Tag: indo

Brexit of champions, Irexit, Barrage, freedom

February 15th, 2018

Wee 41 of the column and this time I get political, with terrible results.

As a portmanteau, Brexit works quite well. It rolls of the tongue, and its similarity to the word breakfast gave great material to headline writers: Full English Brexit, Brexit buffet, bed and Brexit – all potentially great headlines. Granted, none of them make sense right now, but you just come up with the snappy headline first, and then everything follows after that, much like Brexit itself, or when Elton John out on loads of weight and some wag in the tabloids ran the photos because a sub came up with the headline ‘Goodbye Normal Jeans’.

Sadly, the only part of Brexit that appears to work so far is the term itself. The tidy little quip is the only part of the UK’s will they/won’t they trial separation that isn’t a dysfunctional mess. Yet somehow, there are some who think that Ireland should adopt an ideology that neither works as a portmanteau nor as a concept – Irexit.

From the get go, this word does not work. It is clunky, and slows down your eye as you try to figure out how to pronounce it – Ire-Zit? I – regsit? Or perhaps the gallic Irezii? Surely whoever forced this term into existence could have tapped into the usual seam of rampant nationalism by offering us ‘Ourland’ or ‘Hiberniaaah go on’, with a poster of Mrs Doyle in full Nazi regalia. No, they went with Irexit instead, and even hosted a conference around this stupid theme.

I was glad to hear there was a solid turnout from that most silenced of majorities – white Christian males. They are the voiceless ones in society, they were told, and who could possibly disagree – the last thousand years of human history is devoid of any mention of this vast, annoying section of society. How many times have you offered an opinion on human rights on the internet, with no-one jumping into your timeline to tell you how things really are for the struggling gender. Where oh where are all the angry white men you wonder, as you yearn for a flood of ‘well actually…’ corrections, casual racism, nonsense logic and death threats. Who will stand up for the forgotten millions of angry white blokes? Nigel Farage, that’s who.

As a preamble to his headline slot at the conference, Farage went on Marian Finucane’s show to offer some thrilling insights into Irish history, pondering why we fought the British for our freedom only to be ‘ruled by Brussels’. It seems a little childish to bring up the 800 years of brutal British rule again, but it’s hard not to. While his ancestors standing back as we died of starvation in our millions may seem like ancient history, it’s still a bit of a stretch to compare the EU building a load of roads for us to the brutal rule of a nation that saw our people as akin to dogs. Still, perhaps Nigel’s grasp of history isn’t that great, as last September he somehow ended up talking at a far right rally in Germany after being invited there by the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister. Surely he wouldn’t have done that if he had even the vaguest knowledge of the Holocaust, would he?

The themes of the Irexit conference were the usual smorgasboard of half-baked notions held by the angry white men of the internet – the media is silencing them (despite much of the audience on the day being journalists), the EU has too much control over Ireland (despite the clear evidence that Ireland really could have done with a lot more control in the years 2005-2007) and Nigel is the man to lead us into this glorious future (‘us’ being an army of internet weirdos).

What made the conference more remarkable was that people actually paid to go and see a man who looks like Kermit the Frog and sounds like Oliver Cromwell tell them in a plummy English accent that they should do what he says.

The turn-out at the conference was reassuringly low, but the problem with events like this is that it gives legitimacy to an ideology that is inherently wrong. No matter how I chortle at it, I know that there are people who will read the coverage and think that Farage is right, that civilisation is falling, and immigrants are to blame. The Farage Roadshow may make for a laughable affair to most of us, but there are many who find truth in his lies, who believe they are oppressed, or under threat, or are the guardians of their race. You have to question where the line is between emboldening the supposedly disenfranchised white Christian males to become politically engaged, and the sort of deranged anti-immigration rhetoric that led to Thomas Mair murdering Jo Cox in cold blood. How far do the right have to go before they are seen as a threat to democracy, to decency, and to civilisation?

Do we really need Farage and his ilk, bringing their PT-Barnum-meets-Joseph-Goebells sideshow here, trying to set up our own Alt-Right here – or Alt-Deis, to use the gaelic? We’re only just getting over a hundred years of having lads in black marching around, preaching at us about how to live our lives, and frankly, we’ve really had enough; we need to be more open, more connected to Europe and less insular. So to to quote Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets, go sell crazy somewhere else Nigel, we’re all stocked up here.
Ash Valentine’s, Nollaig na mBan, huntsmen, love

January 14th, 2018

Please spare a moment's thought for this poor fool, married to Ireland's Biggest Dickhead™ for a miserable 12 years today. #PrayForCiara #Condolences #NotOnTwitter pic.twitter.com/jMuDTQadsx

— Bill Linnane (@Bill_Linnane) December 1, 2017

Week 37 of the column:

Rejoice, cheapskates of Ireland – the stars have aligned and for the first time in decades, St Valentine’s Day, February 14, is falling on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. This is a true sign from the heavens that Jesus is a dude, as now none of us have to rush out buying chocolates or booking a table for two in a fancy restaurant, because this year the Lord has directed that we make do with some dry toast and a cup of black tea (no sugar).

Even in my godless house it was welcome news, as I still like to respect traditions, especially when they share my core belief of saving as much money as possible. I’m tempted to offer my vastly better half a lovely bouquet of rosaries, or relaxing ash facial at the local church, but instead I’m going to opt for what I get her every year – almost nothing. If that fails and she gets incredibly upset (highly likely), I can just tell her that she will get her real Valentine’s gift when Lent ends on Easter Sunday, which this year falls on April 1st, meaning her actual gift would turn out to be the gift of humour, as I don’t really have any gift for her at all. April fools!

Her celebration of Nollaig Na mBan went well, despite me mistakenly telling an elderly relative who phoned looking for her that she was off out for Cumann na mBan, leading to concern among her family that being married to a struggling writer was having an ill effect on her politics. But even Agnes O’Farrelly would have been proud to know that first order of the night was that great tradition of Women’s Little Christmas – a strip show. However, this one wasn’t some gratuitous commercialisation of the human form – it was The Full Monty for charity, although I think any woman voluntarily being subjected to an undressed male is an act of charity in itself.

The charity in question was the fund for a local community playground, because of course a children’s play area is what you think of when you heard the words ‘live male nude revue’ – a sort of Full Montessori, if you will. It was all in good spirits and through hard work, dedication and a lot of baby oil, the lads raised enough (money, you pervert) for the playground to be built, which hopefully will lead to many puns about zip lines, swinging and seesaw-yer-da’s-arse. The end of my wife’s night was nearly as thrilling as the start, as she received a half decent proposal at the taxi rank. I had her forewarned that there is a special breed of man who pointedly goes out on Women’s Little Christmas – he has crunched the numbers and he realises that with all the men folk minding the kids, and all the wives out on the lash, statistically speaking his odds are way above normal.

And so it was at the taxi rank that the local lothario set his sights on her. He told her that, serendipitously enough, he had only just separated from his wife the weekend before, which sounded like a fairly lousy way to ring in the new year. It must have been like watching When Harry Met Sally while it’s being rewound. He also invited my wife back to the hotel he was staying in, which was a smooth play as it told her that he was as feckless with his wallet as he was with the rest of the contents of his trousers, whilst also letting her know that he was technically homeless, which is very chic right now.

Somehow she managed to resist his charms – and his invite to take a stroll down the darkest alley in Munster – and come home to me, so she could giddily tell me she has still got it, before guzzling an Alka Seltzer and falling asleep for ten hours.

When I worked in a local paper, there was an elderly gentleman who would write to the letters page. They were on a variety of topics, but it was the ones about his wife I remember, as they all followed the same formula. He would recall sitting on the bus or train next to this beautiful woman, they would chat, and really hit it off, they would get off at the same stop, and they would – plot twist – both go to put their key in the door of the same house at the same time, because – spoiler alert – the beautiful woman was his wife of 37 years. When I first read them I thought they were a waste of newsprint, but as the years go on I realise I am slowly becoming him. I don’t need the huntsmen of Nollaig Na mBan to hit on my wife to know that she has still got it – I tell her all the time that she is a genetic freak (in a good way) as she has somehow managed to stay the same despite me burdening her with four children, the domestic equivalent of the hobbling scene from the film Misery. She still shines like she did when I first saw her at the local fair in 1989. Of course if you lived within earshot of our house you could testify that it isn’t all smiles and sunshine. Our relationship is like plate tectonics – two land masses collide, there are angry earthquakes and sexy eruptions, but over time all the rough edges smooth away. That said, I don’t really understand how either plate tectonics or relationships work.

She didn’t need to wake me at 3am to tell me about her fun night out, as I was, as usual, lying awake waiting for her to come home. It’s not a conscious thing, but we both do it – you just don’t sleep right when you know the other one is out, because life can be cruel and fickle, and there is a sense of dread lurking within you that your little cocoon may someday go pop. Of course, it isn’t always some terrible tragedy, accident or mishap. We used to live near a block of apartments that was known locally as Bold Boy’s Corner, due to the high number of separated men living there. It was conveniently located next to a McDonald’s, and you would see the McDads there on the weekends with their kids, sad faces all round. My Women’s Little Christmas was a solid reminder that I am fortunate to have found somebody to love and who loves me in return, and who isn’t going to leave me for a fundraising male stripper or desperate single dad who lives in a hotel room. Perhaps I will just start Lent on February 15 instead.

Footnote: The chap who hit on my wife happens to be in one of these photos. Just saying this in case I end up in a landfill.
Run, fitness, fatness, run some more

January 14th, 2018

Week 36 of the column, in which I stare at myself naked in the mirror, crying:

The Rarámuri are an indigenous people who live in the mountains northwestern Mexico, in the Sierra Madre. They didn’t always live here – this is where they fled to when the Spanish arrived in the 16th Century, and their remote location kept them safe from harm and from many attempts by various agents of ‘civilisation’ to homogenise their culture. It would appear that it was a wise move as many of their customs and traditions remain intact, such as the tesgüinadas, a sort of beer festival that they hold several times a year. Much of their social activity revolves around the tesgüinadas, which they hold to ask for rain, cures, or a good harvest. They also hold these festivals to mark Sunday gatherings, Holy Week celebrations, and curiously enough, race events. Despite having a thriving drinking culture, the most notable aspect of the Rarámuri is their ability to run – in fact the word Rarámuri, their own term for themselves, means those who run fast. While they do run fast, it is the distance they can run that is remarkable, as they seem to be natural-born ultramarathon runners. In May last year a 22-year-old Rarámuri girl, wearing a skirt, homemade flip-flops with an old rubber tyre for the sole, won the Ultra Trail Cerro Rojo, a 50-kilometre race through the mountains. María Lorena Ramírez had no special equipment, just a bottle of water, and she beat 500 runners from 12 countries. The year before, the goatherd came second in the 100-kilometer category of the Caballo Blanco ultramarathon in Chihuahua. But the success of the Rarámuri isn’t just about terrain – last November a Rarámuri family were finalists in the Polar Bear Marathon in Manitoba, Canada, where the temperature hit minus 20 C.

The Rarámuri are a reminder of the role running has had in human history, how we were able to use it to run from danger, chase down prey, and now, as we slowly eat and drink ourselves to death, it could be what saves us all.

I hated running, but I loved exercise. I started going to gyms two decades ago, and since then there were very periods when I did not train at least three times a week. While most people enjoy the social aspects of team sports, I loved the solitude of the gym, with my headphones on, working through stress and calories at the same time. But running was torture. About six years ago I realised that with a young family, the early morning was the best time to exercise, and that I would need to find a way to do it that was time-efficient, and non-dependant on gym opening times. I would, I realised, have to start running.

So I would be out pounding the road at about 5am. People used to look at me funny when I would tell them this – and, to be honest, when I would encounter another runner I would often think ‘what’s that quarehawk up to at this time of the morning?’ But in running I found a peace that I never found in gyms. Out there, with no-one around, I was all alone with my thoughts, in rain or ice or snow, hammering at the roads and enjoying the loneliness of the short-to-medium distance runner. I never ran more than five or six kilometres, and if I didn’t feel great, I would run slowly (or walk quickly), like you do in the office when someone holds a door open for you but are a bit too far away to it be be more mannerly than annoying.

While running may feel like torture when you start, you adapt very quickly, as you feel the athletic abilities hardwired in your DNA kicking in. Running is part of who we are.

There’s an old (scientifically inaccurate) analogy about boiling frogs – that if you put a frog in hot water, it will jump out. But if you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat, it will sit there until it cooks. Gradual change doesn’t feel like change at all. And so it has come to my attention that I have put on weight. Over the last two years I stopped exercising. A change in work patterns and a slight injury to my hip saw my gym attendance and running both dwindle and eventually stop. Then, the final nail in my oversized coffin, I started driving everywhere. My relationship with food and drink changed, as sought more comfort in both than I should have. Life is like a box of chocolates – thanks to those little cards telling you what each sweet is, you know exactly what you are going to get, and if you eat too many, you’re probably going to get diabetes. I haven’t got it, but if I keep going the way I am, it’s only a matter of time.

All this has came to a head with me asking my wife if she had been using the tumble dryer more than usual as I thought my jeans might have shrunk. After she had stopped laughing and realised it was a genuine question, she pointed out that I was just getting old, and maybe it was time to get some more elasticated waistbands. Over my flabby body, I thought to myself. So it is that I face into the new year with the same resolution as everyone else – to live a little better, and a little bit more like the Rarámuri.

Christopher McDougall’s book Born To Run, in which he spends time with the Rarámuri and tries to unlock their secrets, is a good inspiration. We may not all have their innate ability, but we can certainly learn a lot from their attitude to running. They don’t do it to win, they do it because they love it. They run in groups more than they do alone – the plethora of athletics clubs here would suggest this applies to all of us – and they also love those beer festivals – anyone who has witnessed an athletic club’s Christmas drinks will know that they aren’t exactly puritans. Neither do the Rarámuri need any high tech gear – you don’t need to break the bank to get state of the art trainers. When I started running I wore a pair of trainers I bought in Heatons for less than 20 euro. When I wore out the soles in them, I went back and bought another. Granted they may seem like high end equipment to a people who run in flip flops made from old tyres, but it shows that once you have the will, a high vis vest and a bottle of water, you can go at 2018 like Forrest Gump.
Happy Middleclassmas

December 31st, 2017
Wrote this for the Indo as I am the go-to guy for middle class ennui.

There are few events in the annual calendar more middle class than Christmas, save perhaps the Grand National, Irish Open or Ideal Homes Exhibition. It is a time of year to gather round the Rangemaster in the back kitchen, earnestly discussing your fear of the hard left with neighbours you don’t really like, sipping some M&S mulled wine out of Waterford Crystal glasses wrapped in artisanal kitchen roll. No need to turn on the heating, as your own smugness keeps you nice and toasty. But wait – what if you aren’t having the most middle class Christmas possible? Here’s 12 key signs that should clear up any concerns.
1. Debating when Christmas actually starts – The debate over when the decorations go up is one that rages in the middle class home. The younger generation try to force a December 1st kick off, but the more traditional (which is code for religious) among us know that to do it before December 8 is a mortal sin. Granted, this makes December 8th a perfect storm – you need to get all the stuff down from the attic, source a quality natural tree (this year there is no such thing, as they are all lopsided thanks to an actual perfect storm named Ophelia), and still make it into your nearest city to bumble about attempting to get all your shopping done in one chaotic 24-hour period. Best to follow the advice of D’Unbelievables and have breakfast the night before to get a head start on the day.
2. Discussion of how Roses symbolise our decline – The fall of Irish society can easily be traced by one annual event – the diminishing appearance of tins of Roses. Firstly, they aren’t even tins anymore, but rather some sort of soulless plastic, which means you can’t use them as a long-term storage for leftover pudding or cake, but it is in their decrease in mass that we can see how we are failing future generations. The whole family discuss how, back in the olden times – ie, when things were great – a tin of Roses was the size of an indoor swimming pool, and there was enough chocolate to give the entire extended family Type II diabetes. Now there is barely enough for grandad to choke on, and the new wrappers should come with their own instruction manual. The whole country has gone to the dogs.
3. Giving Irish-made gifts – During the December 8th trolley dash, it is important that you charge headlong into the Kilkenny Design store to stock up on Irish gifts. You aren’t entirely sure how to ascertain the Irishness of the items you buy, but feel fairly certain Irish people were involved if they are vastly overpriced and made from scatchy wool that would not be tolerated by other nations. It also helps if the packaging has a picture of a dolmen on it.
4. The quest for spiced beef – A regional delicacy, the hunt for a good joint of spiced beef takes on aspects of a Homeric odyssey. Advice is sought from all quarters on which guilded butcher is best; do they have craft or artisan in the name? No? Well then they can burn in hell. Once the most artisanal producer is selected, the order is placed well in advance, usually the start of February, because another aspect of being middle class is being tragically well-organised. Of course, nobody actually eats spiced beef, as it is terrible.
5. Which turkey to buy – Bronze turkeys are better. You have no idea why, or what bronze means (Is it wearing fake tan? Is it an Olympian? Is it the bird from one of those old penny coins?), but somehow it seems superior to the ordinary loser turkey (technically they are all losers as they all get eaten) most people have. You get bonus points if you actually hand select the turkey on the farm, as this shows you are connected to the land and your place in the food chain, ie, at the top of it. If you are considering a goose, you have transcended middle classness altogether and are now ‘posh’, and therefore an exile in your own land. You probably call Stephen’s Day Boxing Day too.
6. Cheese board – The modern incarnation of those little hedgehog displays made from a pineapple, cheese cubes and cocktail sticks, the cheese board is really only suited to festive ads on TV, as everyone is already on the verge of a cardiac arrest and the last thing their arteries need is a solid tonne of unpasteurised lard injected into them. Nonetheless, a cheese board appears, with everyone forced to pretend they know which weird knife is meant to be used with which cheese. Later on the knives will be used by children pretending to have a Klingon honour ritual.
7. Midnight Mass – It’s Mass, but more traditional. It also follows the middle class traditional of preparedness, by giving you a clear run at the following day so you can baste the turkey every 15 minutes for its full six-hour cooking time. Of course, being up this late on Christmas Eve opens another can of festive worms – when to open the presents. Do you do it Christmas Eve, half cut on port, or on Christmas morning, half cut on mulled wine? Here’s a handy guide – if you do it on Christmas morning, your inner child is alive and well and is still caught up in the joy of Christmas. If you do it Christmas Eve you are admitting that you are old, that there is no magic in this world, and you have suffocated your inner child with cheese and port.
8. White lights, no tinsel – Tinsel is a little Eighties, n’est pas? So you subject your tree (and yourself) to a 60-yard length of fairy lights – in minimalist white only – and some 4,000 baubles. This is a great idea, as it turns dressing the tree into an extended game of Buckaroo, as you endeavour to get the baubles on the tree while a psychotic toddler, out of their head on those cherry Roses nobody eats, endeavours to knock them all off by kicking the tree like a proto-lumberjack.
9. Physical activity – For two days a year it is ok to sit and do nothing – Christmas Day and St Stephen’s Day. The middle classes feel chronic guilt about this, as they do about almost everything else, and so a brisk walk is needed on one or both of the mornings. This is carried out in the name of ‘working up an appetite’ or ‘working off that cheese board’, and will see the group wrap up in their new scratchy wool scarves and head out. Whilst on the walk the group will beam and greet every other walker they see as though they were long lost friends. These are the only days of the year when being friendly to strangers is deemed ‘not weird’ and is not something that should be carried through to the New Year as some sort of terrible resolution.
10. New Year’s Resolutions – Everyone else knows they are a waste of time. Yet each year you set yourself a new, insanely high bar – peak fitness, no more cigars, eat less cheese – and each February 1st you ditch all your big plans and just continue as normal in a general state of shame and that most middle class of feelings, disappointment.
11. Disappointment, the gift that keeps on giving – The middle classes understand that things are ok but could probably be better, which is why every single gift comes not just with a gift receipt but a loud declaration that the receipt is with the gift, information that is shared before the person has even got the present. ‘If you don’t like it you can take it back’ you nervously titter, as they stare in confusion at the set of Irish made cheese knives and dolmen-shaped cheese board.
12. Bickering – much like the centuries long storms on Jupiter, the middle class family is in a constant state of friction. It rarely hits full-on arguing, unless someone cheats at Monopoly, or denies that Liam deserved to win Bake Off, but it is always there, a constant loving hum of good-natured ribbing over what colour turkey should be, where to buy the best cranberry sauce, or who was meant to pick up the red cabbage in M&S. Then, after three long days locked in the house together, we all go our separate ways, simultaneously breathing a sigh of relief while also counting down the days until next year.
The ghosts of Christmas past

December 31st, 2017
Wrote this for the Indo about everyone I went to school with, burn in hell guys.

Ah Christmas – a time to get together with old friends, when everyone comes back home and reunites, talks about how their lives have changed and gain a deeper understanding of who we really are, and the strange elliptical paths that lead us back into each other’s orbit once a year. Of course, there are also the ghosts of Christmas past who suddenly materialise in front of you in the pub, before you have the chance to run and hide – here are ten of the worst offenders:
1. The Wild Goose – Up until 2009, they sounded like Micheal O Muircheartaigh being possessed by a sean nos demon. But then they emigrated, and depending on whether which hemisphere they ran away to, they now either sound like Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting, or Alf Stewart in Home & Away. But it’s not the accent that makes them grate – it’s the confidence they have been imbued with, as they talk down to you about the land of milk and honey they have discovered, repeatedly mentioning the great ‘quality of life’ in a country either plagued by mass killings, or a species of spider that nests in toilets and can kill with one bite. You smile and nod and casually ask them when their flight back is, so you can count down until this wild goose takes their grey wing, jumps in the tide and effs off back to where they now claim to come from.
2. The Swan – The easiest way to track your own demise is in the faces of your classmates. You look at their thinning hair, wrinkly eyes, and Nineties clothing and think – do I look this goosed? The answer is a ghastly ‘yes’. But there are always those genetic freaks who seem to age like a fine wine, as opposed to the bitter vinaigrette that you have become. The Swan went from so-so extra in the soap opera of your teenage years to looking like an actual movie star, all rippling physique, Milan style and an inner glow that blinds your weary, squinting eyes. You desperately try to avoid them but are drawn to their beauty like a moth to a sexy flame. After resisting the urge to stroke their face and hair, you go home, stare in the mirror and weep.
3. The Success Story – They made a fortune selling their company after getting deep into either tech or something to do with gluten. You know this because not only did your mother tell you this fact repeatedly, but The Success Story is now nonchalantly telling you the exact same thing. After their 20-minute TEDxThePub talk on how great they are at blockchain (you assume it’s something to do with Minecraft), they finally get round to asking you what you do, and then offer a nondescript ‘good for you’, before you are finished telling them. They eye the room looking for fellow moguls, before offering you a business card and disappearing, much like your own sense of self worth.
4. The Breeders – So how many kids do you have? That is their opening line. Kids are all that matter, the validation of your entire existence. No kids means no life, right? Wrong, and they are about to get a masterclass in what it means to be alive. Just as they try to whip out their phone to show you photos of their sticky brats, you show them the tribal tattoos you got after spending six months living with pygmies in the Amazon basin, or the crocodile bite on your leg, or just the photos of your studio apartment in the city centre, which is overflowing with Bang & Olufsen kit and smells like sandalwood and lemongrass. You can tell you just ruined their evening, as they desperately wanted to feel sorry for you, to crinkle up their already-crinkly faces as they tell you ‘it could still happen’. No it couldn’t you tell them, as this planet is hurtling towards its doom thanks to overpopulation, and someone had to be the hero who wasn’t vain enough to believe their bloodline had a right to continue. Satisfied with yourself you walk away, covering up the bite mark from your neighbour’s cat and the rubbish tattoos you got on an Ibizan booze cruise.
5. The Ex – Oh my god, there they are, across the bar, the same bar where you first met, this has to mean something, this is deeply serendipitous, it’s basically the video for Last Christmas by Wham! It’s like the last few decades never happened, your eyes lock and you are both back in that moment all those years ago, young and wild and free. No kids, no mortgage, nothing but an open road, vodka shots and the morning after pill. Your heart is jackhammering and you think you might be about to have a cardiac arrest as your left arm has suddenly gone numb. On closer inspection your arm is numb because the actual love of your life has your elbow in the vice like grip. Through a frozen smile they whisper ‘what are you staring at?’ followed by ‘is that drool?’ You snap back to the present and the moment has passed, you are back where you are fairly sure you belong, and everything is fine, this is fine, as you are almost certain that this is happiness. On mature recollection and reflection you remind yourself that The Ex used to eat with their mouth open, read terrible crime novels and believed in homeopathy, so it probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Probably.
6. The Poor Mouther – Despite coming from the largest farm in the province, they talk as though they grew up on an allotment in the inner city. Everything is terrible, the whole country has gone to ruin, it’s all the fat cats at the top who have it all. You wonder whether you should bring up the 80,000 tax bill they got for never mentioning their plant fire firm to the Revenue, but you don’t want to ruin their Christmas by pointing out that they are actually incredibly wealthy. The conversation reaches a crescendo when they declare that we would all be better off dead, before wishing you a merry Christmas and heading off into the night to drive their poor auld 171 Porsche Cayenne back to their 800-acre smallholding.
7. The Who – Hey! It’s you, how are you, how is…..everything? This is the traditional greeting for the person you don’t quite recognise. You know them from somewhere – Irish college, scouts, Bebo – but you aren’t 100% sure where. One thing you are entirely sure of is that you have no clue what their name is, despite the fact that they have used yours six times in five minutes of chat, so the pressure is growing, especially now your partner is staring meaningfully at you and waiting to be introduced to your friend. Clearly there is only one way out of this – offer to buy them a pint, and never come back from the bar. The only thing worse than this particular social nightmare is being the one who nobody remembers.
8. The Bully – They made your life a living hell for six years, yet somehow here they are, chatting away as if nothing happened. They seem to have suffered some sort of memory loss as, not only are they talking to you, they are talking about ‘the good old days’, as though there were such a thing. Your brow furrows as you wonder if they are luring you into a false sense of security before giving you a dead leg, purple nurple or atomic wedgie, like the one that you got in 1994 which means you now can’t have children. No, they just want to chat, and you slowly come to realise that they managed to take all that anger they had in school in channel it into something more productive than giving you PTSD, as they are now CEO of a vulture fund.
9. The All Star – They won an All-Ireland in 1996, and somehow the celebration party is still going on. They look like they might be about to have a heart attack, as they play online poker, swill pints, and complain about the modern game, and how the young stars now have no class, before drunkenly hopping into their car and screeching off to a lock-in or possibly into a ditch. Never meet your heroes.
10. The Hero – Back in school they told everyone they were a Level Eight Vegan (they only eat gravel) but secretly ate a big dirty kebab every time they had a lash of pints. After school they got seriously into Facebook activism, endlessly posting conspiracy theories about how Big Oil and Big Government were secretly watching us all through our webcams, and Infowars was the only real news left in the world. Despite their strong opposition to capitalism, they actually live and work in Saudi Arabia, wiring up the homes of oil-rich royals with IoT technology, so they can watch beheadings on their tablets. The Hero sees nothing wrong with this at all, but somehow thinks Ireland is a police state, just because they got busted with a nodge of hash on New Year’s Eve 1999.
There are of course, many more contenders for this list, including old teachers, disgruntled former co-workers, cousins you don’t have anything in common with, or racist friends of your parents. While once a year really feels like more than enough time spent with any of these ghosts of Christmas past, they do serve as a reminder of how much you love your oldest friends, your family and the people you chose to surround yourself with, because Christmas is all about the present.
PTA, pride, failure, Brexit

December 31st, 2017

Indo col week 32

It seems something of a miracle that I managed to avoid attending a parent-teacher meetings until last week. I always had great excuses for not being there – either work or just a complete lack of interest in going – but the day finally came where I could no longer avoid it, as this wasn’t just any parent teacher meeting, but the only one of my daughter’s Junior Cert cycle. This was Serious Business – no more chats from disinterested national school teachers about colouring inside the lines or how good the child is at sharing; this was a serious talk about the foundations of a life and career – this was education with a clear purpose. So I stuck on a tweed waistcoat so I would look more erudite, had a quick peruse of some memorable quotes from Pearse’s The Murder Machine in case it kicked off, and headed along.

As soon as I walked into my daughter’s school I felt a familiar sense of dread. The nicotine yellow walls, hand-crafted motivational posters with ‘positivity’ and ‘prayer’ written in gradually diminishing fonts, the dead light from halogen bulbs – this was an anxiety dream made real, all it needed was my teeth to fall out or for me to wet myself, which seemed increasingly likely as I was starting to panic.

I was given a printed guide to the classrooms, informing me which teachers were in which rooms. It might as well have been written in Sanskrit. I tried to read my daughter’s report card to match up some names, imagining the teachers as depressed Pokemon, adamant that I was gonna catch ‘em all. Obviously, I wasn’t going to catch even half of them, as the whole system was rife with confusion. Other parents milled about, queues formed with no beginning and no end, with no-one quite sure who or what they were queueing for.

I started to wonder if this was a test in itself, if we were the ones being secretly graded and judged by the Department of Education. I’m very clever for thinking that, I thought to myself, wishing there was someone else around in a tweed waistcoat who would appreciate my tremendous wit. No, I thought, save it for the column – this sort of grand insight is the premium content that my readers deserve. Don’t waste it on these poor schmucks shuffling from desk to desk. Besides, I appeared to be in the wrong queue again and needed to move.

Eventually a helpful transition year student saw I was struggling and guided me to a corner, and there I was, the perennial buachaill dána, back in bold boys’ corner, surrounded by rather shoddy paintings of Jesus. All I was short was a dunce cap.

Finally I got out of the corner and got facetime with some teachers; the first one didn’t seem to know my daughter at all but told me about the class and their self care plan for the year ahead. Back in my day self care was a sin and they said you went blind from doing it. We smiled and nodded at each other, and said goodbye – she went back to correcting homework, I went back to my corner thinking that really, teaching isn’t all Dead Poets Society, is it? If someone stood on a chair in the self-care class and shouted ‘oh captain my captain’ you’d probably have a departmental inquiry before small break.

I moved on to the next teacher, who did know my daughter, and this was when things got intense. She was full of praise for her, saying how hard she works, how she was a pleasure to teach. I could see the teacher wasn’t just saying this because of my tweed waistcoat and obviously eruditeness, but because she meant it. The next teacher was the same, and the next. As I moved from one to the other I started to get more and more emotional, and by the time I got to the fourth teacher I was blinking back tears.

It’s a strange thing to realise that you might be an okay parent. We spend so much time fretting about passing on all our bad habits and mistakes, that it is extraordinary to think that we might be raising someone who will be better than us. In theory, every generation should be some sort of upgrade – it didn’t work that way for my poor parents, who used to have to grit their teeth for my parent-teacher meetings, as all but the art and English teachers said I was going nowhere fast.

Perhaps a knock-on of that experience is that I would give myself a C- as a parent – fair to poor, could do better. After my daughter’s parent teacher meeting, I realised that my wife and I might actually be getting a solid B+ – there is always room for improvement if we worked hard, but we weren’t failing by any stretch of the imagination. It feels good to know your best might just be enough.

That said, my self-satisfied bubble burst when I got home and my wife and daughter realised I left the parent teacher meeting without talking to half the teachers. I tried to explain that the last thing the event needed was a middle aged man in tweeds in the middle of a classroom, sobbing with pride. That, I claimed, was a scene better suited to one of those sensitive Educate Together places; if poor auld Jesus up on the convent school wall managed to hold in the tears, then I should too. Besides, is it not the spirit of continuous assessment that I should go along next year too and speak to the other half of her teachers?

The biggest shock of the night wasn’t that my daughter had given up history, but that anyone is allowed to give up history. I had assumed it was compulsory, but apparently not, which I assume is also the case in the UK, where there seems to be a lot of cramming about what the Empire may or may not have done to their neighbours over the past few centuries.

The current stumbling blocks over Brexit and the border seem to cause confusion with many on the mainland, as they wonder what they ever might have done to deserve such a hardline approach from the Irish Government. Presumably the same people avoided watching Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley as they assumed it was a documentary about the impact of agriculture on climate change, or In The Name Of The Father because they thought it was one of those Jeremy Kyle Show DNA test specials. Yet while there may be some gaps in the UK’s educational policy when it comes to their own history, it is great to see so many people frantically try to brush up on several centuries of imperial unpleasantness in the space of a week. Here’s to lifelong learning.
Taxes, welfare, Black Friday, KISS

December 31st, 2017

Indo col week 30

I quite like paying taxes. This is partly because, as a low earner, I don’t pay a lot of tax. However, it is also because I have been so well supported by the State over the course of my life. In my 20s, I went from work to the dole to the back to education allowance, which – along with third-level grants – saw me through to masters level. When I took redundancy three years ago, I got a similar level of dole payment to what I had been earning for a 37-hour week, as well as full medical cards for my family and I. After eight long months I was fortunate enough to get a job, but even then the State supported me, via the Family Income Supplement (FIS). We recently got a statement from the Department of Social Protection on how much we were paid in FIS last year – more than 12,000. This is because we were a single income household with a low wage and considerably more children than we can afford. I can give you various reasons for the excessive amount of human life I have co-created, but overall I would say that economics rarely features in the romantically engorged mind. Except maybe in David McWilliams’s mind, he seems to really, really like economics.

So I pay tax, and I get support in return. From my point of view, Ireland is a good country to live and work in. I’m always slightly bemused by the various Robespierres of the hard left, talking about Ireland as though we were currently trapped in a live re-enactment of Swift’s Modest Proposal. There are things that need to change here – a quick flick through the pages of this paper will give you a dozen or more good examples – but overall I would say that I love living here, and I love my country, not in some chest-thumping, nationalist fashion, but rather in a pay-my-taxes, clean-up-after-myself way. That said, I’d always be open to finding a solid tax efficiency – or loophole as they are more commonly known.

The furore over firms using offshore structures to increase their profits and reduce their taxes isn’t all that different from me claiming credits for waste disposal or pet ownership or just about anything I can legally use. But I felt great sympathy for poor Bono, who gets the most stick for this, as though he should give all his money to Revenue and go live in a wheelie bin to be true to either his beliefs, his lyrics or his attempts to make the world a better place through whatever charity it is he has been going on about recently. At this time of year especially I think of poor Bono, getting dogs abuse for being a tax exile, albeit a charismatic one. It must suck to be rich sometimes. So tonight, as I do every night at this time of year, I thank god that it’s Bono who is the multi-millionaire tax-exile hate figure, instead of me.

Obviously all this gauche talk of money or my lack thereof is leading to the pleasing announcement that I no longer qualify for FIS as I landed myself with a second job (it’s this, my role as opinionista). This means I will now pay more tax – hooray! – and also will get less support from the State. I’m delighted. Obviously, I’m still not quite at the level of earnings of Bono, but I can at least now buy the odd treat without feeling like I am tightening the Primark corset of the ‘squeezed middle’. There is a great joy in spending money you have worked hard to earn. Except of course on Black Friday, when there is no joy in spending money at all.

I’m sure there are upsides to globalisation – having a Starbucks/Subway/Costa on every street corner, or our kids talking about sidewalks and gas stations – but Black Friday is not one of them. This is especially true of our watered-down version of it. While the Americans get to have the real fun, stamping each other to death and shooting assault rifles into the air as they try to buy a six metre wide TV for a fiver, over here it is just a big sad rip-off. This is partly due to the fact that the US is a low tax economy – anyone bleating about how much cheaper things are in the States might want to try getting sick there, or losing their job there, before they start seeing it was some economic utopia.

Yet somehow we have decided that Black Friday is something worth adopting, despite the obvious disparity between our economies. UK consumer group Which? Has pointed out that more than half of the deals offered in the UK on Black Friday last year were cheaper or the same price at other times of the year. It is no different here, but we get swept along in the hype, acting as though 15% off electronic items is worth queueing up for. It seems only a matter of time until we adopt Thanksgiving itself, holding a celebration of the arrival of the Normans in 1167 and all the awful things they gave us, such as feudalism and Dublin.

If you need a good example of how different we are from Americans, just spend a few minutes watching Fox. It’s like the TV station in The Hunger Games, if it were hosted by an animatronic Adam Smith and Libertarian Barbie. You would imagine it would take a lot to get banned from the station, given the Rolodex of the criminally insane it uses to keep its couches warm. Step forward Gene Simmons: The KISS frontman, best known for having an oversized tongue and some terrible opinions about women, was on Fox to promote his new book, which comes with the snappy title On Power: My Journey Through the Corridors of Power and How You Can Get More Power. The book, which gives expert tips on how to be more like Simmons – ie, ‘powerful’ – is actually a follow-up to the equally snappily titled Me, Inc.: Build an Army of One, Unleash Your Inner Rock God, Win in Life and Business.

After his interview on Fox Business, he burst into a Fox News meeting, shouted ‘hey chicks, sue me!’ and mercifully only exposed his chest and navel. He also took the opportunity to thump two people on the head with his book, which is probably as close it will ever get to actually stimulating a human brain. Sadly, Simmons is now banned for life from the station, which means he has one less platform for his various lessons on economics, which, unsurprisingly, are largely centred on how rich people like him shouldn’t have to pay tax to support ‘the welfare state’. So if you needed one more reason to feel pride in being a taxpayer, it is that it makes you that little bit less like Gene Simmons.
Cars, freedom, men, Weinstein

December 31st, 2017

Week 29:

I am driving. Not as I write this – I’m not quite at that level of proficiency just yet, where I can stare down at a glowing screen in my lap while careering across lanes at 105kph. In fact, I’m not even at the stage where I can confidently pick my nose when at traffic lights. I am still at the stage of the death grip on the wheel, hands locked at ten and two and nothing else will do, eyes peeled open to a degree that would make Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange wince a little. But yes, I am generally driving, and after two decades of only using public transport and the kindness of friends, family and my long suffering wife/chaffeur, I am now an independent road user.

Things have changed out there; the last time I drove it was in a Nissan Sunny, and it was so long ago that the salesman pointed out that it had ‘electric windows’ as though he was telling us it could fly. Fly, it could not. The car was a sluggish lump of ugly metal, and the few journeys I made in it felt like I was leading a platoon of Soviet tanks into the badlands of Afghanistan. Cars today are remarkable – even my sexless Fluence drives like a hovercar from 2525 in comparison to that so-called Sunny.

Using the bus is a distant, troubling memory. It seems like a long time since I had to join the human centipede that is public transport, surrounded by the sniffling masses, listening to the tinny din of those people who don’t know about headphones and instead choose to play their music on a phone’s miniscule speakers. A lifetime on the buses and trains taught me that hell isn’t other people – it’s being trapped with other people. I quite like the human race, even with their headcolds and lack of headphones, but I like them a lot more now that I am not trapped in a metal tube with them for an hour a day.

But one thing has jumped out at me from my few months on the road: Leaner and new drivers are not the menace I thought they were, but fully qualified men of a certain age, usually mine, are. When I see someone aggressively cutting across lanes in a tunnel, running a red light, or just being casually obnoxious, it is almost always a guy like me behind the wheel. Is life this short that we have to nuzzle up against the rear bumper of the person in front like an aroused canine, or just beep at everyone over everything? What is it with blokes in cars? In fact, what is it with blokes in general?

On Saturday I was in the game shop with my son. A man in his fifties came in to buy some games. The girl behind the counter told him that since he had spent more than seventy euro, he could have a free T-shirt. Any T-shirt, he asked? Any T-shirt, she said. Can I have that one? he asked, pointing at her T-shirt. She made some flippant comment to brush it off, he got his stuff and left. I felt a mix of emotions – pity for the man, who was so tone deaf that he didn’t realise that what he said wasn’t flirty, or funny, or anything other than unsettling; embarrassment for the staff member, even though she seemed wearily used to this sort of ‘top bants’; and a general sense of shame over being a bloke.

I tend to drop kick all these aspects of men into the same cauldron of oedipal horrors – the aggressive driving, the creepiness, the inability to read the room. How did we get here? We spent so long styling ourselves as some sort of apex predator that we sacrificed essential components of our own humanity. We have devalued ourselves in this process. Look at jobs where nurturing is required: What percentage of creches staff are male? If you advertised for an au pair and a man showed up, would you call the cops right away or wait until he was gone? We just can’t seem to free ourselves from this predatory status, even though we have devalued our role as carers. Look at the concept of the stay at home dad – why isn’t that more common (apart from the limits of the glass ceiling, which is really more like a Temple of Doom-style descending stone roof with spikes in it)?

The horror stories emerging about rich and powerful men and how they treated women have led me to conduct a rather grim internal audit of my relationships. Overall, it’s been pretty bleak. I can give you a few weak reasons for this – growing up in a viciously Catholic Ireland, or just the magic porridge pot of emotional problems that is being adopted, but while there are reasons, there are no excuses. I just treated people poorly, and especially women. I try to be a better person, but it’s hard to tell if I’m a decent human being or just better than I was. This change can’t happen fast enough: I worry about my sons and the sort of men they will become. I just don’t want them to have my problems, my hangups. They may have the advantage of growing up in a more enlightened time, but they also have a father who is trying hard to overcome a cultural hangover. Hopefully by the time they reach manhood, those self-driving cars we keep hearing about will offer them some moments of quiet contemplation on the commute home to think about how to improve their relationships with the opposite sex. Or they may just use the time to give their noses a really good pick.
Gods, death, poppies, war

December 31st, 2017

Week 28 of the column.

Being an atheist is a lonely old slog. Most people will cling to the belief that there is something out there watching over us, be it Jesus, Yaweh, Allah or whatever MechaGodzilla the Scientologists funnel their taxes towards. Few people will actually offer such a bleak world view as the true atheist – that there is nothing else out there, no higher power, and we are all alone. Of course, you don’t sell it to people in quite such a bleak way – you say that you believe people are innately good, that all religions were just an extension of that goodness, an extension that ultimately got corrupted by the power-hungry, in much the same way the leaking extension you got built during the Celtic Tiger got corrupted by lazy builders and pyrite.

Us devout atheists are few and far between, but what makes it even more isolating is the fact that we don’t have the structures of religion. There are no parish tea dances, no community hall bingo, no festive services. But in the broader sense I’ve wondered that the hell I’m going to do when I die. Being freed from the strictures of Catholic rites is great, but we still need some sort of ritual – I can’t just get stuffed into a recycling bin and turned into Soylent Green, or have my ashes chucked into a landfill. How will we say goodbye when we know there is no journey to the other side? Do we have a sacred decommissioning of our Facebook profile, a ritualised restoration of factory settings on our iPhone, or one final Instagram shot of our bespoke artisanal funeral buffet? Or just have Siri conduct a service, while Alexa paraphrases Mary Elizabeth Frye for the eulogy:

Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there. I do not sleep.

I was cryogenically frozen, it wasn’t cheap,

So the money I owe you all I will have to keep.

The hardest part of being an atheist has been dealing with loss. The absence of an afterlife isn’t just hard to come to terms with for yourself, but for your loved ones. Since my father’s passing I have been crushed by grief, as I know that he is gone and I will never see him again. I’ve spent much of the last 12 months breaking down at inopportune moments – I meet people in work who knew him and they tell me how much they liked him, and I break down. I find an old letter from him to my mum written in the 1970s in which he promises not to drink and drive (apparently it was all the rage back then) and I break down. My son points to a photo of my father and asks me who he is, and I break down. It has been a year when I occasionally thought I was going to have some sort of breakdown, as I try to make sense of it all – this life, all our lives, and the fact that we all die. The dormant Catholic in me still sees November as the month to think on all these things, to remember all the souls no longer in existence, and the supreme importance of trying to follow the one commandment shared by all religions – try not to be a total jackass.

Speaking of remembrance and jackasses – it’s poppy season again in the UK, a time for flag-waving jingoism of the highest order, when the atrocities of war and sacrifice of the fallen is completely overshadowed by an orgy of imperialism. Where’s your poppy mate, don’t you honour our brave boys, spit on the flag is it mate, do you want to bring back Hitler, is that it? No more can UK TV presenters or sports stars quietly think about war and honour, they need to stick the biggest poppies they can find on their lapel or they are deemed to hate freedom.

I have a distant relative who fought in the First World War, Colonel Jim Fitzmaurice, and of his experience he wrote: “Dead German, British and French soldiers lay about in every conceivable position and condition—here and there a dead horse, a broken field gun. I had never seen a dead man before. I looked again at those dead soldiers — I looked at the poor dumb beasts — dead with their poor glassy eyes turned to the heavens. It was impossible to think. I decided that a very serious job had to be done, that I had better stop thinking and get along with my own particular portion of this big job — C’est la guerre.”

He was 17 when he fought in the Somme. I wonder what he would think of the obsessive poppy-watching in the UK, whereby every weatherman and celebrity chat show guest has to wear a big red poppy or be torn apart by the media; what would he say to the rising nationalism, of the UK’s plan to remove themselves from the European project? After the war Fitzmaurice made aviation history by making the first east to west Atlantic flight, which he managed with two Germans. Even though he fought in the Great War, he understood that divisions make us weaker. The poppy has become that most awful thing – a virtue signal, a way of telling people you care, whether you actually do or not. It’s like an analog hashtag, or the words of the gauche bore who feels the need to tell you about their many donations to charity. It seems a tragedy that there is a sense of relief when Armistice Day has passed, and we no longer have to endure shallow displays of remembrance.

In terms of overcoming divisions, you have to admire the gumption of the three Alliance TDs who are riding out to North Korea to try and find a resolution to the secret state’s nuclear Mexican stand-off with America. Of the three, Waterford TD John Halligan should be best placed to find some common ground with Kim Jong Un as they both have sentient hair, complete lack of belief in god, and experience dealing with difficult characters (Shane Ross and Trump, respectively). If nothing else, this could be the greatest episode of Hall’s Pictorial Weekly never made, and sher if it stops us all from dying in the Third World War, isn’t that much better than fixing the roads?
RTE, Supremes, JFK, Duchas

November 8th, 2017

Week 26, six months of being an opinionista and nobody has threatened to kill me yet, WTF am I doing wrong?

It seems odd that I grew up in the age of one TV channel. It doesn’t seem like a million years ago, but I can still remember the excitement when Network Two launched, or waving a wonky rabbit-ears aerial around the living room in the hope of picking up some HTV Cymru Wales and possibly some post-watershed nudity, as there was little hope of any on a station that carried the Angelus.

Times have changed, and although RTE still carries the sacred ding-dongs, there is little hope of salvation for them. My kids don’t watch TV – they watch Netflix and YouTube. The concept of sitting down at an appointed time to watch any show is completely alien to them, I feel much the same way. I am happy to pay my license fee, as I think it is important to support our national broadcaster from a cultural perspective, but it’s a sad state of affairs when the most enjoyable thing to come out of Montrose in the past 12 months is a Twitter account of an unnamed, disillusioned producer who is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore.

Secret RTE Producer appeared out of nowhere in early September and started dishing the dirt. At first it seemed like it might be a Steve Bannon-esque false flag operation being used as an accelerant for job cuts, but the sense of frustration in the tweets can’t be faked. Many of them explain some of the odd decisions made in Montrose over the years (why isn’t Fair City better, what was the story with all the Craig Doyle stuff), or help shed some light on the background operations of an entity that we all have a stake in. In the two months that the account has been running there have been plot twists, grand reveals, Cold War paranoia, and even a period when the account went silent, leaving its thousands of followers wondering if the secret producer had been caught and dispatched to a North Korean-style re-education camp in the human resources department, or a just another course in media studies in Colaiste Dhulaig.

Whatever happens to the secret producer, they probably need to start making plans for life outside Montrose, because the closing scenes of this real-life drama are not going to be pretty. The public reaction from those within the RTE machine was a little depressing – where many of us on the outside saw a whistleblower, they saw a rat. Where they saw profound disloyalty to their organisation, I saw those tweets as actual public service broadcasting. But the future for all of RTE is stark – kids today don’t want The Den, they want Stampy Longnose’s inverted guffawing on YouTube, while teenagers just want Netflix and chill, whatever that means. Perhaps instead of feeling hurt by the tweets of Secret RTE Producer, the top brass at Montrose could learn from them, and make a few changes. Don’t change Nationwide though – that is perfect.

One move in the right direction was the broadcasting live from the Supreme Court for the first time yesterday. While many tuned in in the hope of some Judge Judy style shrieking and fake cases involving bruised pets or damaged flowers, it really drove home just how devoid of drama the courts are. Far from the byzantine, kafkaesque nightmare of legal jargon and people shouting latin at each other that one would expect, it was quite like a live broadcast from the queue in the motor tax office, or a dentist’s waiting room. It was like the broadcast from my local church on the internet which I sometimes found myself watching at 4am when I worked nights. You kept waiting for something incredible to happen, but it never did – yet the expectation was always there, of some divine judgement on us all. But if the broadcasting of court cases helps deter people from taking spurious insurance claims, then RTE will have justified the license fee for at least another decade.

Conspiracy theorists rejoice, for another tranche of the FBI’s JFK assassination papers are being released. While Donald Trump announced to the world that he was allowing them to be opened, they were scheduled to be opened since long before that haunted jack o’ lantern began flushing America’s reputation down the toilet. It was actually Oliver Stone’s intensely dull film JFK which prompted the US congress to order the release all the way back in 1992. Still, you have to admire Trump’s confidence, as he is basically allowing the FBI to release a ‘how-to’ guide on getting away with assassinating a president, in a nation stuffed with gun nuts. So perhaps anyone thinking of dressing up as him for Halloween might want to rethink their costume choice.

Here at home we have sizeable chunks of our own rich history being released onto the internet. Duchas.ie has released a quarter of a million documents and almost ten thousand photographs from the National Folklore Collection on their website. With a handy search option, it is a fascinating selection of myths, legends and rumours that otherwise would have been lost. Granted, some of it is pure bunkum, but when I stumbled across two transcriptions from 1938 about treasure that may or may not be buried near my house, I found myself waking in the middle of the night and googling metal detectors and the law regarding ownership of massive hoards of gold. If I do find a load of torcs, I just hope that I get to appear on Nationwide before I flog them all on eBay.
Powercuts, offaly, ophelia, sean hughes

October 20th, 2017

Now facing the prospect of being stuck in Dublin for 24 hours and the name Ophelia sounds really terrible in their accent, please send help.

— Bill Linnane (@Bill_Linnane) October 16, 2017

Week 25 of the column! Who woulda thunk it? Certainly not my guidance counsellor in school, who said I should be an engineer and also got my name wrong.

The worst storm that I can remember was in December 1996. It seemed to come out of nowhere and pummelled east Cork right before Christmas, ripping the roof off the local Co-Op and leaving thousands without power. We lost our power on Christmas Eve and didn’t get it back for ten days. This, of course, would not be that bad, only for the fact that we have a well, and no power meant no water – to drink, to flush, to wash. That Christmas was never going to be an easy one, as we had lost my sister earlier that year. I can remember my parents and I sitting around the fire, all trying to be strong for each other, all pretending that somehow this live reenactment of The Shining was a much more traditional Christmas, as opposed to an incredibly sad week and a half of darkness, despair and poor personal hygiene. We didn’t even have a TV to distract us from the loss, or clean water to wash away the tears. Thank god I had a massive supply of beer to keep me hydrated.

The most memorable part of the storm and its aftermath were the simple acts of kindness. People we hardly knew showed up to the door with gallons of water, hot food, and even a couple of roasted turkeys fresh out of the oven. It was incredibly touching, even though it meant I had to eat about 30lbs of turkey in 48 hours so it wouldn’t all end up in the bin. To this day that storm ranks as the worst and best I have lived through, and I still use it as a gauge for any other natural disasters – the only questions I ask are; are we all here; is everyone ok; and who wants more half melted ice cream. As long as you are safe and together, things are generally ok – although a decent supply of Febreeze and babywipes also helps.

It was disappointing to see Offaly get hit by Ophelia. The recent census figures showed that the county has the highest percentage of Catholics in the country, which I assumed made it some sort of promised land for the chosen people of Ireland. Apparently not; they got smote just like everyone else, despite being the home to important pilgrimage sites like Clonmacnoise and that Barrack Obama filling station in Moneygall. Granted, there were a few missteps along Offaly’s path to righteousness, as the county is responsible for not one but two Cowens, while they also declared war on heaven by Birr physicist George Johnstone Stoney coining the term electron in 1891 as the as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity”, thus undermining the power of prayer, which up until that point had been fuelling the national grid. I’m sure all the poor souls without power in The Faithful County will enjoy the irony of that. Perhaps this latest testing of their faith might make them want to move to Dun Laoghaire, which not only had electricity right through Ophelia but also has the lowest number of Catholics in the country. Coincidence? Probably, yes.

I spent Ophelia trapped in Dublin. My daughter and I travelled up on Sunday to make a hospital appointment on Monday morning that was subsequently cancelled, along with all of the trains out of the city. The culchie in me felt a rising panic as I realised I was going to have to spend another 24 hours in this terrifying metropolis, trying to hide my uncool, non-ironic country ways and singy-songy Cork accent. I stood at the Luas stop for a tram that would never come, desperately trying to remember what the Five Lamps were, or how to make coddle, in case a local started talking to me. The last thing any culchie wants is to be identified as such in the Big Smoke and subjected to the hate hoots of the million or so first generation Dubs whose parents only left a bog in Mayo two decades ago. We kept the heads down and just prayed that we would make it out alive, ready to burst into Aslan songs if anyone tried to chat to us. As we walked through the city centre, businesses were pulling down the shutters, as staff got sent home to ride out what has become known as Bank Holiday Ophelia with important provisions like Netflix and cans. We passing throngs of bemused tourists who obviously failed to listen to the Nuacht warnings that the weather was going to get ufasach ar fad, as they clustered around important cultural attractions like Carroll’s gift shops, those Paddywagon places, and Starbucks. But it’s good to know that when the trumpet sounds and the fall of man begins, we will still be able to get a pumpkin spice latte and Kiss Me I’m Irish bonnet.

In the middle of the storm the new broke that Sean Hughes had passed away. Aged just 51, he was one of the great surreal comedians of the Nineties, but more than than, he always seemed like a nice guy. There was something loveable about his witty misery, his love of indie music, and his wet, sad Irish eyes. One of my favourite quotes is his thoughts on religion, of which he once said “I don’t know whether it’s because I’m a man or because I was brought up a Catholic. But sometimes I find the whole idea of sex repulsive and at other times I’d gladly stick my penis up a drain.” Hopefully when he gets to the pearly gates they will see the funny side.
Norovirus, flu, maccie d’s, Mickey d

October 20th, 2017

Week 24 of the column and I finally get around to talking about my ass. Also, check out that layout up top: They used my name, like you would with other important thought leaders like David Quinn, John Waters, Ronan Mullen, or any of those other great guys who I am totally friends with on Bebo.

There are many pleasant occurrences at the changing of the seasons – shorter days mean the awkward among us breathe a sigh of relief as they slump into social hibernation, while the drop in temperatures means we get to light a warming fire and then use it as a mini-incinerator for everything from broken toys to pink Roses.

But there are some things that happen at this time of year that are less welcome – the mass migration of giant spiders into our homes and, presumably, our hair; or having to pretend you care about the budget beyond diesel and pints. But the least welcome seasonal occurrence of all has to be the return of the Norovirus. It is better known as the winter vomiting bug, in itself a complete misnomer as ‘the ebola of the arse’ would be a more fitting title. It may be simply a side effect of age, but I just don’t remember this bug being around when I was a child. I don’t recall the horror of when it takes hold of a family, spreading from person to person like wildfire, forcing violently unwell parents to chase nauseous toddlers about the house with a basin, like some deranged medieval parlour game, or if Caligula directed an episode of It’s A Knockout. I can remember measles and mumps, even the odd demonic possession, but not this. It seems like a very modern bug, one that preys on our very modern belief that just about everything is going to kill us. True, it does make you want to gather the children and bid them farewell, or even just to curse them for bringing it home from playschool, but as actual illnesses go, it does little real damage to healthy subjects, apart from helping us shift a half stone just in time for the Halloween treat binge.

One virus that definitely needs a rebrand and relaunch is influenza, a life-threatening bug that we have become so blasé about that we don’t even call it by its full title, instead opting for a rubbish nickname – ‘flu. In fact, we are so blind to just how dangerous the ‘flu actually is that we now use it as an umbrella term for anything from a nasty cold to the shame-filled endgame of a bad pint. If only it had the caché of new kids on the block, bird flu and swine flu, who went truly viral in the last five years. Even the uptake of the influenza vaccine is poor – because hey, it could never happen to me, and even if it does sher I’ll be grand. This year, however, is different. There is a particular strain of it that has hit Australia with punishing ferocity. Where previously it was a serious threat to the elderly or those with underlying conditions, now it is a threat to the young as well – three children are among the casualties already. Influenza has always been dangerous, but it would appear to be getting moreso. So for those of us who previously thought we were invincible, this is a wake up call. At the ripe old age of 42 I now have to accept that I quite like being alive and the chances of me staying that way are diminishing day by day, so the onus is on me to actually get the vaccine. It’s a sad sign that I am both getting older and getting sense, and I worry about what comes next – pension plans? College funds? Minding my cholesterol levels? Dark nights in front of the fire watching The Great British Bake Off whilst enthusiastically discussing flans are my MDMA now, prompting me to ponder – was it for this that the wild geese spread? Yes, it probably was, as we are living longer, freer, and better than ever. So off I go to get the jab and try not to die. Now if only they could come up with a vaccine for the Norovirus.

Spare a thought for local mom n’ pop food chain McDonald’s, who seem to be struggling to produce that most basic of foods – condiments. Inspired by the hit adult cartoon Rick And Morty, Maccie D’s decided it might be fun to reintroduce their long gone Szechuan sauce for just one day, but in very limited supplies. They seem to have underestimated the demand, as some outlets only got 20 sachets, while there were scenes of screaming children and angry adults shouting at slightly bemused staff. In some outlets, the police were called to deal with irate customers. Within hours, three packets of the sauce went on eBay and sold for US$280 each, while Twitter went into its usual meltdown over the fiasco. The facts are clear – McDonald’s are running out of food, and we are all doomed. Either that or it was a cynical marketing ploy to create buzz, which backfired spectacularly. Still, given that this was America, let’s all just be thankful that nobody got shot.

The campaign to make Michael D Higgins President for life starts here. His tenure in the Aras has been a huge success – from his compassion, to his communication skills, to his general je ne sais quoi. You just get the sense that were you ever found yourself lost in the Burren, he would emerge from a dolmen to teach you how to read ogham and show you which mushrooms to eat, before guiding you back to civilisation by the stars. He has done such a great job, it is easy to forget the also-rans from the 2011 campaign. While he didn’t just win by being the best of a fairly uninspiring lot, it was a pretty poor line up. There was the Uncle-Fester-in-Louis-Copeland guy, the sad eyebrow guy who looked like ALF, I think Enya was there, and some others that I don’t recall. Michael D won because he is both a man of letters and someone who knows how to deliver an intellectual headbutt to those who deserve it; listening back to his surgical takedown of American right wing radio host Michael Graham – in which D uses his keen intellect to eviscerate him and also manages to call him a wanker – will make you want to declare him president for life. And if that role isn’t possible, let’s just stick a throne on Tara, give him a couple of wolfhounds and make him high king of Ireland. All hail King D.
Brain Kerr

October 7th, 2017
Wrote this for the Indo:

Miranda Kerr knows a thing or two about marriage. This is partly because the 34 year old model has been married twice, firstly to Orlando Bloom, and now to the world’s youngest billionaire, Evan Spiegel, head honcho of Snapchat, AKA the biggest threat to today’s youth since cooties. In an interview with Net-a-Porter’s online magazine, The Edit, Kerr described Spiegel, who is seven years her junior, as “a 50-year-old man in a young body”, which makes him not that dissimilar to so many of the 50 year old men on Snapchat pretending to be 15.

But it was Kerr’s discussion of her approach to marriage that raised the most eyebrows: “At work, I’m like, ‘We need to do this!’ and, ‘This needs to happen’. But at home, I slip into my feminine and empower Evan to be in his masculine”.

Asked to explain exactly what this pearl of wisdom actually meant, she elaborated: “Just be more in my feelings. More gentle, leaning back. It’s a nice balance. My grandma taught me that men are visual and you need to make a little effort. So when [Evan] comes home, I make sure to have a nice dress on and the candles lit. We make time to have a nice dinner together.”

Finally, our day has come – Kerr is leading the charge for masculinists everywhere, letting the ladies know that even a Victoria’s Secret model has to put a little effort in to make our fragile egos feel validated. So without further ado, here are some other ways to ‘lean back’, so far back that you fall into the 1950s.
1. Would it be too much to ask for a pipe and slippers? Clearly feminism has gone too far and balance needs to be restored in households around the world, but rather than revert to the old ways, we need to modernise: Instead of pipe and slippers, why not bring him his e-cig and Toms when he comes home in the evening. A nice relaxing puff of unregulated mystery gas should help him unwind, whilst the flimsy canvas and porous soles of the Toms will make him feel like he is relaxing in a hammock on a Pacific island, as opposed to trapped in negative equity in Roscommon.
2. Come on girls, have a wash: You’ve been trapped in the house with several deranged children all day, racing through endless cycles of laundry and ironing, and are starting to understand why Irish housewives used to consume half of the world supply of Buckfast. At the end of the day, you sound and look like Jodie Foster in the film Nell, in which she had been living in isolation in a ditch for her entire life. No man wants to come home to that, especially not a billionaire who presumably has to sift through his site’s online traffic of billions of nudes. No, you need to achieve a supermodel’s level of perfection – despite having zero time in which to do this in – or we are done. You know we once shifted a third-round qualifier for the Rose Of Tralee and we are fairly sure she is still waiting for us out there somewhere, so please try to fix yourself up a bit, or at least stop crying.
3. Men need to feel all powerful, as they are afflicted with critically fragile masculinity. When he slumps in the door from his important job in the call centre being shouted at by strangers, the last thing he needs is you attempting to talk to him about how you think one of the kids might have ADHD and you think you might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A respectful silence, punctured only by the sound of respectful shuffling and bowing, as though he were Genghis Khan, is all he wants to hear when he comes home.
4. Fetch him a beverage: Thanks to the EU/troika/Opus Dei, we aren’t allowed to drive around the place half cut, so offering him a refreshing alcoholic beverage is a thing of the past. However, you can go for a healthier option – after all, you want him to live for a long time, as without him you’re nothing. Why not clear some time in your day to rustle up some kombucha, even if it’s just so he can quip that the gelatinous lump of bacteria known as The Mother is much like your mother, in many ways.
5. Laugh at his insulting, unfunny jokes: It’s important that men are laughed with, not at, so whenever you suspect he is trying to be funny, even if it is after you have discovered he remortgaged the house to buy a sports car, you will need to giggle like a schoolgirl. So titter flirtatiously while the debt collectors are kicking down the door to take away your washing machine, the only help you ever got around the house, and possibly your only friend.
6. Make him feel smart: Ask him about the many important decisions he made in the workplace, like which roll to have from the lunch trolley, or which highlighter he used most during the day. Also try to ask him about things you supposedly don’t understand, but do really, like the GAA, personal finance or George Hook.
7. Teach your kids to admire him: You need to work hard to counteract the corrosive effects of Peppa Pig and her constant ridiculing of Daddy Pig. Daddies generally are not shown the respect they deserve, whether jumping into muddy puddles or making a mess of dinner. Teach your kids to call their father ‘sir’ and to never speak to him unless they are spoken to by him first. This distance should ensure that they will grow up to be respectful members of society, or possibly gang members. Time will tell.
8. Aim low: If you do manage to get out of the house and have some sort of career, just make sure you don’t earn more than your spouse. This will be easily achieved as your workplace will most likely be overflowing with equally insecure men who also seem to think they deserve a higher wage than you.
9. BMS, or Be More Stepford: Miranda Kerr dons a nice dress and lights candles for her man in the evening, despite this being a clear fire hazard, and despite the fact that as a 27 year old tech billionaire, Spiegel probably just wants to take hits on a bong while playing Overwatch. Even on their wedding day, Kerr was striving to be the perfect wife, going so far as to roast a chicken for the groom as it is his favourite dish. Somehow the image of Kerr in her haute couture wedding gown checking a mini rotisserie oven is the most depressing part of this whole thing.
10. Disregard all of the above: What works for Kerr and Spiegel works for them. Her comments weren’t some call to arms for women everywhere to give up on this whole suffrage malarkey and get back to tanning hides in a cave while himself goes to hunt a wooly mammoth in Copperface Jacks – she was just talking about how her relationship works, and given that they are still in the first six months of their marriage, she is allowed to over-egg the cake a little. Let’s see if she is still roasting chickens by candlelight in a negligee in ten years time, perhaps then we can check back with her and see if she has any actual advice on how marriage works.
Goodnight sweet prints, myanmar, fake news, nuclear war

October 7th, 2017

Week 21 of the column, in which I perform a remarkable about-face on my attitude to print media, now that I am making some money from it. Lol jk – journalism is actually important. Stories are great, but there has to be facts.

When I left the newspaper industry three years ago, I thought we were heading into a brave new world. I had spent 12 years working as a subeditor in a regional paper, and saw how the digital revolution democratised communications and gave everyone a voice. I thought this was going to be great – everyone would be a citizen journalist, reporting live from global events, large and small; instead of having a small number of media outlets, we would have a chorus of unbiased, verifiable sources for our information.

The reality, of course, is slightly different. When you buy a newspaper, you are invested in it. You generally read it cover to cover, as you paid for it and are committed to it. You are exposed to things you would otherwise not see, opinions you might not like, ideas and information that you could otherwise miss. The commercial aspect of newspapers also meant that if they get things wrong, they get sued; there is accountability. The overall ethos of the paper you buy may reflect your world view, but you are still opening your mind to a variety of opinions, insights and facts.

On the internet we tend to only look at the things we like – this is anything from cat videos to celebrity nip slips. The more we hit that like button, the more the internet gives us what we want. It refuses to challenge us. In an age when we have the entire world at our fingertips, we seem more concerned with being entertained than informed. This was brought home to me when I asked a friend if he thought Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan still sing Unplayed Piano, the ballad they wrote in 2004 about Aung San Suu Kyi, now that she has been released from house arrest and seems intent on looking the other way while ethnic cleansing takes place in her country. I got a blank stare. Whatever about knowing the back catalogue of Rice and Hannigan, I thought he might have heard about a massacre that has left an estimated thousand dead. He had not. For all the time we spend on our phones, we seem a lot less connected to the world around us. The grim eventuality of this is currently being playing out across the Atlantic.

In 1938 Orson Welles decided to teach America a lesson. He felt they swallowed everything they heard on the radio a little too readily, and created The War Of The Worlds, a radio play that led many to believe that the planet was under attack from aliens. The Trump election campaign did something similar – it deceived people into believing they were under attack, that aliens were coming for them, and that only one man could save them. Trump said the media organisations that tried to hold him to account were fakes, and people believed him, not them. If there is a lesson there for us, it is that actual news matters more than ever.

Three years ago I picked up my redundancy cheque and headed off into my brave new world, where I believed news would be truly democratic. I was, as I am much of the time, dead wrong. Now I am seeing that newspapers matter, because facts matter. And I’m not just saying that because I get paid to write this, but because the bright lights of news media need to be kept on, for all our sakes.

The death of Harry Dean Stanton didn’t come as a surprise. At 91, there were periods of the last decade when he would pop up in a cameo and I would suddenly remember that he wasn’t actually dead. Like all great character actors, he disappeared into the roles he took. He was the go-to for the hangdog American everyman, and seemed to play a succession of people who had not-quite achieved the American dream. The film critic Roger Ebert once said that no film with Harry Dean Stanton can be altogether bad, although he later qualified this by adding that teen body swap comedy Dream A Little Dream, starring Coreys Haim and Feldman, was a clear violation of this rule.

His greatest role was in Paris Texas, where he played a drifter walking the roads of the southern states as a form of atonement. I loved the film from the first time I saw it as a troubled teenager, but it was only years later I could see that this was because it spoke to me. Being adopted, then central themes of family, abandonment and redemption all resonated in my teenage subconscious. As an adult, I love Paris Texas because I spend much of my time like Stanton’s character Travis, wondering if my family would be better off without me, if I should take to the highways and byways of Munster as penance for being a fairly dismal parent. But as this is Ireland, I probably wouldn’t get far before I got clipped by a passing SUV or drowned in a pothole.

A less notable death this year was that of Stanislav Petrov, aged 77. Although he passed away in May, news is only breaking now of his passing and of the minor incident in 1983 that saw him save the world. In the depths of the Second Cold War, Russian satellite warning system alerted authorities that a nuclear missile had been launched by the US, and was followed by several others, all headed for Russia. This was an act of war, and the Russians had to scramble to retaliate. Lt Col. Petrov, however, discerned that it was a false alarm, stood down the Russian weapons systems, and prevented what could well have been the end of civilization as we know it. It seems strange that one man had the presence of mind – and faith in humanity – to know that this was a malfunction. Despite all the technology teling him otherwise, Petrov knew that the computers were wrong: He saw information on a screen, and was able to discern that it was false. If only we all had this ability.

Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi gave an address to her nation yesterday. She condemned any human rights violations in her country, and previously said an iceberg of false information was being put forward about the situation. All she needs to do now is stick on a little red cap and claim there are good people on both sides, before promising to build a wall around the Rohingya, who the UN have said are victims of a military ethnic cleansing programme. Here in Ireland, people seem strangely on the fence. In a poll of 1,000 adults for Claire Byrne Live, 42% of people said they think the Myanmar leader’s award of the Freedom Of Dublin should be rescinded, 11% disagreed and 47% were unsure. Assuming the 11% were just massive fans of the song Unplayed Piano, it is still incredible that 47% were unsure how to feel about what is happening in Myanmar. If ever there was a case to be made for people to just pick up a paper and have a proper read of it, there it is.
The clown’s pie, the zodiac killer, drunken foetuses, branson’s pickle

October 7th, 2017

Week 20 of the column.

My parents were strict. Products of the Forties and Fifties when Catholicism ruled supreme, they took a somewhat North Korean approach to cultural products they deemed unsuitable for me. I have fond memories of my father switching off an RTE matinee showing of Black Narcissus when I was ten (still one of my favourite films), banning heavy metal when I was 15 (I still love heavy metal), or refusing to get me a skateboard for Christmas because, they claimed, people were using them to worship the devil. Years later I realised that they were mixing skateboards up with ouija boards. One thing they never censored were books. They held the belief that reading could almost never be bad for you, and so it was that I found myself reading Stephen King’s IT aged 13.

The genius of King’s work lies not in making us scared of what we can see, as Lovecraft did, but in looking deep into the human soul and showing us the simple horrors of life on earth, such as family holidays (The Shining), figuring out how to work domestic appliances (Maximum Overdrive), the perils of cat ownership (Pet Semetery), the importance of a religious upbringing (Carrie) or American democracy (The Stand). But in IT he tapped into one of our most understandable fears – that of clowns. As another remake of King’s meisterwerk hits our screens, it would appear that one bunch of clowns aren’t going to take this pie in the face to their profession lying down. Two professional clowns appeared on the UK’s GMTV to point out that – spoiler alert – the Pennywise character from IT is only one of the many physical manifestations of the being, before going on to say the film was cheap, a low blow, even coming from a pair of men wearing clownpants and facepaint on live TV.

But perhaps the best protest of IT was in the US, where professional clowns though the best way to win back hearts and mind was to stage a protest outside cinemas screening the film. This resulted in members of the public, emerging blinking into the sunlight following two hours of clown-based horror, only to be confronted with a bunch of angry clowns. King must be delighted that his self fulfilling prophecy has come to pass. The clowning profession might do well to note that the only way back from this PR disaster is to kill the media circus – and the only way to kill a circus is to go for the juggler.

Speaking of sad horrors, spare a moment for depressed vampire Ted Cruz. After the ignominy of an presidential race that saw Trump repeatedly humiliate him, and an ongoing joke about him being the Zodiac killer (which he isn’t, by the way), the American Senator has now hit the headlines for his Twitter account liking a pornographic tweet. Were he a Democrat, it would be taken as a sign of the moral decay of liberals everywhere; sadly for Cruz, he is a member of the Republican Party, whose puritanical zeal means enjoying a bit of filth on Twitter is not ok. It seems that poor Cruz is doomed for humiliation no matter what he does, so perhaps he would be better embracing his own decline – and appearance – and star in an X-rated remake of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot titled Count Cuckula. It couldn’t suck worse than the last 12 months of his career.

Rejoice, pregnant ladies – or at least rejoice as much as you can whilst incubating a ten pound loaf of a child. A report this week in the BMJ Open has revealed that a glass of wine during pregnancy is not going to do major harm, and while total abstinence might be healthier, you don’t need to cause yourself anguish over a drop of chablis during a Narcos marathon. This is great news for the entire population of Ireland, whose entire lives from conception onward is fuelled by medicinal boozing. Frankly, how anyone gets through the various delights of pregnancy without a drink or two is a miracle in itself.

Finally, spare a moment for Richard Branson, the billionaire whose Caribbean island home was trashed by Hurricane Irma. Branson laid the blame for the hurricane squarely at the feet of man made climate change. Given that he owns a massive airline firm, whose planes presumably do not run on sunlight, it was a plot twist akin to the moment in horror films when you realise that the killer is inside the house. If there is a lesson for us all, it’s that those Euromillions ads that suggest we should buy an island are really quite misleading. That and the planet is dying.
Coffee, Uranus, gas, spoilers

September 10th, 2017

Because I like my coffee like I like my music – dark and full of ket. pic.twitter.com/AxNOkDcDhb

— Bill Linnane (@Midleton_Rare) July 2, 2017

‘Week 18 of my column’ – words I thought I would never write.

Finally science is starting to give us some good news. After a week of terrifying weather events, there were glad tidings for those of us who are unable to function without coffee – it may be helping us to live longer. A study of 20,000 men and women found that three to four cups a day may help us to live one third longer.

This is great news for the caffeine junkies among us, who are unable to have a civilised conversation in the morning before they have at least one pharmaceutical-grade coffee, and possibly two on Mondays. The lead researcher in the Spanish study said that it is the antioxidants in coffee that provide the benefits, which I – like all sensible people – take to mean that I should get dosed up to the gills on premium grade Java to the point where my heart is jackhammering and the veins at my temple bulging.

Of course the only problem is how to come down off this obvious health kick – well, science has done it again, this time via the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, which has published a study that says moderate drinking may be beneficial to us physically, apart from helping us unwind from a day of guzzling black gold until our eyes pop out of our heads.

Moderate alcohol use in this study was considered to be less than 14 drinks a week for men and seven for women, and was associated with a 25 percent lower risk of overall death. Our path to a longer, healthier life is clear – jugs of the strongest coffee available without prescription, and a healthy dose of grain alcohol to wind down of an evening. After all, having fallen from first place in the year 2000 to an embarrassing 12th in an EU survey on national alcohol consumption, it’s important that we all don the green jersey and start chucking down the Irish coffees. We need to stagger back up the rankings, otherwise the Public Health Alcohol Bill might seem a little unnecessary.

Our frenemy science also gave us a wonderful headline (or terrible chat-up line) this week with the revelation that Uranus is stuffed with diamonds. Perhaps you thought that the light emanating from it was the sun shining out of there, but no, it’s far more exciting than that.

Uranus, despite being the butt of jokes since German astronomer Johann Elert Bode named it after the Greek god of the sky, or possibly after a co-workers backside, is a massive gassy cloud, but one that produces huge diamonds in its interior which then sink to the centre. It was a nice moment for a mass that for centuries failed to be recognised as a planet as it was considered too dim and too slow. The upside of the planet’s goofy name is that people in the mainstream media actually like writing about it – perhaps if we had named all the other planets of the solar system in this manner we would pay more attention to them, and gaze up at the night sky sniggering about the beautiful brown rings of Shaturn.

Bathers along the Sussex coast at the weekend were hit with a mysterious cloud of noxious gas (not from Uranus this time). The occurrence had a slightly apocalyptic feel to it, coming as it did after another bi-annual ‘storm of the century’ pummelled the southern states of America into the mud, while a scaled down version tried to wipe Donegal off the map. A cloud of poisonous gas seems unlikely to be the result of anything other than human endeavour, you can’t help but worry that maybe the planet has really had enough of us trying to kill it.

Perhaps it had this secret defence mechanism all along, much like in the incredibly weak M Night Shyamalan film The Happening. Aside from the moment the credits roll, the high point of the film – an ecological scare story of a sudden wave of human self destruction sparked by nature itself – was Marky Mark Wahlberg pleading with a houseplant to give humanity a second chance. If the Sussex gas did happen to be belched out by an angry planet, I think I would rather smother in its noxious fumes than have to explain to my decrepit vicus about why watering it once a fortnight was too much hassle, or explain to my velociraptor-friendly lawn about how ‘work has just been really crazy recently’.

If you haven’t seen The Happening, firstly, lucky you, and secondly, sorry for not offering a spoiler alert. However, there is a Shyamalanesque plot twist here – a study published by the US Association for Psychological Science showed that people actually preferred watching films when they knew the twist was coming. Some 800 subjects were recruited by the University Of California, where they were read stories by authors like John Updike and Raymond Carver, some with the plot twist revealed beforehand and some without. It transpired that the listeners enjoyed the stories more when they knew what was coming, and could see the machinations of the writers, as they conspired to misdirect them and camouflage the looming reveal. Perhaps we can console ourselves with this when scientists the world over say ‘we told you so’ as the planet self-combusts.