be worth your weight in silver to this place, then", was my side-splitting response . Oh yes it was. (Context for non-Irish readers here, should you wish). I still shrivel and die a little inside when I think of that, but that guy's been kind enough never to remind me of that, and he now knows I'm not quite that much of a fucking sack.

It can happen even with people you've known for a good while. A good mate of mine came back from a year's travelling and told irritating, shit-awful jokes for a couple of weeks before he got back to normal. I'm still not sure if he was just feeling a bit nervous and out of place being back home, or if he thought this material had played well among all the back-packers he had encountered - too polite around new people to do anything but chuckle politely. Wedding Table Syndrome, to so very many of us.

But yeah, my stock of patience for it is running perilously thin, given that lifetimes are just packed full of awkward making nice with strangers. "I do this, and I live there and yeah, I've heard there are loads of nice pubs in Clonmel and no, I suppose Simon Cowell probably isn't really like that in person, yeah I've heard the family name but I don't think I've met him - Wicklow's a bigger place than you realise, you know."

Fuck all that, I think I'd rather people just thought I was aloof.

Though there is always the nuclear option of going up to my new colleagues and launching straight into a bawdy anecdote involving casual sex or soft drugs, giving them some unanticipated physical contact and perhaps even dropping in a track or two from the '30 Greatest Paedo Jokes' album that's generally on heavy rotation in my head. It's what they'd end up getting somewhere down the line anyway.

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.

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.

the panic, the vomit!

Oh, I am in a state today. Fully 36 hours since consuming childish amounts of alcohol and I appear to still be hungover. My dear wife is even worse off.

Leaves me feeling low, this nuclear holocaust of headache and nausea and contrition. And so I'm thinking about John Gray today. John Gray was the first person I ever heard suggest that there is no such thing as progress, at least in the political and ethical sense of the word. I found that a complete and utter headfuck when I heard it, right up there with when you first seriously ask yourself whether there's a god or not. As a species we are obsessed with the potential of things and people, from footballers to musicians to actors, but we rarely ever stop and say "This is as good as it gets and I think it's just fine." We'd see that as defeatist, as letting ourselves down.

As Gray puts it:


"The idea of progress is detrimental to the life of the spirit, because it encourages us to view our lives, not under the aspect of eternity, but as moments in a universal process of betterment. We do not, therefore, accept our lives for what they are, but instead consider them always for what they might someday become."

and, also:

"The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run."

Most discomforting at first, that kind of rhetoric, but oddly uplifting once you get used to it. I am a riot to be around while dwelling on these things. I have also been learning about Black Swan Theory and reading this remarkably good piece about Internet stupidity. If you only click on one link in this post make it that one.

But I leave you with some even wiser words, as spaketh by the prophet Andrew:

"€5 cocktails do not make for a cheap night out when you consume eighteen of them between the two of you."

Ajai Chopra: economist, saviour, deviant

A student asked one of my colleagues today why Irish people are so obsessed with economics. It's funny now to think of a time when we weren't. Terms like I.M.F., toxic loans, bailouts, Olli Rehn, mortgage arrears and E.C.B. certainly didn't always have such a large part in the vernacular. But while it's hard not to feel like the sky is falling in at the moment, I still maintain that most of us don't really have a fucking clue what's going on. Sure how could we when we're lied to by the government on a daily basis and receive a drip-feed of misleading and contradictory information. In much the same way as it seems that property developers and bankers made out like bandits during the boomtime it might just be that financial journalists and economic experts will be seen (along with politicians, inevitably) as being the villains of the busted years, for having made a mini-industry out of the public's confusion. For every genuinely well-informed commentator there's some cowboy who knows no more than the average barstool economist making a living from shit-stirring and scaremongering. There's something vaguely immoral about it.

With this in mind, Chancing My Arm took it upon itself to get hold of Ajai Chopra, the man leading the IMF's rescue mission to Ireland, in order to cut to the chase and find out what exactly the bloody fuck is going on. Here, exclusively, is the complete and unedited transcript from my exclusive interview with Ajai:

Ajai, thank you for taking some time out from bailing out our sorry asses to talk to the readers of Chancing My Arm.

You're welcome, Andrew, I myself have a blog , so I'm totally down with this. I love your blog, that shit you wrote about nailing both of the Sweet Valley High twins in a hot tub was righteous. High five, dude!


Thank you, Ajai. Though I must confess that it didn't really happen. First and only time I'll make stuff up to put on my blog, I promise. Now, down to brass tacks. Tell us, did this whole global economic ooopsy entirely originate with the collapse of Lehman Brothers?

Well, yes and no. After Lehman Brothers defaulted in September 2008, global trade collapsed, capital inflows into the region plummeted, credit growth suddenly stopped, and domestic demand plunged.
But pre-crisis domestic imbalances and policies made a difference in how these shocks affected each country’s economy. Some countries saw declines in gross domestic product (GDP) similar to those in the Great Depression (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine), while others avoided declines altogether (Albania, Poland). But the seeds of the crisis were sown, in large part, in the five years before the crisis. Between 2003 and 2008, much of the region experienced a boom in bank credit, asset prices, and domestic demand. This boom was fueled and financed by large capital inflows.
With low interest rates in advanced countries, banks in western Europe expanded aggressively into emerging Europe—where returns were higher. And, while the influx of capital boosted growth, it also led to rising imbalances and vulnerabilities.


I see, but what kinds of imbalances and vulnerabilities, exactly?

Current account deficits increased to unprecedented levels in some countries, and inflation accelerated. And substantial vulnerabilities emerged in bank and household balance sheets, particularly because much of the borrowing was in foreign currency.

Fascinating. Tell me, Ajai, in your brief time in Dublin have you had a chance yet to savour any of our local delicacies?

Oh, yes. Strawberry and vanilla YOP is famous the world over and after a good skinful at the bar in the Merrion Hotel a few of us ended up hopping in a taxi and telling yer man we were really jonesing for one. They were harder than expected to locate but we finally achieved success at a Shell garage on the Dargle Road in Bray.

Lovely part of the world. I once dated a girl from Bray, she was a right goer.

Is this Mary Coughlan woman from Bray? She introduced me to brown flavour Hula Hoops. I love her.


It's barbecue flavour, Ajai, not brown. Have some respect. Now, tell me, why was Ireland amongst the hardest hit by the global collapse?

Countries that experienced the fastest credit growth during the boom years saw the deepest recessions. And it now appears that average GDP growth over the full business cycle in this group was no higher, and in some cases was lower, than in countries with more modest credit growth.


In other words, we talked ourselves into believing our own bullshit?

To be succinct, yes.


Right, when you're walking into a high pressure, cards-on-the-table, heart-in-your mouth, cocks-in your-hands meeting with the likes of Brian Cowen and Angela Merkel do you choose to freshen up beforehand with Lynx Africa or Lynx Nevada?

Truth be told, I always favoured Lynx Tempest. I certainly associate it with the years when I did most of my shifting - is that what you call it, "shifting"? - with girls in nightclubs. I fell into a terrible depression for years after it went out of production and chose to wallow in my own faeces instead of deodorising. My career briefly stagnated as a result.

No doubt. Did the high price of housing in Ireland have a lot to do with our misfortunes?

Well, you all thought it was worth spending about 750 grand on a two bedroom semi-detached in Ballaghaderreen, so you tell me.

Don't knock Ballaghaderreen, Ajai. The wildest retirement party I ever went to was in Spelman's Motel there, you know.

The wildest retirement party I was ever at was my uncle Sanjay's. I snorted petrol and got off with one of my cousins. I wish I could remember which one it was, it would have been prudent of me to have made a note of it. Speaking of prudence, Ireland needs to learn to adopt a more prudent fiscal policy. This is a policy of saving money when revenues are growing instead of increasing spending and boosting public wages. Prior to the crisis, fiscal positions in emerging Europe looked good—better than in other emerging market regions. But those good-looking headline numbers masked a deterioration of the underlying fiscal position. Public expenditure was surging, financed by a temporary revenue boom. This not only further contributed to overheating; it also set the stage for large fiscal deficits. So when revenue plummeted in 2009 and fiscal deficits increased sharply, many countries had no choice but to cut spending precisely when this was most painful.

Uh huh. And if things start looking up a bit, what would you advise?

When revenue takes off during the next boom, it should be used to build up fiscal buffers rather than boost expenditure. Politically, this may be very challenging—when revenues abound there is strong pressure to increase expenditure or cut taxes—but this will help dampen the boom and create fiscal space that can be used to soften the impact of the next recession.


So no public sector pay rises ever again, ever?

Nope. Do you have Mary Harney's number? I would like her to be my wet-nurse.


You're a sick puppy, Ajai. But our futures rest in your hands. Now, Cash in the Attic is on soon and you're boring me, so any other pearls of wisdom before we wrap this up?

Going forward, growth in the region should become more balanced, and less dependent on domestic demand and capital inflows. Much of the shift will come about through private sector actions. Now that profits in the nontradable sector (finance, real estate, construction) have shrunk, investments will seek more promising venues. More balanced macroeconomic policies and wage restraint can also help maintain balanced growth by preventing the overheating that pulls resources from the tradable to the nontradable sector.
Above all, it will be important—when the next boom comes—to be wary of claims that “this time will be different.” Such narratives often have some plausibility and attractiveness in the heat of the moment. But a careful analysis of the drivers of growth, current account deficits, asset price developments, and credit growth should always be used as a “reality check.”


Lovely. And finally, if I may change tack entirely for a moment and imagine that I am a radio presenter, is there any particular song you'd like me to play for our listeners today?

Yes, it being the only song I'm aware of to namecheck the I.M.F. it has to be 'Electioneering' by Radiohead. But I'd like to dedicate it to Marek and Sklopek for indulging my whims at the hatch of the Dargle road Shell station and to Larry the cabbie for making the magic happen. Yiz fuckin' rock and I wish success and fiscal solvency to yiz all!

Are you carrying a weapon? I know a lot of you are.

When I was 15 I was suspended from school for being a little bollix. It had manifested itself in various ways, such as shoplifting on a school tour, but had culminated in me and a mate getting busted for our 'convo book'. Bored as every other student, wary of getting caught passing notes, before the advent of teenagers and texting, we took to writing down our every waking thought in a copy book and then sliding it across the desk to the other. This meant that teachers were not inclined to notice anything, and merely assumed we were doing our work. Fancying ourselves as devastatingly witty we prided ourselves on the collection of stuff we wrote, even fancying that one day someone might want to publish our observations. Like Adrian Mole.
But, inevitably, we got caught by a teacher. Who confiscated the copy. And read some of its content. And looked horrified. And passed it on to the principal.
He was not amused. Our book was filled with the usual teenage complaints about school and parents, sometimes fairly bile-flecked. And, of course, lustlorn paeans to female classmates and teachers we fancied. Far from depraved, it was, but it was honest enough and it probably looked mildly deranged in accumulation. My defence, when confronted with the disgust of principal and parents, is that there was nothing there any worse than what everyone else was saying. That everyone had these complaints, these turns-of-phrase, these desires. They did, and much worse, but I learnt the painful lesson then that what you say and what you write down are two very different things. The written word can be taken vastly out of context and can be augmented in a tone that was never intended. And it's there for posterity, not blown in a breeze down the corridor. My mate and I had never intended to offend anyone, but we did, and we came to regret it badly. He wanted to keep hold of our other convo books that he had squirrelled away at home but I insisted that he burn them. As a pretty accurate record of teenage selves that slip further and further away they would probably crack us up to look back over now, but I still feel the right call was made.
I think of that situation, now half a world away from me, when I see stories like the PricewaterhouseCooper one, the Twitter joke trial, and the stupid Tory tit who thought it was merely 'glib' to tweet about stoning someone. As we choose increasingly to replace conversation with online interaction and to inscribe our every brainfart, people are going to have to realise that this kind of shit can't be unsaid, that words are still potent and that they go a fuck of a lot further these days than they used to.

Mo' money

I have, largely out of vanity, signed up for Movember, whereby I'm supposed to grow a moustache and get sponsored lots of money for it, in order to fight cancer. I had initially intended my good deed for the month to be the Mini Miss Ireland competition, but the lassies from St. Pat's declined my help, on the spurious grounds that my appearance onstage in a bikini might spark riots in Copper's on Thursday night.

Truth is, I rather like having a mo'. A coat of arms for your face, as the website puts it. As arduous fundraisers go it's certainly not up there with running a marathon or appearing half-nude in front of a load of cops and farmers, but should you, Strangers from the Internet, feel so inclined as to stick something towards prostate cancer research my Mospace is here. If not, then see if you can identify me among this craftily constructed mo'saic (see what I did there?). I join some illustrious company, I can tell you. Super extra bonus kudos to anyone who can name all eleven of my moustachioed brethren.

feelgood friday

I have, despite being told my job was up a week or so ago, been given something of an indefinite stay of execution at work, and carry on for the time being. I could use the respite of unemployment right now, if I'm honest. The only real time off I've had since February was nine days in which to get married twice, interview for a better, ultimately unattainable job, and go on honeymoon. Mornings are a hazy fugue at the best of times, but these days they're met with a new level of melodrama. "I don't think I can do this much longer" I croaked to Rosie as I shambled out of bed on Tuesday. I was tired and had a mild to middling headcold, you see. My wife, who gets up earlier, works a longer day, does a more important job, commutes much further and gets paid a lower hourly rate for the pleasure gives me a hug and makes sympathetic noises when I make these statements. I must stretch her patience fiercely at such times. I've passed on the headcold to her, too.

Still, in these DJ-wanking budget-looming student-rioting garda-bashing garda-retaliatory-bashing red paint-slinging days it can be difficult to feel too fucking chipper in the morning. What we need is a song by a bunch of Canuckistanis from thirteen years ago to capture the national mood perfectly.




Do give it a listen, if you can have ten minutes to devote to full-on gloom, and feel free to mumble along apocalyptically with the opening monologue and somehow feel a little better:

the car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
and a dark wind blows
the government is corrupt
and we're on so many drugs
with the radio on and the curtains drawn
we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
and the machine is bleeding to death
the sun has fallen down
and the billboards are all leering
and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

it went like this:
 
the buildings tumbled in on themselves
mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble
and pulled out their hair
the skyline was beautiful on fire
all twisted metal stretching upwards
everything washed in a thin orange haze
i said: "kiss me, you're beautiful -
these are truly the last days"
you grabbed my hand and we fell into it
like a daydream or a fever
we woke up one morning and fell a little further down -
for sure it's the valley of death
i open up my wallet
and it's full of blood

Yeah.

Coldmember

A couple of weeks back I was away in Bundoran for my brother-in-law's stag party. A group of his friends are as much my wife's friends as his, so I know them pretty well at this stage and get on most chummily with them. One of the lads, Kevin, who is also soon to be married, was laughing at the fact that his bride-to-be had, at one stage or another, snogged several of his mates. He doesn't care, this was long before his time and such things inevitably happen between any group of intergender mates. Then he looked mischievously at me and, expecting to get a rise out of me, said "But do you know which of the lads has snogged Rosie?"

It so happens that I do. Barry is sitting opposite me and, bless him, has started shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Barry is the very definition of a decent skin and is happily settled with a lovely young lady, so I really don't have an issue with my wife having kissed him on a night out many moons before we even met. We don't talk about exes much but she had told me about Barry, perhaps to help me avoid an awkward situation such as the one Kevin has just tried to engineer.

"Yeah, just Barry, right?" I hope Barry doesn't take my just as being dismissive of his tonsil-tickling abilities, more that I'm glad he was the only one. The direction of conversation is swiftly turned to the direction of 'Members of the Irish rugby team whom Kevin has nearly come to blows with in a nightclub' and everyone is drunk and happy.

The next morning, cruelly, we go surfing. I manage to avoid everyone seeing how bad I am at surfing by never even attempting to mount the board. "Waves just weren't right for me, man" I opine to anyone within earshot. Back at the surfclub everyone hits the scaldingly hot showers to try and reverse the damage two hours in the North Atlantic in October can do to a body. Barry is in before before I am. He is the only bloke to have dropped his trunks. Barry is a hurler and you can always recognise the lads who play team-sports as the ones who are happy to let everything hang out in public showers.

Here is, roughly, my thought process:

1. Dropping my shorts will surely help my frozen, shrivelled bollocks to resume normality that bit faster. It's only sensible.

2. Barry's a hurler and I'm a hockey player. Hockey players get a bad enough rap in the man-stakes without people thinking we're afraid to get it out.

3. Barry (and everyone else there) might think he has a far bigger lad than I do. I can't honestly tell if he does or not but, nevertheless, This Will Not Do. Sometimes things are just that primal.

4. HE KISSED MY WIFE.

So I strip off my shorts and stand there with Barry and six uncomfortable-looking, beshorted men. Hot water dribbles down our flaccid mickeys as I will a restoration of girth and pretend not to be sneaking glimpses.

No I in Threesome

When I was born and lived in Cork I was from Cork and that was simple. When I briefly lived in Birmingham I was the Irish boy and kids at school asked me if I was in the IRA, or knew anyone in the IRA. I was seven, so I probably said I did. And when I lived in Tanzania I suffered the odd Irish joke from my Australian friends, but I could laugh those off because I recognised them as re-badged Kerryman jokes that Irish people had written in the first place. Coming back to Ireland after three years abroad was the hardest adjustment of all because of the Antipodean mishmash of an accent I'd picked up and the fact I didn't own a polyester Ireland shirt or a sega Megadrive made me more of a foreigner than ever.

Life got easier, but deep into my teenage years I still harboured fantasies of my family moving to America. Anywhere in America would do, though I reckoned Californian sun might work best for my greasy, troubled skin. I'd negotiate the cliquey, hierarchical minefield of U.S. high school and win. Girls would be blown away by my adorable accent and my roguishly, anachronistically Colin Farrellish looks. Yeah, and the jealous jocks would keep their distance because ofmy biting Irish wit and the assumption I was IRA; a notion I would take few steps to relieve them of.

I'd become a sporting superstar and have a college scholarship sewn up within days of arriving, due to my single-handed transformation of the "soccer" team's fortunes. This, I was confident, was the most realistic element of my fantasy, not due to any great skill on my part, but by sheer dint of my not being American - and therefore inherently superior with the ball at my feet.

Despite the attentions of most of the popular girls in school, including the icily beautiful Shelley Aryanski, my heart would be set on Naomi, the awkward art student whom I knew would be a stone-cold fox if only she'd take off those thick-rimmed glasses of hers. I'd capture her fragile heart by playing Damien Rice songs on a ukulele and pretending I'd written them. With the new strength she found in me she'd overcome her bulimia and her sculpture would really flourish.

I'd garner the devotion of the nerds through my powerful and outspoken stewardship of the school newspaper, and the black crowd would have my back after an impromptu rap-off saw me proclaimed "the illest, chillest honky muthafucka since Vanilla Ice", such was the impact of my mad skillz. 'A-Dogg' was how they would choose to address me from then on.

Jessica and Liz: strong swimmers

Naomi and I would hit a bit of a speedbump after word of me banging both of the twins from Sweet Valley High in Frankie Lopez's hot tub during a party to celebrate the team winning the championship after I scored seven goals in three minutes to beat our cross-city rivals 7-6 got back to her, courtesy of the bitter, spurned Shelley Aryanski. Naomi dumped my cheating ass initially, but she soon came around after I tearfully reminded her from beneath her bedroom window that it's not hard to fall when you float like a cannonball.

And then one day, perhaps as we were making our way to be crowned Prom King and Queen, Naomi and I would encounter Chuck Logan. Chuck had been captain of the soccer team and an A grade student before my glorious arrival. Now he was a high school dropout slinging crystal meth for a living. "Oh look, it's the Irish fag and his fag-hag" he'd sneer to his crackhead buddies, who definitely carried an air of menace. And I, I'd whip a can of Lynx Africa out of the back pocket of my Ralph Lauren suit trousers, and spray it against the flame from my lighter to form a blowtorch to scorch the skin off Chuck Logan's face. As he lay writhing acridly on the ground I'd douse the rest of his body in Lynx Africa and then take the cigarette out of my mouth and say "No, this is a fag, ya fuckin' eejit!" as I calmly flicked it onto him and watched him burn. Then I'd force-feed his charred remains to Shelley Aryanski for being a meddling bitch.

i wish i was a neutron bomb, for once i could go off

Syntax

I want to call you thou, the sound

of the shape of the start

of a kiss - like this, thou -

and to say, after, I love,

thou, I love, thou I love, not

I love you.

                Because I so do - 

as we say now - I want to say

thee, I adore, I adore thee,

and to know in my lips

the syntax of love resides,

and to gaze in thine eyes.

Love's language starts, stops, starts;

the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

Carol Ann Duffy

Had I been aware of the above poem three weeks or so ago I might well have used it as my reading during our registry office wedding. Not for all the soppy 'thou' stuff - though the worshipful tone can ring true - but for the last couple of lines expressing the awkwardness of finding the right words to talk about love. I scoured various volumes of poetry in the days before the wedding and even made the mistake of typing in 'poems for marriage' into Google. Unable to find anything that wasn't wilfully oblique, or cloyingly, clingily, cringingly awful I wrote my own poem instead. How embarrassing. I won't publish it here, not due to any sense of modesty or privacy, but because it is not, in hindsight, very good at all. But the sentiment it expressed, I think, was right.

Sadly, I don't think I can say the same of my speech at our Saturday wedding, the one with a hundred or so people at it. Years of wandering into a class full of baying teenagers with nothing prepared and winging it to a reasonable degree of success had lulled me into thinking it would be OK to do the same thing on my wedding day. It wasn't. I burbled a lot, glanced at the skimpy notes I had made with utter incomprehension, and forgot to thank half the people I really ought to have thanked. I was thinking of things I should have said for the first three or four days of our honeymoon - a kind of esprit d'escaliers without the prior insult. Perhaps I could blame blogging for giving me all the time in the world to think about what I want to say. Articulacy is easier when you only write something every couple of weeks.

But it was when I came to acknowledging my beautiful wife that words failed me most and I blithered on with a crack in my voice. The sense of what a significant moment in our lives this was meant that my brain was simultaneously simpering and squalling, cooing and caterwauling. But that's alright, I think. My feelings for my wife should never, all being well, be less than a maelstrom of thoughts that I can't easily express.

Icerain Icerain, baby

I did not get that job, as I thought. I suspect that the postion was sewn up long before they even advertised it, and that my interview last week was the kind of sham that educational institutions are obliged to conduct, for reasons I'll never understand. This surly fucker does not appreciate having to take an unpaid day-off from his temporary job to get suited and booted at crack of dawn o'clock for a joke of a ten minute interview. There will be other jobs, but it's hard to imagine one that I would be better qualified and experienced for. Fuck 'em.

It only started to really get to me when my mother called as I was on my way to work this morning and sounded genuinely heartbroken for me.


Further to this, some bollix decided to invade our home in the middle of the night the other day (I'm leaving Rosie to write all the descriptive stuff about our shared experiences these days, as she's so much better at it), leaving us both sleep-deprived and a little shaken. My system has yet to sort itself out and the primal rage that had me barking threats and obscenities at him like a rottweiler at a postman has yet to fully subside. A fat American nearly got me run over by a bus earlier and I didn't know whether to bellow at him or burst into tears.

Time for a holiday.

Fortunately, our renowned skills in assisting people with house and dog-sitting have brought us a free stay in this place, starting tomorrow. Not bad, I suppose. Still, the downside of it is that if i want to use the local municipal swimming pool I have to follow French law and abstain from sporting a nice comfortable pair of swimming shorts. Apparently I'd be refused entry in loose trunks but the bienvenues would be a-flowing were I to rock up in these bad boys. You gotta love them.

However, to fully achieve rehabilitation fully I reckon I may have to treat les femmes francaises to the sight of the semi-legendary Andrew gooch in these:

Mais oui.



Disclosure: Oddly bulbous crotchal region not blogger's own.

How To See Yourself As You Really Are

One of the many books I have lying by my bed is How to See Yourself as You Really Are by the Dalai Lama. It's one I picked up while working in the charity shop (His Holiness and his publishers would have liked me to have paid seventeen quid or something for it, but hey, I guess that's not who I really am). There's some good advice in it at times, and even the odd sniff of genuine profundity. Still, one can't help but wonder, at times, whether yer man's quest to see himself as he really is has ever taken in that noblest of pursuits in the pursuit of self-actualisation,the one known as "snorting vodka."

I've this friend who snorted a bit of vodka, in his time. The first time was on New Year's Eve, at a house party, when he was seventeen. Another lad, undeniably the smartest in his year, told him it that it had never done him any harm, so it must be fine. Solid enough logic there. He sniffed it right up and it burnt his nostrils and gave him brain freeze but just that one teaspoonful made him feel like he'd drunk three naggins so he had another one. A few minutes later he jumped up really high in the air thrashing around on his air guitar to the intro to Radiohead's Just and he landed hard on his left hip. Everyone laughed really hard so they put the song back to the start and he did it again. He only started to feel his hip ten minutes later. He reckons now that he cracked it, but he was far too embarrassed to ever seek medical attention for it. Still gives him the odd sharp pain now, eleven years on.

The second time was when he was eighteen, about to finish school, and he and his entire class mitched off to celebrate this step into adulthood by going and getting absolutely fucked in the sand-dunes of Brittas Bay. This was to be achieved through a cunning combination of cider and sunburn. And a capful or two of uncle Smirnoff, route one through the nose and into the good times. He remembers deliberately head-over-heelsing down a steep, high dune, and little else. A few of them headed straight to The Forge once they got back to town. They weren't all eighteen, but no-one gave a fuck at 5 o'clock in the evening. He remembers ordering gin and tonic and smoking a cigar, in what he can only imagine was intended as a display of louche decadence. He remembers blowing cigar smoke in the face of a toddler who looked over from the neighbouring booth. He remembers the child's mother not seeming to mind, as she said they were keeping him entertained. He remembers being warned that he had tapped cigar ash into his G&T. He remembers drinking it anyway. And how he vomited all over the table a few minutes later. And how they just changed tables and how, inexplicably, no-one kicked him out, this friend. Someone should really have kicked him out.

You're toxic, I'm slipping under

"It's not fair!" Words you haven't uttered in years, now directed at two Leinster Hockey Branch referees on the occasion of your team being dumped unceremoniously out of the cup by a team bolstered beyond all recognition by a load of illegally unregistered players from a much higher division. A team whose legitimate side you had strolled to a 6-0 victory over in the league just a couple of weeks earlier. Yet another example of the skulduggery that dogs lower-level hockey to a surprising extent. Not fair at all, but your team are slowly learning how to play that game. Come to think of it, it isn't really fair that you're a hockey player at all, being a refugee in its middle-class bosom for over a decade now. Forced out out of football - a game you're much better at - as a delicate 15 year-old by one too many taunts of "Proddy bastard" from your own team-mates. And they laugh at you, these elder gentlemen, much as you do when teenagers approach you with the same whinge when confronted with a punishment they don't feel they deserve. Life's not fair, lads, I'd kick you up the hole too, if The Man'd let me.
The words come rising to your throat again in an acid bubble tonight, as you sit down with one of your best mates to watch the football over a few pints and he comes clean about who his new employer is. AnglofuckingIrishcuntingBank, of all people. The ones costing the state about 30 billion euro; you may have heard mention of them recently. Good to know they're hiring, innit? Loath to hear too much about the bastards, you fill him in on my recent own employment status. Which is that, after more than four months without a speck of paid work, things have been a bit better recently, a few TEFL hours and a bit of secondary subbing work making things feel a lot better. You don't bother spitting in his pint when he says that he's glad the hourly rate for  subbing has come down a bit, as it was too high. You don't bother pointing out that it would take his new friend Seán FitzPatrick a full 1200 years as a full-time secondary teacher to pay back the debts the government reckon he won't be able to get back to them. You just let him get the next round in and you sit and watch your team take a hiding with an odd mixture of glumness and awe and you think that it's also not fair having to play possibly the best club side in the world with five of your cast-iron starters missing. Trying to counter  Lionel Messi, the best player in the world, with Mickael Silvestre is most likely a contravention of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. .You console yourself with the fact that at least the horrible little banker fuck beside you is a Liverpool fan, so he knows something of pain. And a job's a job and a mate's a mate, right?
Right.

Stella, I love you!

Lacking in words, as I am recently, I thought I would abort all the half-formed, moth-eaten posts I have been labouring on and post, instead, a picture of me staring at my new bonsai tree.

Her name is Stella and I have decided that I love her. I will caress her while my fiancée is not looking and gradually, gradually, I will have coherent things to say again.

codeine for a mouth abscess

I'd say that it was the greatest feeling ever, only that i can't feel anything at all. I assume this is what it's like to be a bran flake.

1:01

"Careful outside, our driveway is the last place in Dublin to still have patches of ice."

As was his flat, judging from this evening. It meant that one of the two extra layers I'd applied for outside wear had never been removed once I'd arrived over to drink some beer and share in his team's further ignominy. And now it's too late for a bus and I don't feel insulated sufficiently against the freezing fog that shrouds the Rathgar road.

I hunch my shoulders and truck homewards, knowing it's not really that far of a walk. A dark figure shambles out of the mist toward me. Look straight ahead and don't make eye contact, Andrew, that's how you keep them from murdering you and raping your corpse. It works.

Dozens upon hundreds of taxis crawl past me, with hopeful lights on top that say "Hey big boy, me bring you home long time five dollah." I pat my empty wallet and think there was a time, lads, there was a time. I walk past a blonde girl with a warm-looking hat on. She looks straight ahead and doesn't make eye contact.

Eddie Rocket's of Rathmines is open and deserted and I consider throwing them the sop of my company. But I've done nothing to earn fries and a chocolate malt on a Wednesday night. The clock above the Swan makes for an eerie backlit sight in these conditions. I wish momentarily that I had a camera with me, then I remember that cameras don't really get fog, especially at night.

Tramco has less punters than the net café next door. Taxis queue outside Rain Niteclub as it dry-retches no-one to their bosoms. In the future, when my grandchildren ask me what I remember of The Grand Depression I will say "Taxis, so very many taxis." 7,247 of them I've counted now, though I have been drinking. Aprile's takeaway are still doing brisk business - those beautiful, greasy, durable bastards. It takes all of my bravery to stare straight ahead and not make eye contact.

 I stumble in the door, hit the leaba without brushing mo fiaclaí and fire up the laptop to thaw out my thighs.