Ladykiller

The very nice Limerick lass I was sitting beside earlier at the dinner at my Big Cousin's wedding in Cork wanders past me, looking sullen and tractor-like in my awkwardness and cumbersomosity on the dance-floor.
"Hey, you having a good night?" she asks, with smiling sincerity.
I'm having a dark moment here, so I scowl, "I think I prefer funerals, no-one tries to make you dance."
She looks truly horrified, and may well have had a restraining order out on me for the rest of the night.

Late on, nearing 4 am or something stupid like that, I'm sitting at a computer in the lobby, checking my comments like the needy tool that I am, when a gangly creature emerges from the darkness.
"What are you doing there?" she asks, annoyingly, in a Cork-Dublin chimera of an accent.
"Do you have any cigarettes?" I spit back.
"Only in my room, I've a carton there..."
"I only need one, not two hundred, thanks. And I want it now."
Unperturbed, she purrs "Why do you have a beard, is it for Movember?"
"No, it's December now so that would be fucking stupid."
"I've never kissed a beard, y'know."
"Me either, I'd imagine it's horrible." This is still not enough. She takes my bottle of Heineken and drinks from it. I am every bit as appalled as the Limerick lass was at my attempt at humour earlier."You hang on to that, love. Night"

Nada y nada y nada y nada y nada y pues nada

Hey bro. Wats d craic? Wz tinkin. How wud a man get into handin out soup 2 pikeys r sometin like dat durin christmas?

And so began yesterday evening, with a text message from a well-meaning and (hopefully intentionally) hilarious friend. Why he sought out my advice on the matter I'm not entirely sure, as my interaction with the homeless has never really extended further than to pass on a cigarette and a patronising smile to someone sitting on Nassau Street or the Ha'penny Bridge. The timing was interesting though, as I was on my way to the launch of a book in aid of Focus Ireland, a charity which aims to provide assistance and shelter to the homeless, of which there are a shameful amount in Ireland.

Along with my own little contribution, Homepages contains short stories and photos from many of Ireland's finest bloggers. Far too many of them to list, though I can tell you I've had a sneaky peek already at the entries from Twenty and Eli, and both are superb. Compiled by Catherine Brodigan, proprietess of Two Wheels on My Wagon and all-round good egg, and featuring a foreword from Pauline 'Mrs. Doyle' McLynn, the book represents excellent value for the 14 euro it costs.

I've thrown a good few links around this post, but the only one you really need to click on is HERE, the only place you can buy the book, as it won't be in the shops and is being printed on an on-demand basis in order to maximise profits, all of which go to Focus Ireland. Go on, order yours now. And get a few for friends and family while you're at it.

Tried it once and then liked it, and tried it again

January 2007.

A spectacular personality clash with a new boss (and by that I mean that I am great and she was an atrocious cuntgoblin) leads to me being laid off from a TEFL job in a horrible school in Dublin. Dumb luck means that I get a new job very quickly that pays double what I was getting before. This also means teaching in a secondary school. Dealing with teenagers every day. Being accountable for my actions. Not being hung over in class any more (or at least not openly talking about it). Moving out of my theoretical 'lad-flat' in Ranelagh and moving home. Driving to work.

These days I cruise around the place like Lewis Hamilton after popping his cherry, but back then I was only learning, and had to drive to work in 'Little Red', my mother's Nissan Micra. I'd drive the ten miles of nasty, meandering, narrow roads every morning, then park up the road from the school and try to find the balance between nervous nausea and too-much-fucking-nicotine-nausea. About two and a half cigarettes at that time of day, I found. I won't name the part of the world I was in, but they were strange, resentful little inbred mountain children I was teaching, for the most part. Sometimes it was fine, but for the most part I returned home with my white knuckles gripping the steering long after I'd parked at home, unable to get out of the car for another five minutes, inhaling and exhaling loudly to myself. Then, ashen-faced, I'd sneak around the back of the house for my last smoke of the day.

I've now spent too long setting the scene.

Point is, the music that soundtracked this time in my life. Little Red, being from the nineties, had a tape deck rather than a CD player. I can rarely stand the crap tunes and witterings of daytime radio, and the place I taught was so remote that you even lost reception from the mainstream stations once you'd reached the point of no return in your journey. So cassettes were really my only option. Unfortunately, most of my tapes had perished when my sixteen year-old misadventures with Bacardi and Coke on a school night had taught me that yes, that feeling in my stomach was the impending return of that evening's spaghetti bolognaise and yes, next time a toilet would be a better receptacle for it than a my tape collection, which included a prized copy of Now 29. My mother's collection in her car consisted largely of Sting and, shudder, Phil Collin, so that was about as useful as a cock-flavoured lollipop.
Fortunately a couple of decent tapes of mine had survived the eruption, including REM's Out of Time. So, I cruelly overplayed this album morning and afternoon, and it became the soundtrack to nervousness, fear of the roads, and fear of the kids. Music often takes me back to a certain periods of my life, and this provides a particularly strong example. I hadn't been able to listen to it since.

I'm a sophisticated fellow who now has such gems on CD, too. I've no stereo of any kind in my car at the moment, but it dawned on me the other day when I was about to undertake a longish drive that I could now play music off my new laptop. Out of Time needed to be reclaimed, to have new associations with better things. So I played it for a stint of my journey and now, just like that, instead of nerves and nicotine it sings to me of the Naas road and new beginnings.

Not easy

A Softer World is one site I don't visit nearly often enough.

for anyone

A question, what is it?

"My talent is to imbue a project with much more significance and theatricality than it actually deserves. This gives a sort of incandescence to it that makes things that are not all that bright, shine very brightly. I can bring that to the party. But, like it says in Blade Runner, the light that burns twice as brightly, burns twice as fast. How brightly I have shone," he says.

No, this is not me descending (or ascending, surely) into an altogether unastonishing fit of hubris, but rather the words of Gerry Ryan, as quoted in this great piece in the Sunday Indo (you won't catch me saying that too often). Assuming that article isn't lying, and I don't think it is, that quote is taken verbatim from Gerry's eagerly-awaited autobiography, entitled Would the Real Gerry Ryan Please Stand Up.

This raises a few question marks for me, one in particular: where the fuck is the question mark in the title of your book, Gerry? I'm a simple creature who gets all conflustered when confronted with sentences that look like questions, but apparently aren't. It makes me feel slightly ill. One can only assume that Gerry and his publishers are not entirely comfortable with the usage and application of question marks. So, with this in mind, I asked members of the public to devise some sentences for Gerry that might illustrate the many and varied ways in which this radical young upstart of a punctuation mark can be applied.

"Gerry, did some eejits really pay you a hundred grand to write about yourself?"

Finbar O'Crotch, Leopardstown, Co. Dublin

This demonstrates the classic use of the question mark, whereby the questioner expresses doubt about a piece of information they have been privy to, and uses the question format to seek clarification on the matter from a more informed party.

"That fat bollix? I heard he once ate 94 Curly Wurlys in an hour and washed it down with a litre of Baileys."

Seosamh Uachtar-Reoite, Knocklyon, Co. Dublin.

Here we see a classic example of how the humble question mark can be used to transform a simple statement of contempt into a trenchant, rhetorical, interrogative statement used to confirm the identity of the subject of a sentence. The second sentence does little to illuminate our understanding of the issue at hand and can, as such, be ignored.

"I thought he died of gout in 1998? Or syphilis? Something like that, no?"

Francoise McBackalley, Athy, Co. Kildare

An interesting example, this. Here we see the question mark being used to express an element of doubt creeping into what the questioner had previously assumed to be gospel truth. Also notable is the third question she asks. Mrs. McBackalley was originally a native of France, where an upwards inflection, accompanied by the word 'non', is a rather more common form of question that it is in our own country.

"Sure, who would actually spend their money on anything that langer has to say? There's a fucking recession on and Lenora wants one of them dolls that shites itself for Christmas, don't she?"

Billy 'Smeghead' O'Sullivan, Mayfield, Co. Cork

The addition of the word 'sure' here is not technically necessary in order to make this question effective, but does add an extra element of incredulity to it. Mr. O'Sullivan's mixed background gives linguistic colour to these questions, both in his classic Corkonian usage of 'langer' and, more significantly, the way in which a simple whinge metamorphoses into a question through his augmentation of 'doesn't she?' - a remnant of his 14 years spent working as a badger-hunter in Essex, England.

Mr. Ryan, I hope this proves helpful in your ongoing quest to burn like a star. As a simple man I would not deign to comment on the contents of your autobiography past the cover, so I'll leave it to the professionals.

Caught By The Fuzz

I was done for speeding last night. At least, I'm pretty sure I was. I was in a 100kph zone and saw a cop car in my rear-view mirror, tucked into a slip road where they couldn't be seen by approaching drivers. I looked at the speedometer: 103. Fuckfuckfuck. I know for a fact that there is no way the cops will have let such a minor indiscretion pass though, as it was 2.30 in the morning and there was absolutely fuck all traffic on the road. One doesn't sit there, bored shitless and getting paid overtime, for hours and let someone off for only exceeding the speed limit by a couple of kilometres per hour.

I've written about speeding before, badly, in my third ever post. The wise old head of Grandad was the only commenter who seemed to fully get my point that speeding, in itself, is not especially dangerous. 3 kph over the speed limit certainly didn't drastically enhance my chances of having an accident, especially not on a completely empty stretch of good quality dual carriageway. I'll hold my hands up and accept the fine and penalty points that are no doubt making their way to me as I sit here. But, at a time when the government are cutting corners and fucking over people involved in first, second and third levels of education, I'll question the wisdom of using Garda resources for such purposes at such ludicrous times. Still, here's a few quid towards the coffers, lads. Glad I'll be claiming last year's taxback soon.