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  • Indo col 98

    May 21st, 2019

    Did you know what you wanted to do with your life when you were 16? Or do you know what you want to do with your life now? Perhaps you are one of that special breed who was born knowing what career they wanted, whose first word was ‘accountancy’ or ‘fast-moving consumer goods’. Or perhaps you are like me and, despite stumbling into your mid-Forties, you still have no real clue what you are doing – or even plan to do – with your life.

    Career has never been to the forefront of my mind, what with so many other important issues to ponder on, such as which member of the Avengers I might be, or what the cut off age for skinny jeans is (it’s 26, BTW). For my daughter however, career is the topic of the moment, as she is coming to the end of transition year, and after a year of putting most of her brain into powersave mode, she now has to try and figure out what subjects she chooses and, ultimately, what she is going to do with her life. Apparently she already has some ideas, as she has made her choices without seeking my advice, something that came to light when I found myself wandering around her parent teacher meeting like someone playing an especially dull game of Pokemon Go.

    Her teachers were largely positive – she is doing well, despite her health woes and associated poor attendance. Her memory is also affected by her lupus, so while I would never want her to be defined by the condition, or to feel it is holding her back, her subject choices will need to be guided by these difficult realities. The teachers were open and honest about her selections, telling me that both chemistry and biology require hard work, excellent attendance, a photographic memory and a deep understanding of the subject matter. At this point the alarm bells inside my head started to ring, as I envisioned two years of test tubes, complex equations and all the other accoutrements of a field that I, like many liberal arts graduates, do not understand. It’s that fear that she has chosen something that I cannot help her with, that is beyond my grasp, and perhaps most of all, that she might not have an innate ability towards. This last one is really more like a weird biological superstition than an actual logical fear, and it’s one that perhaps has more to do with ego than anything – the notion that I have certain gifts, and ergo, my kids will have those same gifts. But this process of identifying aspects of your child and attributing them to yourself or your spouse, depending on whether they are positive or not, is hard to fight. Stubbornness? Not from me, no way no how. Sense of humour? That’s from me, of course, sher amn’t I a laugh a minute. And so it goes with school, where I have assumed she will be good at the things I am good at, but that prophecy has yet to be fulfilled as she has almost failed English several times and has dropped art for the Leaving, whilst embracing subjects I either dropped or failed when I sat the State exams back in the Paleolithic era. But her decision is her decision and no matter how I tried to steer her from this path, she is dead-set in her choices, and that stubborn streak that I pretend she gets from her mother probably mean she won’t change her mind no matter how difficult the subjects turn out to be. For me, it just means a return to calculators, latin, and the gnashing of teeth.

  • Indo col 97

    May 21st, 2019

    In 1974, the film-maker George A Romero was invited by an acquaintance to see a shopping centre he ran in Monroeville. Romero was fascinated by the mall – the way people ambled around the halls, staring blankly into windows, buying things they most likely didn’t need. He was bemused by the strange blissful state that people were reduced to, shuffling along white-tiled, glass-roofed cathedrals to capitalism.

    As a result, Romero set his next film, the zombie horror Dawn Of The Dead, inside the Monroeville Mall, seeing the building itself as a kind of architectural zombie, slowly digesting the consumers that shuffled along its various wings as though they were moving through a digestive tract; the consumer as consumed.

    This lengthy, po-faced preamble is my way of telling you that I don’t really like shopping centres. I think of Dawn Of The Dead every time I find myself being dragged to a sprawling retail park, and I approach them with the same sense of dread one would the end of the world. These are places without soul, as thanks to the virus that is globalisation, one out-of-town shopping centre is much the same as the last. Chain shops, chain cafes, chain restaurants and chains of us poor fools, wandering around trying to find our way out.

    The greatest horror of these places is that once you have kids, they become a regular port of call, because they are so gloriously safe. A city centre is a vibrant, buzzing place, with a sense of adventure and discovery. Independent cafes, independent book shops, independent thought – the city centre has it all. Granted, it also has a vape shop every three steps and loads of the units are boarded up, but still – it is an organic, cultured place, where you can just sit back and delight in the hustle and bustle. It is also home to the constant threat that one of your kids is going to get clipped by a wing mirror or force you to listen to a busker playing The Fields Of Athenry on the pan pipes, as danger is everywhere. Shopping centres are not like this at all – there is no danger here, unless you count being brushed by a passing Little Tikes car as being worthy of a compo claim, which given our world today, seems highly likely.

    A trip to your local shopping centre is a way of quietly admitting that you no longer want surprises – you want convenience, and ample parking, and predictability. Sure, there is the occasional moment of mild confusion when a new donut shop opens where the old donut shop used to be, but that’s about it. Everything is the mostly the same, forever.

    I find myself becoming like one of Romero’s zombies when I go to our local shopping centre – you get that dead eyed stare from looking at products that you don’t need, and eventually you start staring at other people in the same mildly-interested way. It’s like when you go to the zoo and find yourself staring at a family eating a picnic in much the same way you stared at a lonely rhino rolling in dung.

    Aside from the somnambulist state I find myself slipping into every time make a pilgrimage to one of these places, the most depressing thing about them is the message they bring – that excitement is currently out of stock in my life, and may actually have been discontinued completely. Sometimes we go there without really needing anything – this isn’t a shopping trip, it’s a day out. We are drawn to their offerings of shelter from both the rain and the sound of pan pipes, the predictability of chain restaurants and knowing exactly what the kids will and will not eat off the menu, the ability to park our bloated people carrier without causing structural damage to the inside of a multi-storey, and the quiet acceptance that I am the zombie now, standing outside Zara with my mouth hanging open, brain operating on about 3% of its functions, wondering if that donut place is open so I can shove some pink gelatinous goo into my face. As for the Monroeville mall, last year a local filmmaker crowdsourced enough money to erect a bronze bust of George A Romero on the main thoroughfare of the centre, and it sits there, broadly smiling, as the undead shoppers of America amble past.

  • The monster mash

    March 17th, 2019

    What is single pot still whiskey? Is it the past, is it the future? Is it a uniquely Irish style of whiskey, an Irish Irish whiskey, a category within the category? Is it our secret weapon, or is it a marketing trick? Is it a common style, found around the world, a simple mixed mash spirit, a dumbed down single malt?  It is a bastard malt, a mongrel? Is it a testament to Irish ingenuity and a spirit born of oppression – is it a flower that grew from ruins? Is it all these things or none, and, most importantly, is it the next step?

    When I think single malt, I think of Scotland. There are many exceptional single malts from around the world, and many mediocre ones from Scotland, but it is still there – a century of marketing has linked the concept of the single malt to one nation above all others. But once upon a time they used a mixed mash too. As single pot obsessive Willie Murphy noted, there is this quote the second edition of Whisky: Technology, Production and Marketing:

    Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the tax on ale, beer and whiskey (which was still referred to as aqua vitae in all statutes of the period) was essentially doubled, and it was estimated that this provision would yield £384 000 in revenue (Statute 1661, Car II, c.128). To raise this huge sum there must have been several large legitimate stills in existence, such as those of John Haig & Co., who claim that a Robert Haig established their business in 1627 (Anon., 1914). What is interesting, from a technical viewpoint, is the fact that these taxes were imposed not only on malted barley but also on spirit ‘not made of malt’. Other chronicles of this period similarly allude to spirit being made from a mixture of grains, such as oats, barley and wheat (Smith, 1776) as well as malt. So even from the earliest times some whiskey was being distilled from unmalted grain, and not all malt was made from barley. The malt tax introduced in 1701, for example, states that duty shall be paid: ‘upon all Malt, ground or unground, whether the same shall be made of Barley, or any other Corn or Grain whatsoever’ (Statute 1701, 12 &13 William III, c.5).

    That Smith they are referencing is none other than the father of capitalism Adam Smith, him of ‘greed is good’/Gordon Gekko fame. In the brutal tome more commonly known as The Wealth Of Nations, Smith notes:

    Malt is consumed not only in the brewery of beer and ale, but in the manufacture of wines and spirits. If the malt tax were to be raised to eighteen shillings upon the quarter, it might be necessary to make some abatement in the different excises which are imposed upon those particular sorts of low wines and spirits of which malt makes any part of the materials. In what are called malt spirits it makes commonly but a third part of the materials, the other two- thirds being either raw barley, or one-third barley and one-third wheat.

    Smith wrote that back in 1776, and then there’s this from super sleuth Charlie Roche:

    Willie I posted this a few years back .. repeat in case you missed from 1833. In the committee reports on Scottish distilleries of 1799 there are a number of instances of mixed Scots mashbills. Can't say categorically when stopped. pic.twitter.com/mQ2tT68n9E

    — charlie roche (@charleymcguffin) March 16, 2019

    So before single malt knew what it was, it was a mixed mash whisky not unlike our own supposedly uniquely Irish style.

    Single pot still can never compete with single malt, but it can become something else. There are obviously obstacles, because it’s not just a complex whiskey, it is also a complicated one. Referring to it as a mixed mash whiskey is actually a welcome simplification – single pot still is a confusing name, as it reflects not the style, nor the key element of the mashbill, but rather the device used to distill it. Also, as they are not allowed to call it ‘pure pot still’ anymore, it now sounds like it is only distilled once, or made using only one still. For consumers approaching the SPS category for the first time, there is a lot of baggage to get your head around. Then there is the requisite explanations of the corn laws, because every whiskey should come with a history lesson that focuses on taxation of grain. But SPS has genuine heritage, and this is where it gets even more complicated.

    Peter Mulryan knows a thing or two about whiskey. He went from writing books on the subject to being the public face of Irish Distillers Ltd SPS promos and is now the driving force behind Blackwater Distillery. Mulryan has blogged about his dissatisfaction with the technical file – the document that controls what Irish whiskey is and how it is made – and has started making pot still whiskey from old mashbills, as the more recent rules mean that SPS is what IDL say it is. Mulryan notes that in all the old historical SPS mashbills he has come across, not one meets the standards set out by the technical file.

    Published five years ago, the technical file was written by the large whiskey producers in Ireland at a time when a boom was looming and the finer points of the category needed to be locked down. The result is a document defining SPS to suit IDL’s in-house style – imagine if Diageo legally declared that Guinness is the only style of stout allowed by law, which, quite frankly, sounds like exactly the kind of thing Diageo would do.  

    You can read the file itself here, or David Havelin’s excellent dissection of it here and here, but IDL’s influence is all over it, including references to SPS being made ‘usually in large stills’ and even allowing for a little bit of column still distillation in there, which is clearly a gob in the face of history. But SPS as a style was resuscitated and kept alive by IDL, so little wonder that they felt such a sense of ownership over it that they simply went ahead and redefined it.

    And just so I can play devil’s advocaat, I would make this point – it has been five or six years since the big producers sat down to write the tech file, and a lot has changed. Grain has become a major talking point, with words like provenance and terroir becoming part of the global discussion, so one more question before I launch into an actual whiskey review – is it not possible that IDL themselves would change the technical file definition of SPS, given how restrictive it is? Are their hands not tied by the file, now that they have a micro-distillery where they can compete with the likes of Blackwater? Would they not wish to loosen the ball-gag on SPS and let it breathe a little? Is there not an archive filled with old mashbills in Midleton, recipes for pot still whiskeys of yore that could be resurrected and released in tiny batches, little pieces of history brought alive and offered to the world as part of a celebration of our heritage? Perhaps, perhaps not. But until they do, we have Midleton’s interpretation of SPS, ahistorical as it may be, and hey, it isn’t all that bad.

    At a Redbreast masterclass at Whiskey Live Dublin in 2017, attendees were given a gift – a sample of Redbreast 21-year-old bottled at cask strength. I, being both antisocial and impoverished, was not in attendance, but John ‘Whiskey Cat’ Egan was there, and through a circuitous route that involved Omar ‘That’s Dram Good’ Fitzell smuggling the sample up from Kerry, I managed to get my paws on a generous portion of this fabled whiskey (a 100ml sample of it sold at auction for more than a hundred euro earlier this year).

    And so to some notes on this rarest of birds:

    Nose: Hello again, chocolate, tobacco, leather, raisins, and for SPS Redbreast bingo, Christmas cake in a glass, complete with marzipan and brandy butter. Pear drops and camphor, roasted banana, flambé crepe with Nutella. It’s cask strength, but you genuinely wouldn’t know it – this is about flavour, not strength.

    Palate: Really reminiscent of the Dreamcask, so much so that it should really become an annual, relatively affordable release – flog 300 of these for 250 a pop one day a year, g’wan. Up front there is more fruit, those JR ice-lollies from the Eighties, rhubarb crumble, bread and butter pudding; it is dark, rich, deep, like meself. There is a lot of toffee, fudge, dark chocolate, hot chocolate with a drop of Baileys in it.

    Finish: That zesty snap of the SPS spice fades slowly, and again a lot of notes reminiscent of the Dreamcask, that bergamot, the sweetness, the leather and tobacco wafting. A beautiful whiskey, and one that deserves to be shared with the world (stocks permitting). Is it automatically better than the standard 21? Not really. It’s great, but to me that 21 is the gold standard for Irish whiskey, SPS or SM or SG or blend or vatted malt or anything. It is accessible, widely available and an absolute beauty. That said, the 21CS could easily be the match of the Dreamcask, especially if it was released at a reasonable price and in a fashion that didn’t become a flipping free-for-all.

    Aside from all my grumbling about the technical file, and the fact that it could do with some significant edits, if there is a way to open hearts and minds to our unnecessarily complicated indigenous style, then Redbreast is it. Forget the youthful SPS of Dingle, Teeling and impending ones from Great Northern, or even the multiplicity of well-aged Powers single casks, ain’t nobody got time for that. To hell with the Spot family, beautiful as they may be, because they are an even more confusing pitch than Redbreast. The smart money is on the priest’s whiskey. Redbreast was my epiphany, and look at me now, friendless and alone, writing sprawling thinkpieces on a minor category of whiskey. So here’s to our grains of future past, and to single pot still whiskey, whatever it once was, and whatever it may become.

    Update 29/04/2019: Irish Distillers Limited have published a piece by Master Distiller Emeritus Barry Crockett, the man who kept that single pot still flame alive for so long, and it goes into a lot of detail about the whys, hows, and wherewithals of the technical file. Well worth a read.

  • Pearse Lyons

    March 9th, 2019

    On this day, we remember our remarkable founder, Dr. Pearse Lyons. All of us here are reflecting on his life and legacy. His character lives on at Pearse Lyons Distillery. #pearse #pearselyonsdistillery #pearseirishwhiskey #topearse pic.twitter.com/ghNkSpZpAR

    — Pearse Lyons Dist. (@PLDistillery) March 8, 2019

    After the passing of Dr Pearse Lyons of Alltech a year ago, I wrote this tribute piece for FFT.ie:

    Dr Thomas Pearse Lyons was a man who looked beyond the surface. Many business empires are built on marketing and spin, but Dr Lyons, a consummate scientist, spent his career looking deeper into animal nutrition, brewing and distilling. His death on March 8 left behind a vast empire, with a business that employed more than four thousand people in ninety countries and spanned agrifoods, brewing, and distilling – a fitting legacy for a man who had an endless thirst for knowledge, and a mind like a razor.

    Thomas Pearse Lyons (1944-2018) grew up in Dundalk. One of six children, his mother ran a grocers, and it is she who he credits with his drive and entrepreneurial spirit. Aged just 14 he started working in the laboratory of the local Harp Brewery – his parents were both teetotallers, but on his mother’s side he came from five generations of coopers to the great distilleries of Dublin.

    On the insistence of his mother, he studied biochemistry in University College Dublin. Later,  in 1971, he received his Phd in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham, after which he worked for Irish Distillers, playing a pivotal role in the design of the new Midleton Distillery, a facility that was to become central to the battle to save Irish whiskey from annihilation during the lean years of the 1980s.

    But while his education and experience in Ireland and the UK laid the groundwork for his success, it was in America that he achieved his most remarkable feats.

    Emigrating to Kentucky in the 1976, he worked with local ethanol distillers to help improve their processes. After four years, he finally made the move that would define his life’s work, and, using a loan of 10,000, he started a company in the garage of his house.

    At this stage he was married to Deirdre, and they had two young children, Mark and Aoife. It was a risky move for anyone, but especially someone who is married with a young family. The company, Alltech, specialised in animal nutrients, and in its first year it turned over a million dollars.

    As the value of his company soared, he diversified into brewing and distilling, as well as authoring a number of texts on the subjects. He became involved in philanthropy, building laboratories for schools, and helping Haiti recover from the devastating earthquake in 2010. While he was a well-known figure in the US, back home he was less well known, save for appearances in annual rich lists. It seemed a shame that one of our great success stories was not as celebrated in his native land as he was in the US – but all that was about to change.

    The Irish whiskey category was booming, and Dr Lyons stated to consider bringing his brewing and distilling skills back home. In 2013 he started to search Dublin for somewhere to build a distillery. His choice of location show just how he was able to see beyond the surface – a dilapidated church in the Liberties, the spire of which had been removed. Although the site had a rich history that went back centuries, in recent times the site had been left to decay, with the church itself being used as a lighting showroom. There were other site he could have chosen – places less expensive to build, with less heritage and fewer complications – but he did not shy away from a challenge. A complete rebuild and restoration of the church and its surrounds saw the billionaire spend some 20 million euro creating the Pearse Lyons Distillery At St James’s, complete with stained glass windows showing the saint after which the church was named, and one of Dr Lyons’s cooper ancestors. Opening last September, it is a fitting monument to a man who blazed a trail in the sciences and in his many philanthropic work.

    As with any business leader, it can be sometimes hard to get a sense of who they are. Dr Lyons always cut a dash, with his dickie bows, sing-songs and boundless positivity. For a man who was able to look beyond the immediately visible, his death leaves you wondering what drove him to achieve all he did.

    There is of course, a very simple answer: Family. His family was built into his success from day one – Alltech takes its name from his daughter, Dr Aoife Louise Lyons, while its signature colour was chosen by his son, Dr Mark Lyons. Mark and Aoife are senior members of the firm. Dr Lyons’s wife Deirdre is director of corporate image and design, and even designed the stained glass windows in St James’s, while she also oversees Alltech’s philanthropic works worldwide. Speaking about his wife upon the opening of the distillery, Dr Lyons said: “The builders said that they loved working with Deirdre because she never changed her mind. Never. She has the vision of what she wants to do. I think this is what makes us a formidable team. It’s telling our story. It’s history.”

    Dr Lyons’s death on March 8, 2018 from a heart problem, marked the sudden end to a remarkable life. His son Mark said in a statement: ““He saw farther into the horizon than anyone in the industry, and we, as his team, are committed to delivering on the future he envisioned.”

    Dr Pearse Lyons will be remembered as a man who dedicated his life to science, to business, and to making the world a better place. But beyond the empire he created, it is his dedication to his family is the most inspirational aspect of his life – he looked beyond the horizon, but he never forgot that family was life’s most important work.

  • Indo col 96

    March 6th, 2019

    Life in the media isn’t all a joyless grind of deadlines, changing the ribbon on your typewriter, and checking under your car for explosives – sometimes even part-timers like me get invited to the odd event. So it was that I found myself at a drinks launch, with several other, younger, more successful and attractive media types, all stylishly dressed and deep in free libations. Naturally I was trying hard to convince them that I was somebody of note. I have a column, I slurred. What do you write about, they asked. It’s kind of like Death On Credit crossed with The Simpsons, I said.

    Given that they were all young and out enjoying life and building careers, they were curious to know more – what’s it like to have a load of kids, is it wonderful, like Cheaper By The Dozen, is every day like The Wonder Years. Yeah, I mumbled, kinda. And then I gave them The Talk – a long and tedious speech I wish I could give my twentysomething self, about how much responsibility actually comes with being a parent, the pressures, the shame, the guilt. Obviously there is wonder, and magic, and even some of those fireworks Hollywood relentlessly promises you, but there is also a lot of just cleaning urine off the bathroom floor, loading and unloading various household appliances, loading and unloading a people carrier, and realising that self care and mindfulness are luxuries that you can no longer afford. It was possibly because I hadn’t been out in a while that my chit-chat went so dark so fast, as at some point I transformed into a reverse Jacob Marley, moaning at them in ghlastly tones about how they should focus on their careers, and spend more time at the office. Don’t end up like me, I whispered.

    One of the journalists broke the silence by saying he was thinking about never having kids, and I chirped, good for you. Don’t be enslaved by Nature’s deranged recruitment programme, don’t end up conscripted into the human assembly line, stay strong and don’t let About A Boy convince you that life sans children is somehow empty. I have friends who don’t have kids, and while our lives are different, I could hardly say that somehow my life is a rich banquet and theirs is a microwave dinner for one, shared with a cat. If your life didn’t have meaning before you had kids, then cranking out a load of little dependents isn’t going to fill that void.

    I didn’t always think like this; I can remember when we first became parents, thinking that this was it, the greatest thing a human can do. I can even remember saying to people without children that they should have them. If I could go back I would throw a pint in my own face, because to make the assumption that the sole reason for human existence is to create more humans is really quite sad, and pitching it to others like I’m selling a shady time share deal is obnoxious and insensitive. I know that having kids has been an incredible experience for my wife and I, but that doesn’t mean it is either easy or the sort of thing you would recommend to all and sundry.

    One journalist told me he couldn’t do what I do, that to write about family as I do would feel like an act of betrayal. I thought – is that what this is? Am I some sort of Judas, taking my thirty silver pieces and the odd invite to a drinks launch as payment for detailing my family’s life? Probably, yeah – but I’m also aware that without my wife and children, I wouldn’t have anything to write about, because I’m not sure I could crank out 600 words about male grooming and brunch spots. They are my muse, and while I gnash my teeth and occasionally suggest the mass sterilisation of the entire human species, my relentless complaining is part of the love, and there is never a moment when I ask for this chalice to be taken from me, not even when, the morning after a drinks launch, little people wake you at 5am to drag you out of bed for another day of  inspiration, joy and cleaning urine off the floor.

  • Indo col 95

    March 6th, 2019

    I live in fear of taking down the Euromillions. Upon hearing the 175 million was won in Ireland, I had a moment of terror where I tried to remember if I had done it or not. What if I had won the lot? What then? What would become of us?

    I often joke with my wife that it isn’t love that kept us together, but poverty. Breaking up is an expensive business – there’s the legal fees, splitting of assets, securing two new properties from the proceeds of the sale of one, botox for her, Ed Hardy jeans and highlights for me, not to mention the high cost of being single again and trying to appear affluent whilst using a medical card to get treatment for my fungal toenail. A relative lack of money, and not having enough income to follow through on heat-of-the-moment threats of divorce meant that we were forced to work things out. It is very much like locking two arguing children into a room until they sort out their disagreement, and it works, in a clunky kind of way. So we have yet to test the richer or for poorer part of our marriage vows, as for the most part our life together has been spent occasionally buying milk with a credit card and borrowing from the kids’ credit union accounts.

    I grew up listening to my dad telling me that money isn’t happiness, a funny motto for someone who worked in a bank. He had seen how money could ruin people, through either not having enough, or having too much, or simply through their own obsessions with it. He wanted me to have enough, and a little extra, but not much more. So at least I didn’t disappoint him by either earning loads or winning 175 million euro, and ruining my own happiness.  

    There is a theory in popular psychology called the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation. It is our remarkable ability to return to a relatively stable level of happiness after major events, both positive or negative. In short, whether you win the lottery or almost die in a car crash, your levels of happiness will be much the same as they were before the event. A famous study in the late Seventies looked at the relative happiness of lottery winners and paraplegics a year after their big win or the accident that paralysed them. The authors of the study noted that “In general, lottery winners rated winning the lottery as a highly positive event, and paraplegics rated their accident as a highly negative event, though neither outcome was rated as extremely as might have been expected.”

    That report also became the subject of one of the first TED talks, when Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert used the 1978 study as the basis for his talk on happiness. The study has been shown to be scientifically weak, but further studies since that effectively say much the same thing – that, as Darwin noted, it is not strength that allows us to survive, but an ability to adapt to change, be it good or bad.

    Over the last couple of years my wife and I have had the usual run of mixed fortunes that come with life on earth – losing people, kids being diagnosed with things, and the aforementioned money struggles – but I would still say that I am relatively happy. I’m sure I could be happier, and there are days when I feel immensely sad, but overall I would say I am clocking a solid seven on a one to ten happiness scale, where one is the guy in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and ten is Joseph Ducreux in his self portrait, Portrait de l’artiste sous les traits d’un moqueur. One hundred and seventy five million euro isn’t going to raise that figure any much, although during the lean times over the last few years, I would say I slipped to a five or below on several occasions, partly due to money worries. But I get by, happiness stabilises again, and the treadmill keeps running.

    To suddenly be immensely wealthy, to have no want you cannot fulfil, to never work again, sounds like a kind of hell. As Gilbert noted in his later works, “A little money can buy you a lot of happiness, though a lot of money buys you only a little more happiness.”

    So congratulations to the Euromillions winners, and if any of them wants to put my kids through college, that would be great.

  • Indo col 94

    March 6th, 2019

    I have some terrible, distressing news – I have succumbed to Cool Dad Syndrome. It hit me out of the blue, as I had only gotten over a severe bout of Smug Dad Syndrome, which I caught after I brought my kids to both an art gallery and a bookshop within the same 24-hour period. However, Cool Dad Syndrome, or CDS, to make it sounds official, is a much, much sadder affair. I suspected I was predisposed towards it as I liked to think of myself as being liberal and open minded in my approach to parenting, allowing my kids to play video games online, or my daughter to go to teen club nights (even the fact I don’t call them discos shows how cool I thought I was), but I’m afraid that I have recently gone full blown by allowing my daughter to go to Longitude, or, if I am to give it its correct title, ‘Longi’.

    She began her campaign of lobbying around the upcoming festival season last summer, telling me all the amazing acts that were playing everywhere and how her growth as a person and her standing socially were both being negatively affected by my refusal to allow her to go on her own to Glastonbury for a week. If I loved her I would let her head off to the UK like Dick Whittington with a bindle full of cans and head full of idiotic teenage dreams about how great life probably is beyond the cocoon of your family home.

    Eventually she wore me down, and I agreed to let her go to a festival. But I wore her down too, from her demands of a one-way ticket to Burning Man, to a one-day ticket for Longitude. I even tried to buy the tickets for her, but as an old man who has never bought a ticket anywhere other than the murky depths of Sound Cellar on Nassau Street, I couldn’t figure out how the online ticket selection process worked and gave up just before all-caps message came through that ‘someone had secured tickets’. Luckily there was another parent on the case, or, to be more specific, every other parent in the east Cork region, because it would appear that this year’s Longitude is going to be an unofficial school trip. So while I briefly basked in the warm glow of CDS because I was allowing my daughter to go to a festival for one day, it would appear there are other parents who are afflicted with a far worse strain of the same problem. According to my beloved first-born, there are swathes of girls in her school who are decamping to Dublin on their own for three days. Apart from the fact that for us delicate country folk, our nation’s capital appears to be twinned with both Gotham and the Interzone from Naked Lunch, the classmates aren’t even staying in a nice house as they would in Irish college, with a bean an tí to clip them round the ear if they show any signs of independent thought. No, they are all staying in apartments, the least moral of all human dwellings. I was horrified – what a dereliction of parental duty, letting their kids head off to a festival on the tear, sher it’ll be like Lord Of The Flies but with glitter and Orchard Thieves.

    However, my daughter was quick to point out that while she is just turning 16, most of her class will be 17 by the time Longi swings round, and are therefore adults, or at least beta versions of adults. So this is how it starts – festival season is now where they spread their wings, leap from the nest and smash headlong into mud. And so it was that my sudden outbreak of CDS slowly morphed into Despondent Dad Syndrome, when you realise that the day they leave you is fast approaching, and you wonder if you have prepared them for life, if they have learned from your mistakes, if they are the better versions of you that you always tried to mold them into, or, at the very least, if they have the good sense to bring earplugs and toilet paper to a festival.

  • Indo col 93

    March 6th, 2019

    Please allow me to introduce you to the world of BearBnB. My first encounter with this phenomenon was when my daughter was in creche, and one day she came home with a teddy bear and a copybook coated in sparkles. Teddy, she announced, was going to be our guest for the week, but unlike most guests who you can just plonk in front of the TV, this guest’s visit was to be documented in the journal.

    As this was our first time hosting a teddy, and our daughter was our first child and therefore we put some actual effort into her childhood, we decided to give it our best shot. First we did our research by reading back over other entries to see what other people did with teddy, and it soon became clear that this really wasn’t about showing teddy a good time, but an exercise in showing every other parent how fantastically well you were doing.  

    No expense was spared in showing teddy a good time back then – pony trekking, visiting new builds and various property investments of the hosts, spins in new SUVs, teddy was receiving the sort of treatment usually reserved for heads of state or rappers. I can still remember the sinking feeling as we leafed through teddy’s adventures in the soon to be struggling classes, not a care in the world. All he was short was a little four-poster bed fashioned out of Anglo Irish share certs.

    Of course, all this was back in the giddy heights of the Celtic Tiger years. Our most recent BearBnB guest came with slightly lower expectations. Reading back through the journal, teddy was brought to an open farm, did a bit of birdwatching and visited an aquarium, all fairly achievable goals for the average host. Sadly, our slot with teddy came during the economic cryosleep of mid-January, where you try to sit perfectly still until payday for fear you accidentally spend money by breathing too loudly. So we played hide and seek in the house, ate my budget bolognese (it’s basically ketchup and noodles) in the house, and took grainy photos to make it seem like our house isn’t a grotty kip, just in case whoever gets teddy next ends up with conjunctivitis.  

    We tried to dress it up with some colourful text, but nothing could disguise the fact that we failed as hosts, just as we fail as parents. After all, teddy wasn’t sent home to us as punishment, but as a reward, as our youngest child had a good day in creche. In other words, most of his days are bad ones. Since he was born he has been a handful, with a particular penchant for screaming, one that we assumed would dissipate once he realised that this wasn’t how we communicate as a species as we are not buzzards. But still he screeches, to the point that it seems he has sensory issues. It seems incongruous that someone who might be sensitive to noise spend so much of his time screaming like a banshee, but apparently this is a coping mechanism, and the long-suffering creche staff even went out and bought him a pair of industrial ear protectors so when the rest of the little ones are having a sing song, he won’t try to run and hide in the playhouse. It’s a bit like a silent disco, except the other way around.

    It warmed my heart to hear that my son had a day without incident, when he didn’t scream the place down, or go into a fit of rage, or fling toys around the room because someone tried to sing a verse of The Wheels On The Bus. It gave me a glimmer of hope that this might just be a phase, and not a sign that he is just bonkers. So while I may grumble about our uninvited guest, in reality it was a happy affair, and I hope that teddy takes a similar view the next time he logs onto TripAdvisor to give us a barely-deserved one star review.

  • Indo col 92

    March 6th, 2019

    Friends, please join me now with heads bowed in a solemn moment’s silence as we prepare to say farewell to my medical card. Obtained back in 2015 when I was briefly unemployed, I had forgotten I had it until it fell out of my wallet last week, giving me a moment to pause and regret that I never really got to use it due to being tragically burdened with excellent health. It’s a bit like ending up a free buffet but already being full, and you just sit there wondering if you could fill a gear bag with sausage rolls without anyone noticing, or turning up to the afters of a wedding just as the free bar is closing.

    Of course, what I didn’t realise is that my medical card also entitled me to dental work, and while my general health is good, my teeth are so bad that I try to do that weird closed-mouth smile that makes me look like an under-fire politician sprinting into a State car.

    Even my close-lipped byline photo looks like it was taken in the middle of me using mouthwash, which is ironic as I don’t use mouthwash or care all that much for my teeth. It’s fortunate that as a professional miserabilist I don’t smile much anyway, but if I had know I could get a bit of patching up work done on them for free, I might have gone for it, and transitioned from wonky canines and stubby incisors to something a little less shameful – less Jeremy Kyle, more Hollywood Smile. Except of course, a medical card isn’t going to get you a full set of porcelain veneers; just extractions and two fillings a year, so it’s not like I was going to be getting gangsta grills on the taxpayer’s dime.

    Teeth are a hot topic in our house. My wife has perfect teeth, and her family went to great lengths to give her them through years of Marathon Man style sessions with an expensive orthodontist. She thusly expects that teeth are to be cared for and prized, and worries constantly about having any removed, as this would apparently cause her entire face to collapse in on itself like a supermassive black hole. I try to reassure her that with a grand full face like hers, reminiscent of a full moon in the fog, she would need most of her jaw removed to even achieve cheekbones, but apparently that sort of contribution does not help. What would I know about dental care, with those wonky little gravel chips I call teeth, jutting out at odd angles. These gravel chips work just fine, although they do give me a slight lisp that is not related to my fat tongue, and anyway, as a dad you don’t need good teeth, just grippy, expendable ones that can open the odd ketchup bottle or tear chunks off whatever mystery meat the kids failed to eat. I apply this same terrible logic to my sons, and this is the point where one of the miracles of married life – the ability to argue about literally anything – comes into play. She cares greatly about oral hygiene, I don’t care if all my teeth fall out, we’re the original odd couple, her beautiful smile obscured by her incandescent rage over my inability to wash the kids’ teeth, me lisping Gollum-like apologiessss through the sinkhole I call a mouth, while in the background our son does the floss from Fortnite rather than actually flossing, oh the joys.

    But while there are parts of parenting that I get wrong, I hope there are some I get right, like passing on the message that my father raised me with – that Ireland is a good country, and that while we are a work in progress, we are heading in the right direction. The demise of my medical card is a reminder that, even though I never needed it, nor did I use it, the State was there for me and my crumbling molars if I ever needed them.

  • Indo col 91

    March 6th, 2019

    Friends, please join me now with heads bowed in a solemn moment’s silence as we prepare to say farewell to my medical card. Obtained back in 2015 when I was briefly unemployed, I had forgotten I had it until it fell out of my wallet last week, giving me a moment to pause and regret that I never really got to use it due to being tragically burdened with excellent health. It’s a bit like ending up a free buffet but already being full, and you just sit there wondering if you could fill a gear bag with sausage rolls without anyone noticing, or turning up to the afters of a wedding just as the free bar is closing.

    Of course, what I didn’t realise is that my medical card also entitled me to dental work, and while my general health is good, my teeth are so bad that I try to do that weird closed-mouth smile that makes me look like an under-fire politician sprinting into a State car.

    Even my close-lipped byline photo looks like it was taken in the middle of me using mouthwash, which is ironic as I don’t use mouthwash or care all that much for my teeth. It’s fortunate that as a professional miserabilist I don’t smile much anyway, but if I had know I could get a bit of patching up work done on them for free, I might have gone for it, and transitioned from wonky canines and stubby incisors to something a little less shameful – less Jeremy Kyle, more Hollywood Smile. Except of course, a medical card isn’t going to get you a full set of porcelain veneers; just extractions and two fillings a year, so it’s not like I was going to be getting gangsta grills on the taxpayer’s dime.

    Teeth are a hot topic in our house. My wife has perfect teeth, and her family went to great lengths to give her them through years of Marathon Man style sessions with an expensive orthodontist. She thusly expects that teeth are to be cared for and prized, and worries constantly about having any removed, as this would apparently cause her entire face to collapse in on itself like a supermassive black hole. I try to reassure her that with a grand full face like hers, reminiscent of a full moon in the fog, she would need most of her jaw removed to even achieve cheekbones, but apparently that sort of contribution does not help. What would I know about dental care, with those wonky little gravel chips I call teeth, jutting out at odd angles. These gravel chips work just fine, although they do give me a slight lisp that is not related to my fat tongue, and anyway, as a dad you don’t need good teeth, just grippy, expendable ones that can open the odd ketchup bottle or tear chunks off whatever mystery meat the kids failed to eat. I apply this same terrible logic to my sons, and this is the point where one of the miracles of married life – the ability to argue about literally anything – comes into play. She cares greatly about oral hygiene, I don’t care if all my teeth fall out, we’re the original odd couple, her beautiful smile obscured by her incandescent rage over my inability to wash the kids’ teeth, me lisping Gollum-like apologiessss through the sinkhole I call a mouth, while in the background our son does the floss from Fortnite rather than actually flossing, oh the joys.

    But while there are parts of parenting that I get wrong, I hope there are some I get right, like passing on the message that my father raised me with – that Ireland is a good country, and that while we are a work in progress, we are heading in the right direction. The demise of my medical card is a reminder that, even though I never needed it, nor did I use it, the State was there for me and my crumbling molars if I ever needed them.

  • Indo col 90

    March 6th, 2019

    To exempt or not to exempt, sin e an question. Our middle son’s struggles with language development mean that he is eligible for an exemption from Irish, prompting much soul searching and keening in our house. What would our ancestors say, are we betraying all they fought and died for by not forcing our son – and ourselves – through years of Irish school- and homework, will he be a little less Irish for not knowing the cupla focail, or will he resent us for removing this from his educational choices? What if he ends up hating us for our rejection of his native tongue, and ends up being radicalised into some sean nos terror cell, how long before he is on the slippery slope to beards, knits, acc-shints, and attempting to speak Irish to people who clearly have no idea what you are saying, like one of those people you find in a glass mansion up a boreen in west Cork who speaks Irish in a profoundly English accent? Perhaps we are overthinking  this, because as his principal pointed out, the exemption exists because he needs it. He has struggled to communicate with the world in English, and the many complexities of Irish may just be a bridge too far for him. However, the principal was quick to point out that it is part of our heritage, and part of what makes us who we are. Perhaps, if you use it regularly, say as a teacher, you might feel that way, but for me, homework is a fun trip down memory lane until we get to Irish, because I can see virtually no reason for them knowing more than hello, goodbye and kiss me arse in Irish. It is as much an irritant to me now as it was when it was being forced down my throat in school, or when I was learning how to be rejected by the opposite sex in two languages during Irish college.

    The Irish language will always exist – there will be better people than me who love it for what it is, what it represents, and will keep it alive. I feel little guilt in opting for an exemption for my son, not just for him, but to spare us all the difficulties of trying to understand a language I feel no warmth towards. I feel this way because I see Irish people as being engaged with their culture. We might find it hard to exactly define what it means to be Irish – or even agree if such a thing exists – but in my experience, Irish people at all levels of society have an awareness of our country, its art, its history, and its politics. To be reassured of just how engaged we are on the latter you only have to look to our dear friends across the water, as their post-colonial crisis of identity continues to make us look at them, slightly frowning, as a parent does with an enraged toddler smashing their own toys off the floor. Reading vox pops from the ordinary British folk I find myself googling ‘is history compulsory in UK schools?’  Because history is one of the most important subjects of all, and those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, unless of course, you are like my daughter, and have an exemption from that subject too.

    One of the curious side effects of her Lupus is memory loss. It is curious because while it is scientifically verified that she does have memory problems, in my experience a lot of the events she cannot remember relate to things she couldn’t be bothered remembering. Did she tidy her room like I asked her, oh no, she forgot, because of the condition you see. But does she remember every broken promise, every disappointment, every fiver borrowed for a pint of milk? You better believe it.  

    But while I will happily grab an exemption for Irish for my son, my daughter ditching history filled me with dread – all I could see was her in a conversation somewhere in the future and suddenly asking ‘what’s a Holocaust?’ or ‘why didn’t the irish just eat something other than spuds during the Famine?’ or even not knowing that Famine takes a capital F, despite the fact that ideally it should be Genocide with a capital G. But it is what it is – two subjects lost from their respective curricula, hours saved on arguing our way through homework, and two little pairs of feet set firmly in the direction of whatever brain trust will be pushing for Irexit in a few years’ time.

  • Indo col 89

    March 6th, 2019

    The Young Scientist exhibition is a wonderful event on our nation’s calendar. It’s a time when we come together to marvel at the brilliance of the next generation, feel shame at our own intellectual failings, and then reassure ourselves that whoever won had biochemists for parents, grew up in a lab and had a mind that was more CPU than brain.

    Science is not my thing. I only develop a sudden interest in it when arguing with my wife about homeopathy or over-priced fish oils that have no discernible effect on our intellect. It’s not so much that my right brain is dominant that I think someone might have removed my entire left brain to make space for all the terrible creative ideas oozing out of the other half. I struggled with all the sciences in school, which made my daughter making it to the Young Scientist exhibit all the more unusual. My enormous swell of pride deflated slightly when I started to ask her what her exhibit was about and it became clear that she was really just a roadie for the brainiacs in her group. She mumbled something about gender identity, then trailed off before asking me if we had any jaffa cakes. Albert Einstein once ate a grasshopper, I told her, maybe she should eat that instead of those orange sugar discs. ‘Who’s Albert Einstein?’ was her reply. I won’t hold my breath on that Nobel Prize for science.

    My daughter is not unlike me. I see more of her mother in her, but my wife reliably informs me that her appalling attitude, disinterest in her studies, internet addiction and general sloth all come direct from me. At least I think that’s what she says, I don’t usually pay much attention, as I’m knuckle deep in an argument with strangers on Twitter. But a report that came out over the festive season brought some great science news – thanks to me, my daughter may also end up with crippling depression. According to a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry and co-authored by Professor Paul Ramchandani of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge,  identified a link between post-natal depression in men and depression in their daughters as they reached adulthood. Good old science, publishing depressing reports in the middle of Christmas, the time of year when we all hate our families the most. Brilliant, this is just what my daughter needed, another reason to resent me, as if being cursed with my oily skin, unruly hair and general sloth wasn’t enough. The research, based on a sample of more than 3,000 families in the UK, identified a link between post-natal depression in men and depression in their daughters as they reached adulthood. Given that her mum and I were only together 15 months when my daughter was born, and that I was still in college and had zero prospects, I wasn’t so much post-natally depressed as I was just depressed-depressed.

    I’ve grown quite philosophical about my mental health as I’ve gotten older – I saw it as a source of torment in my youth, but I realise now that it is also the source of many of my gifts. I don’t want to romanticise self destruction, or suggest that you have to suffer to create, but I can see that many of the things I like about myself come from the same place as the things I do not like. As time has gone on it has simply become a matter of working on the parts I dislike and working with the parts I like. I’m now at the point where I can say that the decades old scars on my arms are as much a part of my professional and personal success as anything I did in college. This isn’t to say that ‘ability to be deeply unhappy’ is now worthy of inclusion in your LinkedIn skills cloud, but it doesn’t hurt to hurt a little once in a while, especially now the robots are coming for us.

    Science, apart from ruining Christmas with poorly timed reports, is also planning on taking all our jobs. Every day there is a new headline about how our job will be done by a tin can and some circuits in a few years. All our interactions will be with robots, they warn. It seems unlikely, given that even my fridge beeping to tell me I left the door open makes me want to take it outside and batter it until its HFC-134a seeps into the tarmac. I think if it had actual sentience enough to explain to me in a HAL 9000-style monotone that the milk was going off, I would burn the house to the ground to get away from it. But the one consolation is that the robots may take many millennia before they finally become as human as us, to feel as we do, to suffer and to struggle, and to create beautiful things. And, thanks to chancers like my daughter holding science back with spectacular aplomb, it looks to be some time before my fridge goes from irritating beeps to writing a column for a newspaper about its own ennui.

  • Indo col 88

    March 6th, 2019

    April is the cruellest month, TS Eliot wrote in The Wasteland, and he was almost right except he was out by four months, as January is the true bastard of the calendar here in the northern hemisphere. The weather starts to get properly cold, the stores of Vitamin D run out, and, worst of all, we have nothing to look forward to except maybe reed crosses or getting snowed in again. The most exciting thing to happen in this accursed month is phoning your bank in the vain hope that your card has been skimmed, because if it hasn’t and you went all Brewster’s Millions in the run up to Christmas, then it’s going to be the month that never ends. The last thing this accursed bucket of weeks needs is to be endured sober.

    My drinking is a running joke in our house. When Aldi brought out a 25 year old single malt for less than fifty quid, I embarked on a Homeric odyssey to every Aldi in Minster so I could get one, which led my son to start calling me an Aldiholic. Yes, it’s very funny, but it is also a little sad, especially when he starts loudly calling me an Aldiholic in public, usually when I am in Aldi buying more booze. Sometimes he even asks me if he should grab a couple of bottles of my regular craft beer tipple and put them in the trolley, but I draw the line at training my ten year old into tending bar.

    The arrival of January brings the usual offers of booze-related freelance work – would anyone like to give up drink for the month and write about it? Every year, I am forced to look deep into my soul and ask myself if I could give up drink for a mere four weeks, and every year the answer is a mumbled, shame-filled no.

    I use a lot of excuses for this response – I write about booze, so therefore it’s work, and sher who could expect me to give up work for the month? This is despite the fact that I only write about the people who make booze, and not the booze itself, but I still see drink as being intrinsic to my writing, and I can’t imagine life without it. It is a marker of the end of the working week, a consolation prize for another Saturday night in, a stress reliever, a sleep aid, and a decadent treat. My drinking isn’t even social, as I do it at home – it’s just a reward for me, and me alone. So it’s hard to discern whether I simply can’t be bothered to go off the drink, or if I physically can’t.

    The latter would mean that I am an alcoholic, which by my own standards I most definitely am not. But my kids view it differently – my daughter turns sixteen soon and she is quite blunt about my drinking, my whiskey collection, or my droning on about craft beers, telling me on a regular basis that I am a disgrace. But her attitude to alcohol has been shaped by a different age – in school her class are taught about the ruination that alcohol addiction brings to health and to homes, and they take a dimmer view of alcohol.

    We don’t allow or encourage her to consume alcohol, but we try to keep our relationship as open and honest as possible, meaning that when she came home from a friend’s house recently and seemed a bit unsteady on her feet, our questions were met with a scathing ‘I had three cans of Orchard Thieves, what are you going to do about it?’ What indeed, beloved daughter. I sat her down and gave her a stern lecture about how she shouldn’t be drinking, but if she must, there are many local craft cider producers who make excellent products and are deserving of our support, which then segues into a two-hour discussion of terroir. That’ll teach her.

    All of this is just me trying to rationalise my relationship with alcohol, of trying to explain why I am incapable or unwilling to give up having one or two drinks at the weekend: I simply love drink (although I very much dislike being drunk). Technically, this unwillingness to quit makes me an alcoholic, or Aldiholic, or just a boozehound, but I can’t see it changing any time soon. I know alcohol might not be especially good for me physically, but it brings me spiritual healing, is a great comfort in times of woe, and occasionally makes me less shouty with the kids, although that last bit sounds like one of those people who say ‘honestly officer I drive better when I’m drunk’. My poor kids may be telling their respective therapists in years to come that their father was an alco, but for now I am toasting the fact that they are all too young to coherently organise an intervention. So here’s a lightly moistened January, and our struggles to find the balance between love and addiction.

  • Indo col 86

    March 6th, 2019

    How are you getting on with the new year’s resolutions? Sticking with them? It’s only been a matter of hours, but sher look just try your best, and remember that the most important thing is not your good intentions, but rather that you didn’t actually tell anyone about your big plan to give up the drink, exercise more, or try to ease off the badger baiting. Because once you tell someone, a verbal contract is enacted, and you have to make a half-arsed attempt at fulfilling your resolution, which means grinding out your new regime until they forget or you just stop caring what they think, which is usually around February 1st, which is why St Brigid is the patron saint of going back on the drink.

    New year’s resolutions are a testament to how endlessly optimistic we are, or alternatively, how oblivious we are to our inability to change. Year after year we assume that this time, it will be different, and we will dig down deep and stop making the same mistakes, eating the same junk, and falling for the same terrible people: This will be our year. Sadly though, we really only change under medical advice, or maybe that’s just me.

    I was an enthusiastic smoker. Having started relatively late – aged 17 – I made up for lost time by taking up full-time residence in Marlboro country. Marlboros were among the strongest, most deadly and therefore most manly cigarettes you could find back in the 1990s, and apart from times when I wanted to appear more exotic by smoking Camels, I plowed through a 20-pack of reds a day. Then, of course, my asthma flared up, and I sounded like Wheezy, the malfunctioning penguin in Toy Story 2, whilst also smelling like Stinky Pete the prospector from the same film. You really don’t feel very cool when you are breathing and smelling like a yak by the time you’ve reached the top of a flight of stairs.

    So I cut down to Silk Cut Purples, a lighter cigarette, and just dragged a lot harder on them to make up the difference. This was a brilliant idea, until my mouth was scorched from the smoke. So off I trotted to the doctor, who gave it to me straight – I was one of those poor souls who was going to get cancer in their mouth, throat, tongue, jaw or general facial area before I got it anywhere else. If he had told me my lungs would be ground zero, I probably would have sparked one up there and then and growled about how a man can do a lot of living in six months, but he had appealed to my incredible vanity. I could keep smoking, but I would be saying goodbye to my inoffensive sitcom face.

    So I resolved to change, and with a lot of hard work, stamina and the support of the local Burger King, I finally managed to be completely smoke free a mere two years later. Granted, most of the hard work came in the first six months – I managed to cut back on the smokes, mainly by chewing nicotine gum in my sleep, putting on two stone, and shouting at the TV or angrily muttering under my breath at strangers on the street.

    After that it was 18 months of smoking with pints, and hating myself afterwards.I only finally kicked the last remnants of my addiction when I went out with someone who didn’t smoke, and who grimaced when I kissed her after a cigarette. Mind you, she grimaced a lot of the time she was with me, but especially so after one my infrequent sojourns in Flavour Country. So I finally, officially quit smoking. I never looked back, but by god, it was hard, but it was worth it. I live a better, healthier life and my chances of being around to see my kids grow and settle are vastly increased. Quitting smoking is one of the hardest, most rewarding things you will ever do, but it is one of those rare changes we can make to our lives that actually buy us more time on earth. So hang in there, vape hard, and give it until February 2nd, at least.

  • Indo col 85

    March 6th, 2019

    A December wedding is a bad idea. There are some benefits to it – most of the guests decline the invite as it is an opportune time of year for excuses; the weather is reliably poor; and you feel less weird about being hammered at 5pm when it’s dark. Generally though, it is a poor choice to wed in December, because neither of you will ever remember your anniversary. This is because it’s Christmas, and at Christmas all we can think about is Christmas. However, on the off chance that one of you does actually remember it in time to organise a night away to mark it, nobody is available to mind the kids, as, once again, it is Christmas and everyone has something on, every hour of every day.

    This year however, we performed our own festive miracle by enlisting a Christmas cornucopia of in-laws to mind the kids for us. Sound the romance claxon, hoist up the faded flag of marital love, and light the fires of coitus uninterruptus, for we managed to get a night away. It took a lot of wrangling, and a last-minute dig-out from my mother in law after our coffin ship of a people carrier failed its NCT, but we made it. Our destination was the beautiful west Cork town of Clonakilty, the black pudding capital of Ireland, because nothing says romance like having a plump blood sausage brandished in your general direction.

    It’s a great tragedy of being a parent that as soon as you manage to rid yourself of the kids for 24 hours, you talk obsessively about them. What should be a blissful break, when you reconnect with your soulmate and remember what it was like to fall in love in the first place, actually turns into a kind of office away day, one of those tedious outings where you do team building exercises that involve poorly constructed rafts and brackish streams. That’s right Brian, you fell in that swamp because you don’t understand teamwork, maybe next time you will ask for my stapler before you take it.

    But it’s ok, because time away from the kids is exactly that – a team building exercise. We may not be the highest-functioning team, and if we had the budget we would probably call in some Six Sigma expert to help us achieve kaizen and eliminate muda of pointless arguments about tumble dryer usage, but all these little people are relying on us to function as a unit. It’s easy to forget all this, and it’s also easy to forget that we need to look after us. As parents, we spend so long worrying about the kids, or money, or work, that we forget to worry about ourselves. Like many couples, we are so busy, and so preoccupied with all the nuts and bolts of keeping a family operational, that to simply pause and take a breath once every couple of years is an overwhelming experience in itself. And so it was that my wife started crying during lunch. It’s never easy to be the bloke in that situation, knowing that if you try to comfort her it will only get worse, escalating from quiet sobs to banshee-style keening. So you sit there looking dopey and wondering why the background chatter has dissipated. You get the urge to turn and explain that actually, this time, it isn’t entirely your fault, or maybe just try to explain it away by saying she was upset that the pitta bread wasn’t Fair Trade. Instead I got the bill and whisked her away to the pub, where a salve of overpriced G&Ts was applied to the malady. After a few of those, we finally managed to relax, and switch off to the point that we were able to talk about something other than parent-teacher meetings, theoretically blocked washing machine filters, and which model of people carrier best tells the world that we are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

    So we laughed and drank and even made out, despite the fact that we really are too old for public expressions of desire. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we were asleep by about 10.30pm, whilst stags and hens bumbled through the streets below, all set for their winter weddings and blissfully unaware, as we once were, of how much work it takes to keep a marriage alive, or how none of them will remember their anniversary in a few decades. The next morning we rose early and came home to the kids, renewed and replenished, but not before a hearty breakfast of black pudding, which, it transpires, my wife does not actually like. Given my family came from Clon, this makes us a sort of offal-based Romeo and Juliet, and is reminder that even after all this time together, there is still some mystery left in our world.

  • Indo col 84

    March 6th, 2019

    There are many joyous moments in the life of a parent – children’s allowance day, the day they can mow a lawn unattended, or when literally anyone offers to take them off your hands for a few hours. But nothing really compares to the joy of dropping your eldest child to their first job.

    We were as surprised as anyone that she even wanted to get a job, seeing as she is incapable of lifting a cup and bringing it down a flight of stairs. But desperation is great motivation, and her pocket money – ie, whatever she could steal from the footwell of my car  – wasn’t sufficient to fund her lifestyle. So she went out and got herself a job. I was expecting her to get something fairly humdrum, but she aimed a little higher, or, to be more accurate, a little further North. My daughter, I am pleased to announce, is an elf. And not an elf in one of those grim winter wonderland scams run out of a vacant lot in an industrial estate, where confused families pay twenty euro to meet trafficked reindeer and a Santa who vapes between kids. No, my beloved offspring is an elf in a classy operation, a five-star golf resort no less, which no doubt will do wonders for her elf esteem. In fact, the Christmas wonderland she now works in is so upmarket that her own family can’t afford to go there. I discovered this when I tried to book our family in to go jeer at her and discovered that it would cost us over a hundred euro. So we opted to save the money and just jeer at her at home, like we usually do.

    All of my daughter’s confidence and vision, I have been told, is not coming from me. Her mother got her first job around the same age, and has worked consistently since. My career has been slightly more staccato, leading to a Swiss cheese effect on the throne of lies that is my LinkedIn page.

    My first job was shovelling seaweed off a beach. Even if you are from a landlocked midlands county, and you’ve never seen the coast, you will already know that there is a simple flaw in removing materials from a beach – mainly, that one tide later, they all come back. This is true for plastic, random bits of footwear, suicidal porpoises, sand and, obviously enough, seaweed. Many jobs bring Sisyphus to mind, but this one was like an actual curse from the gods. I would shovel the seaweed into a wheelbarrow, roll it down the strand, and dump it where it was deemed less unsightly. Guess what – the next day the beach was covered in seaweed again. The job lasted three days before defeat was accepted and I was handed some soiled notes, which I then spent on fags and arcade games. Perhaps if I had taken a role where I got to wear big pointy shoes, hair glitter, and yellow tights as my first job I would have found greater rewards in work than just ciggie money, or at least learned the importance of leg day in the gym.

    My daughter constantly surprises me – we never put pressure on her to get a job, but she went out and got one anyway. We try not to push her at school and she still does well, even when it isn’t by design; she entered the Young Scientists competition because it got her out of a class, a plan that has backfired as their project was accepted. I’m almost scared to say it in case we break this magic spell, but it would appear that we might actually be doing something right. Of course, now that I have put this sentiment in writing, it’s only a matter of time until the fates kick in and she is revealed to be some sort of festive Keyser Soze, running North Pole sweat shops, busting gnome unions with candy cane beatings and contract sleighings. But until then, we can bask in the glow of having a child who seems to functioning at a higher level than us, and who is about to get a great lesson in the joys of employment when her dad makes her put her hard-earned wages towards a Christmas iPhone.

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