Community Voice Musings

Rain magnets

2008-06-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

Cartoon: Fergus Lynch

I’m beginning to think that either my wife or I is jinxed. The way that things are going, one or other of us, or maybe both, are going to be physically ejected midflight the next time we take Ryanair in the same way that Jonah was dumped overboard in the Bible as a harbinger of bad weather.
I suppose it started last year with the abysmal summer that we experienced here. Although, to be fair, it had its good points for I had a readymade excuse for not cutting the grass for months on end. But all in all, I’d have preferred to put in the hours for a patch of blue sky.
The only two good weeks in the whole year that were any way decent was the first fortnight in April, when two million burnt lobsters turned up for work, rubbing their hands and saying they had a feeling in their water that it was going to be a great summer.
And where were we during that halcyon fortnight? Why, we were on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Orlando, where we had to make regular mad dashes for cover to escape sudden downpours and where the CNN news was full of “the coldest Easter since records began.”
But of course, that was just unfortunate.
In recent times, I have become a Ryanair junkie. Yes, the seats are ridiculously narrow and yes, the airports are sometimes nowhere near the places they purport to serve and yes, the fact that you have to pay a credit card handling charge per person each way is a rip-off, but the fact remains that they can get you to the furthest reaches of Europe for cheaper than the cost of a taxi from Dublin 15 to the airport.
Some people like to spend their money on home improvements. Others choose to buy new cars or eat out in restaurants. We treat ourselves with short trips at home and abroad.
As someone who can’t resist a bargain, I have consequently visited a lot of places on the Continent that would have hitherto been beyond my budget and I have dragged my wife around with me. We have enjoyed the delights of -25°C in Vilnius in January, blundered our way through springtime fog in Trieste and negotiated the interminable road works in Wroclaw. As someone who considers himself a good environmentalist, I do worry about this carbon footprint Achilles heel of mine and tell myself that the next trip is the last one but something tells me that cheap airfares won’t be around forever and I ought to make hay while the iron is hot..
Last October, to compensate ourselves for missing out on the two weeks of summer in early April, I booked us in for three nights in Pula in Croatia, a town now strangely removed from the airline’s list of destinations. The guide book assured me of very pleasant weather in October – not the oppressive heat of summer but like a nice spring day here.
It was a beautiful spot, rich blue waters and green headlands, but, oh my God, it was freezing. And when it was not freezing, the rain came down in bucketfuls. Driving back from a day trip to Slovenia we got caught in a shower that threatened to put dents in the roof of the car. It was reminiscent of another Ryanair trip to Perpignan, via Girona, when we both got soaked to the skin running ten yards to the shelter of McDonalds.
This rain thing was starting to infiltrate in my consciousness. I booked two nights in December in Frankfurt to see the Christmas market and sure enough it rained on one of the days, though to be fair we weren’t expecting hot and sunny in Germany at that time of year.
This year, I was determined to break our string of bad luck. Rodez, a small city near Castres in the midi-Pyrenees promised us April sunshine but yet again failed to deliver. We marvelled at the way the water just kept on coming down hour after hour with no let up in its intensity.
Surely three nights in Biarritz in mid-June would break our duck? Close to the border with Spain and with a reputation for long sandy beaches and sun worshipping, where could we go wrong? Sadly, the duck, far from being broken, positively revelled in the conditions. When the first drops started to fall at 1pm on our first day, I just shrugged helplessly. Subsequent persistent downpours on the second and third days were only exacerbated by the blue cloudless sky on the morning of departure. And, just to rub rainwater into the wounds, the plane home decided to let us off about 400m from the terminal building back at Dublin and we got drenched in the length of time it took us to gain refuge.
The other day I got a call from Met Eireann, wanting to know if we had plans to go away anywhere in the near future. Satellite pictures can only tell so much, he said, and he had heard our ramblings around Europe were a much more accurate barometer of weather trends. The Timbuktu tourist board left a message on the phone wondering if we might consider holidaying in the sub-Sahara this year as the rains there had failed again. The Ombudsman is currently ruling on privacy laws and whether airlines are obliged to disclose to other passengers if the Gouldings (or, more colloqially “that shower from Dublin”) have booked themselves on a particular flight.
Sympathy among our kith and kin for our plight is somewhat lacklustre, particularly among the kith, who have always been a bit harsh. If we choose to swan around Europe like the Royal Family, they say, we should accept whatever Fate launches in our direction.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that we are providing a valuable social service to the weather weary residents of Dublin 15. As our Ryanair plane heads southwards, the sun will peep out nervously from behind a cloud to make certain we are gone before leaping out with a big grin all over his face and spreading warmth and bonhomie all over Blanchardstown. T-shirted neighbours will smile at each other and remark that “the Gouldings must be away again.”
I think we should be recompensed for this. At the very least, Fingal County Council should sponsor our trips abroad, seeing as how, just as in a Pink Panther cartoon, we’re fated to exist with our own personal black rain cloud above our heads.

A green fingered lament

2008-06-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

A very learned man once told me that if you stand on top of the Quinn Direct building in the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre and look out over the sprawling metropolis of Dublin 15, you will be struck by the amount of greenery. Our planners may be accused of a lot of things from traffic gridlock to the spread of fundamentalism in world religions but, if anybody still wore a hat, he or she would have to take it off to them when it comes to environmental awareness and picturesque settings.
Developers, though much criticised for the constant building of new estates, have not skimped on the provision of grass verges, roadside trees and landscaped gardens. Many of us new arrivals are faced with a decent sized lawned garden, and in the same way that an artist squares up to a blank canvas, we have launched ourselves into making the most of our outside spaces. The provision of plants has doubtlessly been a big industry in this area.
Like many others, we were enthused with the gardening bug when we first moved up here eight years ago from Arbour Hill. A huge back garden – at least, compared to the postage stamp we had previously– was a challenge and an opportunity for us to design a piece of heaven that would have Diarmuid Gavin drooling in envy.
We shared the work according to our talents. Basically, my wife chose the plants and I dug. I found out I was pretty good at digging, particularly after I bought a spade. If my wife needed the lawn trimmed back a bit for a hebe? No better man.
Of course, at the start, this gardening lark necessitated a lot of time spent at the Phoenix Park Garden Centre on the Castleknock Road. Not wanting to return home to bombsite, it was deemed necessary to take the kids along and so the four of us would hop into the car on a Bank Holiday afternoon and head off. The fact that three of us moaned like mad at the prospect of spending hours there when we could be sitting on our backsides watching Indiana Jones did not deter my wife unduly and when we arrived, she would be out of the car like a shot, the three of us trailing dispiritedly in her wake.
The only good thing I could say about the garden centre was that it afforded me the opportunity of smoking in comfort. At the time, I was a smoker and my wife counted exactly how many cigarettes I had gone through in the last hour / four hours / twelve hours. She was also not behind the back door when it came to telling me if I was overstepping the mark with my nicotine allowance. And like most smokers married to non-smokers, I always maintained that I smoked less than I actually did.
So while she was off examining fuchsias, I’d be wandering around the gooseberry bushes having a crafty fag. The problem was that I found the garden centre excruciatingly boring and when bored, I smoked. So I’d smoke a lot more, always keeping a wary eye out for my wife suddenly appearing around a dwarf conifer.
Itchy and Scratchy of course spent their time annoying the goldfish and playing hide and seek in and out of the bedding plants. My wife seemed to think she was obliged to examine every plant in the centre in case it had mildew or liver fluke or whatever plants get. And I’d wander, round and round and round, my eyes glazing over as I passed the alpines for the twenty fourth time.
Whenever I encountered my wife – and I felt obliged to bump into her every so often to show her that I wasn’t smoking – she would invariably ask me what I thought of this or that plant. My stock answer would be, “Yes, its very nice, but where are you thinking of putting it?” I found this worked much better than actually offering an opinion.
(The equivalent these days is when she asks me to comment on wine. I always reply that it is “very fruity,” though I think she may have cottoned onto that one now.)
I have to say I did admire my wife’s attention to detail in the garden centre. Coming, like myself, from a distinctly un-green-fingered background, she was determined to inform herself about the whole subject of horticulture, while I couldn’t be bothered. Give me a plant and tell me where you want to put it and I’ll dig a hole for it. All the difficult stuff like soil types and aspects and pruning, I left up to her so it was hardly surprising that she took hours making up her mind whether to take the spirea and put it in beside the viburnum or should she take the pyrracantha and move the heathers out from the back wall?
Even when she had made a choice, there was still the problem of selecting which of the ten thousand geraniums (gerania?) on offer should have the honour of adorning our garden. This one was too scrawny, that one had already bloomed too fully, that one was the wrong shape or had a hole in the leaf where caterpillar vandals had thrown a brick through it. By the time the choices had been made my throat was raw from nicotine inhalation and the kids were being told off for chasing each other up and down the aisles with a goldfish.
Our garden could now be accurately described in an estate agent’s brochure as ‘mature.’ After a lot of trial and error, we have the climbers along the back wall, roses in the sunny corner, a veritable jungle of shrubs along the sunny wall and a couple of large japonicas along the shady wall. Suffice to say that we haven’t bought an outdoor plant in ages, as the lawn has been reduced in size enough.
It is not a route I normally take, so driving down the old Castleknock Road recently, I was surprised to find that the Phoenix Park Garden Centre – oh paradise of my middle-age! – is no more. Further enquiries elucidated the fact that “its been gone for years, you big eejit.”
This kind of makes me wonder where all the newer residents of Dublin 15 are buying their plants. It seems peculiar with such a huge potential consumer base that there is no dedicated indigenous garden centre to cater for the hordes of green-fingered enthusiasts out here. I would have said that the fuchsia looks bleak but my wife says that cheap laughs are something we should be garden against.
The Phoenix Park Garden Centre – RIP.

Oh what a divine war

2008-06-02T13:15:00.000-07:00

Greetings, fellow inhabitants of Planet Bisto!
As you know, I have broadcast reports from the most deprived and depraved regions of the Known Universe but today I bring you a tale that will bring a shiver to both spines of all readers. It is a tale of inbistoriaty from an insignificant planet circling an insignificant sun in an insignificant galaxy in Sector V of the universe.
The unimaginative occupants of this planet call their sun “The Sun” and their planet “The Earth.” The part of the island they inhabit is called Littlepace and the island is called “Ireland.”
The humans – as they call themselves – that reside in Littlepace are the planet’s most intelligent race and follow the same basic life-cycle as most creatures in Sector V – they are born, they grow to maturity, they mate, they moan about their children and then they die. All this happens in but three Bistorian hours, so as you can imagine these humans spend their lives rushing about from place to place in an awful hurry.
However, in addition to their very short lifespan, Littlepacers also live in fear of their great god, Fingal.
Fingal is a massive snarling god that comes down to the Littlepacers once a week. A jealous god, unlike our own beloved Tayto, Fingal is cruel and demands sacrifice from the natives. They are forced to feed a small black plastic pet called “Wheelie Bin” and, at the beginning of the week, they wheel him out to the street and leave him there.
Imagine what this poor Wheelie Bin must go through as he hears the ferocious deity entering the estate! Imagine the dread as the god rounds the corner and his minions – all dressed alike in chilling blue uniforms – grasp the Wheelie Bin firmly by the ears and lead it to the sacrificial site! Nearer, nearer, the growling monster approaches and then suddenly it happens!
The poor Wheelie Bins are chosen in pairs to pay homage to Fingal. They stand side by side trembling and then suddenly they are hoisted into the air and are summarily disembowelled. With a great gulp, Fingal flips off their heads and gorges himself on the intestines. It is almost too horrible for me to describe in words. They are then released, discarded, thrown aside, often many hundreds of yards away from their owners, alone in a strange part of the estate, violated and disorientated.

Occasionally the natives are so keen to keep on the good side of the incarnate deity that they stuff the protesting Wheelie Bin with too much food. The bloated bin then stands groaning on the street until some black feathered angels swoop down from the chimney pots and relieve its distress by scattering much of the excess around the neighbouring lawns and pathways. The residents are afraid of the wrath of these angels and the residue sometimes lies in the gardens for weeks afterwards.
Sometimes it happens that the natives forget to leave their sacrifices outside the door on the appointed day. It is not uncommon on these occasions to see scantily clad men come running down their driveways dragging a petrified Wheelie Bin by the ears begging the god’s minions for forgiveness and pleading with them to intercede on their behalf. Such is the terror in the natives’ eyes that the minions at least show some propensity for mercy and accept the sacrifice.
Like many gods though, Fingal keeps demanding more and more. Once a month, in addition to the offering of the black plastic Wheelie Bin, he sent down his sister-God, Oxygen, demanding that a rarer green Wheelie Bin be sacrificed. He has now stated that two green Wheelie Bins a month must be offered up to placate her. There is even talk that he will soon demand that the incredibly rare brown Wheelie Bin must also soon be filled and left on the street for him to gorge upon.
Naturally the residents are petrified at the thought of such excessive demands and have petitioned the Church to intercede. The archbishop – more commonly known as the Director of the Environment of Fingal County Council – has wrung his hands and reported back that the sacrifices must be made or else a plague of rats, locusts and other creepy-crawly things will be visited upon the heads of the householders. In addition to this, the god Fingal has levied a financial punishment upon the heads of the householders because, he is reported as saying, not enough of the natives have been putting out their black Wheelie Bins in homage.
But of course there are downtrodden races all over the universe. What is so special about these Littlepacers?
The answer, oh Bistorians with but a single loving father figure, is that a new god has arrived in town and is trying to woo the natives away from Fingal with promises of eternal redemption. His name is Panda and already some of the natives have turned their back on Fingal and offered up their sacrifices instead to Panda. If more natives go over to Panda, Fingal will become angrier as his share of the sacrificial market declines and his appetite for Wheelie Bins of all colours will increase. Other gods, like the omnipresent Greenstar, are said to be viewing the situation carefully with an eye to picking up enough disciples to make divine intervention worthwhile.
The archbishop and bishops in the Church of FCC have all denounced the interloper as a false god and are urging the natives to shun the new road, no matter how brightly the sunlight falls on it. “Fingal is the Word, the Truth and the Light” appears to be the Church’s watchword. Thou shalt have no other gods except him.
It is all shaping up to be the greatest religious pitched battle since the gods Fluffy and Nigel squared up to each other in Sector III at the end of the last uranium age. And you can be sure there will be casualties with the helpless residents of Littlepace wedged firmly between a rock and a solid mineral-based molecular structure, to use a well-known bistorianism.
The people of Littlepace urgently need your help. Please send money – notes of large denomination only - to my intergalactic / off-planet / non-residential account where the funds will rest prior to their eventual distribution to those most in need.

Dead tigers

2008-05-12T12:31:00.001-07:00

Cartoon by Fergus Lynch

As some of you may be aware, there are not too many tigers rambling around the general Littlepace area and consequently my knowledge of the lifestyle of this great and beautiful animal is somewhat limited. I presume that when he is about to die from natural causes, he slinks off into the undergrowth, watches his life pass before him in a series of mental flashes and then pops his clogs, lying there for a long time until the hyenas figure out that he can’t still be asleep and start giving him the odd nervous nudge.
I occasionally wonder – and with increased frequency of late – what will happen when our own special brand of economic tiger crawls away into the Maumturk Mountains for the last time. I suppose we’ll all be waiting at Oughterard for a while in case he returns, but eventually we’ll have to bite the bullet and accept that Tiddles (well, nobody else has bothered to give him a name) is no more. He is an ex-tiger. He has ceased to be.
Now my tenuous grasp of economics is matched only by my tenuous grasp of reality but I predict that as soon as Tiddles has departed for that great wilderness in the sky, there will be a mass exodus from the country. Already there are rumours of a Polish Tiger – or whatever animal the Poles have chosen to represent their economic upturn – sniffing around the steelyards of Gdansk and doubtless, Lithuanian Panthers and Nigerian Cheetahs will also appear in due course.
Even if Tiddles doesn’t actually die but just goes around grabbing people by the sleeve and telling them what a great tiger he used to be in the old days, people will soon realise that a fit and healthy Moldovan Leopard cub is more attractive than a Tiger with a gammy leg and a hearing aid. There will be a mass movement of Jah people and a lot of other people as well.
And it will not only be the new communities who will leave. As happened in the fifties and again in the eighties, our young people will head for the shores of Americay and some might even venture inland, wondering why the letter “Y” has been mysteriously added to the name of the country. Or they’ll go to Brussels or Munich or Melbourne or Abu Dhabi, wherever there are jobs worthy of their qualifications.
And what will that mean for those of us left here at home in Ireland and particularly those of us in Dublin 15? Life will probably carry on as normal for settled communities in Malahide or Dalkey but for areas that have expanded hugely to cope with the massive demand for houses – Lucan, Swords, Blanchardstown, Hansfield, Ongar and so on – the effects will be seismic.
If you live in one of the newer estates – say, one built in the last fifteen years – imagine what your particular stretch of road would look like if all the members of the new communities and say 20% of the indigenous 18-30 year olds moved away. How many empty houses would there be? The actual answer, calculated statistically with all available data, is – a lot.
With all these empty houses all over the place, it is pretty obvious that house prices in the area will, like the walls of Jericho, come tumbling down. This won’t affect those of us who live here and have no intention of moving, although those people with mortgages will be paying for a pig in a poke. And they don’t even know what a poke is!
But it will affect those who have speculated to accumulate – landlords who could now find themselves with no tenants whose rent pays for the mortgages on their expensive houses. Neither can they sell because there is nobody to buy. House prices will tumble again as they try and cut their losses.
And of course with dole centres full of lines of people pining for Tiddles, there will be no need for people to commute into town because all the jobs will have gone to enlightened countries like Burma and Tibet. The brand new Navan rail line – formally opened by President Ahern – will fall into disrepair and garden centres will buy the sleepers at a knockdown price and sell them to people in Howth for rose garden borders.
With poverty rampant, many household pets – fearful of ending up on the Sunday dinner table – will pack up their belongings and head for the now boarded-up houses in Dublin 15, claiming squatter’s rights and playing Kanye West at great volume at all hours of the night. They will grow their hair long and tie-dye their collars and doubtless engage in depraved acts such as free love and civic studies.
As disaffected animals take over the neighbourhood, humans, powerless to act due to current species-equality legislation in the Constitution, will move out. After all, who wants to live next to a house full of tibetan terriers singing protest songs till four o’clock in the morning?
As whole families wander the highways and byeways of Ireland with their belongings piled high on carts, the BBC will do a major documentary on our plight and food aid will come pouring in, though many children will perish because there will be no tomato sauce to accompany it.
(Actually this is turning into quite a promising synopsis for a science-fiction novel. If anybody wants to finish it for me, I’ll only take 50% of the royalties.)
And then, if all this homelessness and eviction and ghetto-creation were not enough, finally the true horror of the situation would kick in as a whole new generation of ballad singers would spring up and drown the country in an ocean of gut-wrenching songs about “strong Irishmen and true” being forced out of their houses by uncaring building society managers and ships bound for the mythical land of Americay. Low lie the fields of the Hansfield SDZ indeed.
Now before you all start to get palpitations and reach for the valium, this is just the product of my rather fertile imagination which, as my wife often tells me, could be put to much better use. I am neither economist nor sociologist. In fact, I am nothing that has an “ist” on the end of it, except perhaps a motorist.
So do not take my idle speculations seriously. I am sure that the good citizens of Dublin 15 can sleep soundly in their beds knowing that our new and astute Minister for Finance will keep Tiddles well and truly pampered for another few years yet.

The Roquefort terrorist

2008-05-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

A while ago in this column, I urged the down-trodden citizens of Dublin 15 to take up cudgels and throw off the yoke of 800 years of oppression by seceding from Ireland and declaring an autonomous republic, tentatively titled The Principality of Castlehuddart.
The response was very encouraging with a 100% increase in membership in the past two years, though I suspect my wife is only humouring me. I daresay the take up would have been greater but for the exorbitant price of cudgels in Dunnes, which is yet another example of financial repression.
What we needed, I told my wife, was a coup.
“Cooooo!!!” she said sleepily. And thus I knew I would have to work on this by myself.
After months of feverish planning, the first blow for freedom and liberation was ready to be struck. We would announce the arrival of the Dublin 15 Liberation Army in style, grab world headlines and call on socialists around the world to rally to our cause.
So, armed with only a credit card, I entered the Ryanair website one night and purchased two return tickets to Rodez in France. This is a new addition to the Ryanair schedule and we chose it as we felt that airport security there might not be up to speed yet. It lies in the Aveyron département of southern France and is well known for being quite near other well-known regions of France.
We travelled there in mid-April, posing as tourists, ostensibly on a three day weekend break. Security, we noted on arrival, was perfunctory, with a sleepy-eyed custom official barely glancing at my proffered passport.
We checked in to our hotel in an otherwise deserted village in the Cévennes countryside and, in order to maintain our pretence, we acted like tourists. We visited the spectacular Tarn Gorge and the mediaeval hilltop village of Conques, gasped in awe at the highest viaduct in the world at Millau and then unselfconsciously made our way to the little hillside village of Roquefort sur Soulzon.
Following an EU directive – I am as yet undecided if our autonomous principality will secede from the EU or not, it probably depends on the size of the subsidies – only cheeses matured in the caves of Roquefort sur Soulzon may bear the name Roquefort. Known in France as the King of Cheeses and in Ireland as That Smelly Mouldy Stuff, Roquefort is produced by injecting penicillin found in a particular species of mushroom into the ewe’s milk cheese and allowing it to spread. I am still wondering who first thought that it might be a good idea to try that out.
Whistling with an air of complete unconcern, we made our way to the visitors’ entrance of Societé, by far the largest Roquefort producer. We paid our €3 and took the guided tour, which did not particularly add to our knowledge of the cheese making process, as neither of us had got much further than “le chat marche au bibliothéque” in our rudimentary French.
We did discover that there were three main types of Societé produced, depending upon the cellar in which they were stored. There was Original (That Smelly Mouldy Stuff) Templier (That Very Smelly Mouldy Stuff) and Baragnaudes (That Smooth Smelly Mouldy Stuff.) At the end of the tour, still whistling unselfconsciously and thus attracting a lot of curious stares, we purchased a gift box containing a 200g wedge of each of the three Roqueforts.
On the final morning, I stuffed the cheese in amongst my used socks and jocks in my hand baggage, figuring that any nosey customs official would choose discretion over valour. We donned sunglasses to make ourselves look inconspicuous – even though it had rained solidly for the three days – and drove to the airport at Rodez.
We only had cabin luggage so proceeded directly to security. My wife went first and I could see from the beads of sweat on her forehead that she was either very nervous or very warm. She got through okay and then I stepped through the metal detector. It didn’t beep and I breathed a sigh of relief which in my experience is the best thing to do with sighs of relief.
“Arriverderci!” I beamed affably at the security girl, who regarded me warily. “Is this your bag, monsieur?” she replied, indicating my holdall. “Si, si,” I answered and felt a lump in my throat, the remains of the croissant I had hurriedly devoured that morning.
“Will you open it, monsieur?” she said. I felt the cold tendrils of fear clawing at my stomach as I slowly unzipped the bag.
“And remove ze contents please.”
The game was up. Although I dallied, hoping she might get bored, she watched my every movement and the moment the three pieces of Roquefort came to light, she pounced on them with glee.
“Zees are forbidden,” she said and handed them to the guy at the x-ray machine. I couldn’t help marvelling at the technology that had allowed a machine to pinpoint cheese through myriad layers of underwear.
To my surprise, she didn’t lead me to a little room where I would be confronted by anti-terrorist police, forced to strip naked and then driven in an armoured convey to the offices of the Sûreté in Paris. Instead she just waved me through.
I clenched my right fist and yelled “Freedom for Dublin 15” at the top of my voice. Well, actually, I muttered it under my breath and stretched my arms as though yawning. Not only was my fiendish plot scuppered but I had cunningly been denied access to worldwide publicity by their failure to arrest me.
“Serves you right,” my wife said.
The plan had been simple. Under the pretence of going to the toilet, I would burst in through the cockpit doors and put the pilot out of action with the Baragnaudes. I would then hold the Original Roquefort to the co-pilot’s throat and demand to be flown to Dublin, even though that what was where the plane was bound anyway. In the meantime, my wife would hold any have-a-go heroes at bay at the cockpit door with the Templier.
We would demand the release of all Dublin 15 Liberation Army prisoners around the world and an Urbus to bring us back into the rebel heartland. The resulting publicity would advance our cause and bring the day of our glorious independence a step closer.
Later that night, at home on the Web, my wife discovered that all liquid-based foodstuffs are prohibited in hand baggage. No wonder my Roquefort had been summarily confiscated.
I am not by nature a bad-minded man but I earnestly hope that the penicillin in the Roquefort was from a faulty batch and that whichever security official got to take it home suffered violent stomach pains as a result.
Vive le fromage!

Solving the schools problem

2008-04-23T04:36:00.000-07:00

Last year, I outlined my solutions to this area’s chronic traffic congestion problem, though it has to be said the Government has been very slow in investigating my idea of a giant slide with the steps in Blanchardstown and the bottom in the Temple Bar area. Still, I can only offer up my vision for the good of humanity – I have neither the money to see it through nor the desire to get up off my backside and do something about it.
Since then I have been putting my frankly amazing intellect to the problem of the provision of schools for the Dublin 15 area and this time l’m certain that l have come up with a solution that will have winsome little Mary Hanafin rubbing her hands with glee.
The problem, as it stands, appears to be that nobody envisaged that the huge population growth in the area would mean that we would have to provide more schools. Probably they just imagined that all the new residents would arrive fully grown and educated and without any children in tow. You can’t blame the Government for that – it was a perfectly reasonable assumption to make and it is certainly not their fault that many of our home buyers started procreating once the keys were handed over.
Anyhow, the schools we do have, are now bursting at the seams with children squashed up against the windows and very often it takes the teacher ten minutes simply to squeeze into the classroom. So the very lovely Mary is under pressure to build more schools and this is where the problem arises.
First of all, she can’t mix concrete to save her life. You tell her five shovels of sand to one of cement and she still manages to get it wrong. Or else she digs down too deep and ends up with half a bucket of soil in the mixer.
Another reason she often cites is a lack of money, and I’ve definitely noticed that she keeps a firm hold on her handbag whenever the subject comes up. Apparently, and I find this hard to believe, we are being ripped off by those lovely people, the property developers.
The law, which in some people’s eyes is some kind of donkey, states that for every x amount of houses, the developer must set aside x amount of land for a school. (I have no idea how much x is and frankly couldn’t be bothered to go and find out) However, and this is a big however, and this – HOWEVER – is an even bigger however, the developer then sets the price for the land he has reserved for a school site. And then, if, after x amount of years, the Government fails to take up the option of buying the site for the very reasonable sum of €50 billion, the developer can then go ahead and build apartments on it. Or something like that.
Society’s problem is that it has traditionally seen a school as a building with a collection of classrooms, a staff room, toilets with very small facilities and a playground. This seems a very narrow definition of a school. I think it was that great philosopher Peggy Mitchell of Eastenders fame who once said, “Leave it aht, Phil! A school is a state of mind. ‘Tis the harbinger of the soul and the exerciser of wit.”
That other internationally renowned educationalist Alice Cooper was probably thinking along the same lines back in 1972 when he uttered his famous dictum, “School’s out for summer.” Out, certainly. Out in the open air. Out of the classroom.
Out in the hedgerows.
Hedgerow schools were once an integral part of the educational life in this country and I think the time is ripe for them to make a comeback. Nobody who attended a hedgerow school ever hotwired a Ford Focus, or bullied people by text message, or indeed failed CSPE and I think society would do well to look to the past as a way forward.
Just think of all the advantages! Low maintenance costs in running the school. All it needs is for the caretaker to give it the once over with a pair of shears in summer and it’s as good as new. No water rates, lighting and heating costs, no school photographs in the corridor of the 1984 hockey team that reached the Leinster Final.
Both children and teachers would be liberated from the pressure-cooker, claustrophobic environment of the classroom and out in the healthy fresh air, closer to nature. You need to build an extra classroom? Just move further down the hedge.
The problem of graffiti on school walls would come to an end as it is very difficult to spray paint any meaningful sentence on even the thickest hawthorn. Environmental issues would have more immediate impact on the students and those taking meteorology would have a distinct advantage over their more traditional contemporaries.
Of course there would be still be the usual queue of young miscreants lined up outside the Principal’s thicket but the heinous crimes of running in the corridor, impersonating wood pigeons and throwing cubes of jelly up onto the classroom ceiling would all be rendered obsolete. Macker wouldn’t be able to fall asleep at the back of the class due to the thorns piercing his backside and footballs would be more likely to break themselves rather than any school windows.
Most importantly, the Government wouldn’t be held to ransom by those nice developing people, who refuse to give a site big enough to put up even one pre-fab unless they get planning permission to erect a hundred apartments at the same time. Mary Hanafin would be able to hand three quarters of her capital budget back to the Minister of Finance and we’d all be happy, safe in the knowledge that our money would be well spent.
As with all great plans, and I believe this great plan deserves to be known as a Great Plan, if not The Great Plan, there is one tiny flaw which needs to be overcome. With all the developments that have been erupting everywhere, there are in fact very few suitable hedgerows left in the area in which to build a school.
Leave it with me, I’m working on it.

Just desserts

2008-04-23T04:35:00.001-07:00

I have to admit that I have a sweet tooth. To be honest, the rest of them are pretty sweet too and when eating out, I find it hard to resist the dessert menu.
It does not matter if I have wolfed down a huge starters and a massive main course, as well as polishing off the remnants of the plates of the rest of the party. It does not matter if I have already loosened my belt two notches and am starting to doubt whether I shall ever rise from the chair without the aid of a winch. The fact of the matter, as doctors and surgeons around the world will attest, is that desserts go down a different compartment and thus can always be squeezed in.
My grandmother, with whom I lived for a period of my childhood, was a great dessert woman, although she referred to them as ‘pudding,’ or ‘afters.’ Dessert, or sweet, was what the nobility had after dinner and implied something light and insubstantial, like a fruit salad. For us, ‘afters’ were big, thick chunks of jam roly poly pudding or spotted dick, or rhubarb crumble, or treacle sponge, each bowlful probably containing our recommended annual allowance of carbohydrate and starch and drowned in a vat of thick yellowy custard, brimming with sugar.
Seldom do any of the puddings of my childhood appear on the menus of the restaurants I occasionally frequent. When they do, a wave of nostalgia sweeps over me and I am tempted to try and recapture a part of my youth. I am usually disappointed. The bread and butter pudding somehow doesn’t taste quite as creamy as I remember it and the bakewell tart is made with thick, comparatively tasteless pastry.
But then of course, I am being unfair. The puddings of my formative years were prepared by an old lady with fifty years experience who had nothing better to do than sift a bowl of flour for twenty minutes and careful grind lemon onto a saucer. Modern restaurant kitchens can hardly be expected to spend three hours nursing a jam roly poly to fruition!
But the dessert menu today (strange how the word ‘dessert’ now has no class connotations!) very often appears to be an afterthought to the main menu, with very little variation between restaurants. I first came across Sticky Toffee Pudding ten years ago in Windermere and now every restaurant worth its custard seems to contain it (or Sticky Chocolate Pudding or Sticky Toffee and Chocolate Pudding.) Profiteroles, cheesecake and ice cream make up the other staple ingredients with one or two other specialities completing your choice.
Whereas I can understand the reluctance of restaurants to tackle spotted dick (recently re-named as Spotted Richard by one large British retail chain, in response to people being “too embarrassed” to ask for it) due to time constraints, I have no idea how some of the tastiest desserts in Christendom, Muslimdom and Jewdom are criminally ignored at the end of a perfect meal.
Semolina. Have you ever seen it on a menu? That luscious and rich creamy texture with just a hint of grit is conspicuous by its absence. Oh what fun we had adding a spoonful of strawberry jam and stirring the whole thing into a pink paste.
Rice pudding, too, and tapioca have never come into the reckoning when proprietors have chewed pencils concocting dessert menus, though zabaglione often rears its foreign-sounding and therefore exotic head. My mother-in-law makes a wicked banana bread, whose like is unequalled in the annals of Irish baking, but you never get the opportunity to complement your carvery lunch with it. When was the last time the waiter suggested evaporated milk to pour over your bowl of Sunny South peaches?
And then there is my own personal favourite, the Emperor amongst Desserts, the King of Cool, the John, Paul, George and Ringo of the sweets world – Butterscotch flavoured Angel Delight.
Just the merest spoon tip of this light and fluffy dessert melts on the tongue before suffusing the taste buds in an ocean of pure delight. Even the act of digging in to that smooth coffee-coloured surface to reveal the deeper texture beneath is pure unadulterated joy, a visual preamble to the taste extravaganza that is to follow.
Not only is it never seen in restaurants but Dunnes have also stopped stocking it, concentrating their merchandising power on strawberry, raspberry and banana, all fine desserts in their own right, but lacking that ultimate frisson of excitement supplied by the butterscotch.
But find it on a dessert menu in the Greater Dublin area? You may as well be looking for a witness with a good memory at the Mahon Tribunal. Okay, I can accept the connotations of adding “Butterscotch Angel Delight” to the menu, when everybody knows how much it costs in the shops, but you could maybe add a slice of kiwi to it and sprinkle the plate with icing sugar and bits of Flake and call it “Butterscotch sensation – a serving of aerated and finely whisked butterscotch mousse topped with fresh fruit and chocolate slivers” which sounds a lot more upmarket.
In defence of Irish dessert menus, as anyone who has travelled at all will vouch, they are a darned sight better than in many countries, which simply serve pre-packaged ice-cream in a plastic Disney figure mould. The Americans, despite their many accomplishments in combatting terrorism and promoting world peace, are blissfully unaware how good desserts can really be. A few European countries treat desserts with the deference they deserve – notably Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy – but by and large in many foreign restaurants you are obviously expected to be too stuffed after your main meal to continue eating.
I once ordered the only item on the dessert menu in a restaurant in the Siberian town of Irkutsk. With the menu being in Cyrillic I had no idea what it was until it arrived. To my untrained eye and nose, it looked and smelled like a bowl of milk that had gone lumpy and sour after being left out in the heat for a week, with streaks of blue and green coursing through it.
It remains to this day the one dessert that has refused to go down the separate compartment.

Still fighting the bin war

2008-04-08T00:13:00.000-07:00

This is an article I did for the Musings column but decided not to submit as, on re-reading, it came across as a complete rant, which of course it is!

A few years ago, at the height of the bin tax controversy, our family was featured in an Irish Independent feature called “The families fighting the real bin war.” In it, we, or rather my wife, detailed how, through careful household waste management, we had got recycling down to a fine art and only needed to put our black bin out every six weeks or so. My wife was photographed, seductively posing next to a green bin and that was that.
The secret of our bin tag bill reduction is my wife’s system of management, in which every item of recyclable material, from plastic bottles to bacon rind, has a home, leaving very little to go to landfill. It is a great system and I am thinking of writing a book on it and talking about in on “Richard and Judy.”
Of course it must be stated that recycling takes a little effort, which, in today’s disposable, dishwasher, car-washer society is very much out of fashion. Bottles have to be rinsed and dried; plastic bottles squashed, tetra packs cut open, unfolded, rinsed and dried. All the inside bins have to be emptied regularly into the green bin and/or the shed; trips have to be made to Coolmine; the compost needs to be removed from the composter at regular intervals.
So we are doing our bit for the environment. We take a little time, take a little effort and are happy in the knowledge that under the insightful leadership of Fingal County Council, the polluter pays.
This is great for me financially. We recycle so assiduously that we only pay for a black bin tag eight or nine times a year. We could probably go less but it starts to smell. We break down all our cardboard in the green bin and the Oxegen truck comes around every four weeks and our bin is only three quarters full. All our kitchen waste goes in the composter and if, in the summer, we have any pruning to do in the garden, Coolmine accepts up to two bags of garden waste free of charge.
All in all, we’re saving money by our recycling efforts and minimising our environmental footprints at the same time. So, I am happy, right?
In a word, no.
From this year, Fingal has decided that the waste disposal system is operating at a loss and so every household in the county will have to stump up €110 to pay for this, on top of the normal charge for bin tags.
I am unsure where it has been decreed that waste disposal should be self-sufficient. Is the library self-sufficient? Will we have to pay a standing charge to use this facility, on top of a charge per book? How about all the wages of the council officials? Surely, administration costs are ‘operating at a loss?’ (Actually, I’d better shut up in case some bright spark in the Council reads this and thinks it’s a brilliant idea.)
However, Fingal tells us, for our €110, every household in the county will get a brown bin collection and they will also double the regularity of the green bin collection.
Yippee. Trouble is, I don’t need a brown bin collection as I either compost all my green waste or bring it to Coolmine. And if my green bin is only three-quarters full when it is collected every four weeks, what on earth do I need an extra collection for?
This is similar to the Government turning around and saying “We’re going to raise income tax to 25% but in return, we’re going to double the amount of street lights in the country. Instead of having them every thirty yards apart, they’re now going to be every fifteen yards apart.” Unfortunately, there is no opt-out option. I can’t say. “No, its okay, leave them at thirty yards, it’s perfectly adequate.”
As a reader commented in a recent Community Voice Letters page, the whole concept of the polluter pays has now been thrown out of the window. Now we all pay, whether we embrace recycling or not. I am now obliged to fork out €110 to subsidise people who don’t bother recycling and in return the Council are spending extra money on two services that I neither need nor want.
In fact, the inference is that, reading between the lines, because our family has only been putting out its black bin every six weeks or so, it’s somehow our fault that the Council hasn’t been able to meet its waste charges! Naturally, if we’d just thrown everything into the black bin and put it out every week, the revenue from the Goulding household, and similar green households, would have been much higher!
My wife points out that the green bin service, the brown bin service and the recycling centre in Coolmine is still free of charge and that a €110 annual charge is a small price to pay for these services, particularly when you hear how much the private contractors are charging in Ballyjamesripoff. And I agree. In fact, up until recently, I have always included Fingal County Council’s environment in my bedside prayers for their enlightened polluter pays policy.
But why should we pay for recycling? If anything, the Council should be paying us for saving reusable material from landfill. We are doing them a service and they are charging us for it.
At this point, I must interject that a recent private operator’s leaflet came through our door and their standing charge of €280 per year worked out at far more than my estimated Fingal cost of €110 plus 9 x €8 = €182 per year. So the option of changing to private enterprise for the avid recycler is not really there.
But I am annoyed with Fingal and why wouldn’t I be if I am facing a 300% hike in my refuse charges? It is the old Eircom trick of paying for standing charges, whether you use the service or not. I sincerely hope this policy will not lead to illegal dumping or other such dodgy activities as throwing your rubbish in someone else’s skip or burning it. Personally, I would not resort to simply using the public waste bins in the street for my one tiny bag of daily rubbish – though it’s very tempting – and I will probably end up paying the €110 charge, though very resentfully and with a bad heart.
I feel as though I want to start another bin war.

The lamentable letterboxes of Latchford

2008-04-04T10:17:00.000-07:00

Up in the further reaches of Dublin 15, between the townlands of Rosedale and Ravenswood and nestling in the foothills of the old and now deserted Hansfield Road, lies the quiet and ancient township of Latchford.
It is said that residents can trace their history back to 2004 when a merchant called EP Lynam first had the vision to turn a barren and featureless field into a strong and vibrant community and embarked on a plan of building that would be undreamt of today. Quite why he decided to name the estate after a bearded Everton centre-forward of the 1970s is unfortunately lost in the mists of time but certainly modern day Latchfordians are proud of their heritage.
Latchford has been called “The Zurich of the North,” particularly by those who have visited both places and have commented on the similarity and indeed the resemblance is striking. Both have roads and houses and footpaths and green areas and enjoy an almost winsome mix of apartments and semi-detached and terraced housing, so the moniker is well-founded, though perhaps Zurich’s financial district is slightly larger.
Every fortnight I have the pleasure of visiting this delightful estate in order to relay the tidings, glad and otherwise, contained in this very newspaper. In days of yore, naturally, this would be done by a stout man with a very large voice and a bell, shouting out “Hear ye! Hear ye!” in the middle of the village green, but sadly my bell lost its clapper a while back and I got special dispensation from the editor to simply post a copy of the paper through every letterbox. That’s modern technology for you.
As newspaper rounds go, Latchford is pretty okay. The doors are close together and thankfully there are no garden walls to treble the distance around the estate. With a fair breeze and a good head of steam, I can give every resident his or her fix of community news in around one hour.
However, despite all its fine attributes, its honest, hard-working citizens, its picturesque and homely street layout, its sturdy yet attractive housing and the stunning view towards the hedgerows of Ongar, Latchford appears to be deficient in one specific area – its letterboxes.
Most of us, I am sure, take letterboxes for granted. They are there as a decorative means of blocking the draught that would otherwise surge through the rectangular hole in the front door. A letterbox is a letterbox, as Iago cunningly tells Desdemona in “Othello.”
The lamentable letterboxes of Latchford, however, are different.
They are as much use as sunglasses in a coalmine.
Oh sure, they look the same as any other letterbox, rectangular and brassy and possessing that enigmatic glint when caught in the sun’s fleeting rays, but the proportion of houses that have defective letterboxes is quite staggering. This of course has gone unreported for many years but the inclusion of the Letterbox section in the next census will doubtless shed light on this whole murky affair.
I must admit I am only viewing these sorry pieces of door furniture from an on-street perspective. I have no idea as to the condition of these letterboxes hall-side as posting newspapers is generally a task performed al fresco.
A lot of houses simply have no letterbox on the outside, merely a rectangular strip of rubber. Whether the letterbox blew away in a storm or was purloined by the hares that bound suspiciously around the field at the rear of the estate or simply melted in heavy rain, I have no idea. In some cases, the delinquent contraption lies forlornly on the window ledge, pleading to be reattached to the front door. (Incidentally, a note to any apprentice newspaper deliverers – do not try to post through these letterboxes, as there is no corresponding hole in the window ledge)
Some letterboxes have been ingeniously reattached with what Buzz Lightyear called “unidirectional bonding strip” (or “sellotape”) or masking tape. Others have been carefully balanced back into position so that, though they look perfectly sturdy, glancing sideways at them causes them to fall off. As I was delivering to one house for the last edition, the whole letterbox came away in my hand and I was suddenly affronted by one of those Game of Scruples type moments when the thought flashed through my mind that perhaps I should just place it on the windowsill and walk away quickly. Thankfully the prophet Elijah appeared to me in a dream and I heeded his advice and gingerly replaced the offending article as I had found it.
Strangely, not every house has been affected by this curious phenomenon. There are still many houses that boast sturdy letterboxes, grinning intactly (?) from their proud vantage points, oblivious to the mayhem that surrounds them. However, many of these have a rough edge on their bottom lip, which rubs against your hand when inserting a newspaper.
After the first time I had completed the round, my hand resembled one of those roughly chopped hunks of meat which zookeepers throw to the lions and I have since been obliged to purchase one chain-mail armour-plated glove to complete the round as per current health and safety guidelines.
I have been doing some research into what Doctor Watson would doubtless call “The Curious Case of the Latchford Letterboxes” and have come up with three possible explanations for this sad state of affairs.
Firstly, EP Lynam, hardworking and honest merchant that he was, was sold a dud consignment of letterboxes. Apparently there have been a lot of fraudsters operating in the letterbox trade in recent times and it is possible that several have moved to our shores for tax reasons. It is hard to believe that EP could have been hoodwinked by charlatans but they might have caught him at a weak moment.
Secondly, and equally unlikely, is that the lad who affixed the letter boxes was in a hurry to get home and listen to his new Lionel Ritchie CD and cut a few corners (not literally.) Maybe he used insufficient glue or glue of an inferior quality or glue for indoor use only – a classic case of spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar, though a ha’penny doesn’t buy you much tar in today’s market.
Thirdly and much more likely is the uncorroborated tale I heard fourth hand from a friend of someone who once drove somebody past Latchford. Apparently a fair damsel approached Mr Lynam and asked him if she could purchase one of his houses. After lengthy and protracted negotiations, he refused her on the grounds that she “hadn’t any money.” Flying into a rage, she turned into an ugly old hag with a hooked nose and a pointed black hat and screeched, “A curse on you, Lynam. From henceforth, all your letterboxes shall in time wither and fall off! Yea, even those of your children and your children’s children! And I shall hide all but two of the letters of your first name in a place where nobody shall ever find them, except maybe an amorous prince a hundred years from now!”
Of course, this is only rumour, but it does appear that Latchford’s lamentable letterboxes have been bewitched in a way not seen since the great Castleknock garden gnome hex of the late 1700s, when 40 of these six inch figures ran away to Benidorm and set themselves up as property developers.
In the meantime, I will keep you posted.

On blogs and blogging

2008-03-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

On a recent radio programme, the very lovely John Waters, of the Irish Times and Eurovision fame, waxed lyrical on the subject of bloggers. “I have never actually met one,” he opined, “but they are all stupid. If I meet somebody for the first time, I ask them if they are a blogger and if they reply in the affirmative, I ask them to leave my presence immediately.”
For those of you who are not fully computer literate, a blog is simply a “web blog” or an online diary set up generally by individuals. And a blogger is naturally someone who hosts a blog. (Again, “hosts” might imply finger food and cheap chardonnay, but, despite the great advances in technology, scientists have yet to come up with a way to serve food online)
Of course I have never actually met John Waters but he is stupid. If I meet anyone for the first time, I ask them if they are John Waters and if they reply in the affirmative, I ask them to leave my presence immediately.
That statement is not strictly true. I put it in to be facetious, much as I hope Mr. Waters was doing with his original pontification. In fact, I met him briefly last year at the Strokestown Poetry Festival just before he flew out to Finland to represent Ireland and we had a brief, but perfectly polite conversation on Dervish’s chances of taking the musical world by storm.
I find I am somewhat perplexed by Mr. Waters' assertion and not merely because he chooses to offend so many people who have discovered a new and harmless pastime. As a columnist in the Irish Times, he writes a log, which over a period, builds up as his own personal record of the times we live in. Which to my admittedly stupid eye, doesn’t seem a million miles from what bloggers do, without of course the web connection. But of course, he gets paid for it and bloggers do it for free.
I must confess that I am a recent convert to blogging, thanks to the very worldly Tony Devlin of the Phoenix Writers Group who, á la John the Baptist, showed me the true path to literary fulfilment. Until that seismic day last August, I had always believed that setting up a website was for highly qualified computer geniuses who speak in terms of gigs and megabytes and it would cost an awful lot more money than I was prepared to spend.
Tony – he actually does bear a resemblance to JTB in his pre-decapitation days – pointed out that all you need to do is to set up a free account in Google (not more than two minutes) and then set up your own blog from a series of templates given to you (again, not more than two minutes) I couldn’t believe I had my first one up and running for absolutely no cost in less time than it takes to do the Daily Star crossword.
It is possible to blog on any subject that you desire. Some use it simply as an online diary: “Met John Waters today. When I told him I was a blogger, he asked me to leave his presence immediately. God, I feel so stupid.” Others use it to lambaste traffic wardens, or raise awareness of shingles or to praise Brian McFadden’s musical output.
I have a number of them set up now. I have a blog on Shelbourne 2008, blogs for my light verse, a blog for my “seriouser” verse, a blog on the various Irish lighthouses I have visited (don’t ask!) and a blog on the Irish football team. Even this column goes onto my “Musings” blog. On the John Waters scale of intelligence, I must be pretty close to the height of stupidity.
Of course, as you get more and more used to the set-up and play around with it, you can blog more and more things. You can add pictures. You can add links to other sites. You can host cheese and wine parties (only joking) Some people have podcasts, which I am still highly suspicious of as they sound quite contagious.
I have open access to my blogs which means anyone with the internet can come in and have a look. Naturally I don’t put in personal details, address or phone numbers but people are welcome to leave comments if they want, provided they are fulsome in their praise of my blogs. Actually, not many people leave comments, which is probably a good thing, as a host of negative comments might cause me to close the site down.
One little device I have found fascinating is the Stat counter. You may have already seen them on websites – “You are the 24,709th visitor to the site” Again, free and easy to install, you can actually go into the counter and find out where all your “hits” are coming from and how they found your site (in my case, normally by accident!)
Of course, most of my sites don’t attract too much interest. Can’t think why! Some have barely crawled into double figures since I installed the Stat counter in January. Others are getting up to thirty hits a day from around the world. It fascinates me that I can see that someone in Surinam spent two minutes on my site reading a poem about a frog. More worrying is that a lot of Americans seem to google “Poem about goldfish.” Whether this is a commentary on the forthcoming elections, or if there is a lucrative goldfish poetry competition happening over there, I don’t know, but I have caught myself more than once darkly brooding over this phenomenon.
If you get a successful blog, with loads of hits, companies will pay you to put ads on your site. I have decided against this route for two reasons. Firstly, I consider myself an artist and I feel that any commercialism of my work would compromise my integrity. Secondly, and far more truthfully, I don’t get near enough hits to entice any self-respecting advertising executive to part with even the tinniest portion of his budget.
One suggestion I gleaned in order to increase my Stat count was to simply include the words “Christine Aguilera Naked” on the site. This will ensure a great deal more hits from all around the world. In fact, as this column goes onto a blog, I expect the stat count to soar immediately. Or you could include “Britney Spears Naked” or “Brian Lenihan Naked” or “Joan Burton Naked” or “Lionel Ritchie Naked,” whoever you feel is the most popular object of desire.
Apparently, every year at this time, the Irish Blog Awards are held. They have lots of different categories – humorous, political, arts and crafts – and they publish a very long shortlist before whittling it down again. And then they have a ceremony like the Oscars in a city centre hotel and everyone goes along to meet other bloggers and make acceptance speeches, break down and cry and dedicate the trophy to their mum.
In sheer hard neck brazenness, I nominated a few of my blogs for an award and was dumbstruck to find some of them making that long shortlist and was even more amazed to find this Musings blog making it onto the “Best blog from a journalist” shortlist. However, after a quick phone call to a dress hire shop enquiring about the cost of renting out a tux, I decided that my artistic integrity would again be compromised if I were to go for the populist approach.
So when I read that it didn’t win, I concluded that John Waters was nearly right after all.
It’s the blog judges who are stupid.

Painting the Town Yellow

2008-03-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

It has never happened in the past and it will probably never happen again but I am going to use this column to formally congratulate Dublin Bus. Now, please excuse me while I go and sit in a darkened room with a wet towel pressed against my head.
That’s better. You may be wondering which of Dublin Bus’s many marvellous attributes has earned this eulogy. Is it the far-sightedness of the route planners giving commuters on the 39 route a complete and inclusive tour of every housing estate in Dublin 15 before arriving at Ongar? Or maybe it is the legendary punctuality of the buses which always come when they say they will and never leave passengers stranded? Or perhaps it is the professionalism of the drivers who take roundabouts and sharp bends at such a gentle speed to avoid discommoding the many standing passengers that delight in using the service?
The answer is – and here I’m paraphrasing the great Lionel Ritchie - none of the above, though all are worthy of mention in helping to keep Dublin Bus at the cutting edge of suburban transportation. No, I have been enraptured by the poles.
Not, I hasten to add, those East European bus drivers whose quick, witty banter help dispel the traveller’s winter blues – I mean the poles at the bus stops.
You must be severely snow blind not to have spotted them. Where once they were navy blue, in keeping with the circular DB logo on top, they have now been painted a glorious yellow that brightens up even the dullest thoroughfare. Even Picasso, during his little known and ultimately ill-fated yellow period, never had the temerity to produce a yellow so vivid. Canary yellow is probably the nearest I can come to describing it, though any small songbird coloured so vividly would undoubtedly attract the attentions of every sparrow hawk in a twenty mile radius. It is like radioactive custard, a bold sweeping corporate statement of intent from one of the biggest movers and shakers in Ireland today.
Frankly, this country is now light years ahead of our European neighbours in terms of bus stop colouring. The Germans are still experimenting with a rather mundane emerald green, while the Belgians are firmly rooted in the past with their robust but sombre black poles. Even the Spanish, normally renowned for their love of all things florid, have not progressed much past the terracotta so favoured by Franco.
Purcan Daul, probably Ireland’s most earnest poet of the last thirty years, has been quick to put pen to paper in praise of the new poles. “So come, yellow crane legs / And shine your bounteous gait / ‘Pon those who patiently wait,” he wrote in his epic poem “Bus,” which was premiered at the Coolmine Poetry Slam recently to rapturous applause.
The question of course is – what is the reason for this sudden eruption of colour from Dublin Bus?
Busologists are naturally split on this and the forum message boards on the internet have been hopping with theories. “The Travelling Wilbury” from Hartstown maintains that this is Dublin Bus’s response to the advent of spring, echoing the annual explosion of daffodils on the centre lane of the N3. “Regina the 39er” suggests that at last the company have got a female marketing manager whose keen eye has insisted that the bus stops blend in with the new buses in an attractive and easygoing way, rather like the way that women seem to think that curtains and cushions should match, (although that is somewhat of a sexist viewpoint not at all shared by this observer.)
A certain cynical section of the bus-hopping public have now been wondering if the luminous bus stops might be an ingenious device to even more fully attract the driver’s attention and thus prevent him or her from sailing past crowds of frozen commuters when the bus is only half full. As if that ever happens!
Others have caustically remarked that it is a Government ploy to divert the public’s attention from the recent revelations at the tribunals and the parlous state of the health service, though as everybody knows this Government has much to be proud of and does not deserve such scandalous vilification.
Whatever the reason, Dublin 15, like the rest of the city, has now exploded into a riot of colour that makes the Dutch tulip fields look positively drab by comparison. Distributor roads shine when you turn onto them and passengers have taken to wearing dark glasses for fear of too much exposure to the brightness. Approaching pilots have been warned not to confuse the rows of brightly painted bus stops with the landing lights at Dublin airport after a Ryanair flight from Carcassonne recently discharged a plane load of puzzled tourists onto the tarmac at Diswellstown.
Critics have pointed out that the vividness of the new colouring will attract the black marker in much the same way that a Wet Paint sign attracts a curious finger. “Macker loves Natalie” will now stand out much more against a yellow background than it ever did on the navy, when people had to squint fiercely to decipher the enigmatic messages contained thereon.
I’m not sure this is true. In fact, I have every confidence that our much maligned disaffected youth will view the aesthetic values of the new posts with pleasure and reverence and will not seek to adorn or indeed deface them in any way.
Sadly the name of the man or woman who came up with the idea to paint all the bus stops a lurid shade of yellow will probably never be known. It is possible he or she is merely a disgruntled employee who utilised the company’s suggestion box in a moment of merriment, little realising that his or her facetious suggestion would be pounced upon by the company’s marketing department with such rapturous enthusiasm.
Maybe they’re sitting in the Clonsilla Inn or the Bell now telling a doubtful audience that it was their idea to paint all the bus stops and how much money they have made out of it. It is a tale they can tell their grandchildren when they grow up happy and content in the wonderfully colourful new neighbourhoods of Dublin 15.
Whoever you are, sir or madam, I salute you.

A Pancake Tuesday Wreath?

2008-02-21T04:34:00.001-08:00

On January 6th, which very helpfully fell on a Sunday this year, I was co-opted by a certain party into taking down the Christmas decorations. Apparently this is the day that they have to come down or else you get penalty points on your house insurance or something, so I quickly started untangling wires and unplugging the fibre-optic Santa that my daughter finds so unnerving.
To me of course, it seemed very soon to be taking them down, particularly as we don’t normally put ours up until the weekend before Christmas, on the basis that we’d be fed up of them by the time Christmas comes around. Every year somebody bursts into the kitchen at the end of November to announce that they’ve just seen a house with a Christmas tree in the window and we all tut deprecatingly and say “That’s ridiculous” and “It’s getting earlier and earlier every year.” Although I didn’t actually see it myself, I read on the Beechfield Residents’ website that somebody on that estate had their tree up and lighting on the 1st November, which has to be some sort of a record.
But I duly went about unhooking, untangling and unplugging while my wife wrapped and put them in the boxes that were to go back into the attic until next year, making sure that the unused cards, wrapping paper and crackers were packed in a box to be left next to the attic door, so it should be easy to see if we need to buy any of same next November .
(This is supposed to be a foolproof method but we’ve actually accumulated enough wrapping paper to last us into the next century, so next year I have decided I will set up a stall at the farmer’s market in Ongar and sell it off. I’ve already been practising my “Fifty cent de wrapp’n’ paper. Would ya like a roll, luv?” spiel.)
Finally, when the house seemed as bare as a Minister of Finance’s bank account back in the eighties, I removed the wreath from the front door and was proceeding through the kitchen to hang it on the apex of the shed roof, as is our tradition, when I was stopped by our interior designing expert.
“Where are you going with that?” she asked.
“To the shed, like always,” I answered.
“Oh. I was going to leave it on the front door. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Of course I know my wife well enough to know that this was not a wistful remark but rather a direct command to go and put it back where I had found it. And, being the dutiful husband that I am, I did so with alacrity.
The wreath remained there all through January. As the needles did not turn brown, there was no reason to consign it to the back garden and here I must complement Dunnes Stores on the wreath’s longevity, which they should use in their advertising next Christmas and if they want to pay me a few shillings for this endorsement, so be it.
If it is still perfectly good, as my wife stated, what is the point of taking it down and leaving it out in the back garden? What was the point, indeed?
Of course, we had to field the occasional puzzled remark from callers. We used up the Russian orthodox Christmas excuse and also the Chinese New Year excuse and I scoured the internet to find other possible feast days that might explain away its presence. A Pancake Tuesday wreath or an Easter wreath, anyone?
It was naturally very handy for giving people directions to our house. “We’re the one near the end of the road with a wreath on the door” became a foolproof way of locating our abode.
I spent a large period of what little leisure time my wife allowed me scouring the local estates to try and see if anybody else still had the wreath in situ. By mid-January, I was starting to widen my search and eventually found such a house in Kilcock, which was a great weight off my mind, and I could stop fretting that we were perhaps unique in the western world.
However it became evident that we had to face up to the reality of the situation and admit that we were the only house in Dublin 15 with a Christmas wreath still on the front door by the time February rolled into town. It was a statement, I told myself. We were telling a disposable world that we would not discard an object simply because society dictated that we should; that we were trying to maintain the natural biodiversity of our house and garden; that we were sending out a signal that a wreath, like a dog, is not just for Christmas.
On my meanderings around the area though, I did notice quite a few icicle lights and one “Merry Christmas” sign still adorning the walls of houses. These unilluminated remnants of the festive season indicated perhaps that they would save the residents time next Christmas. Instead of risking life and limb hanging them up on a freezing cold December afternoon, they need only flick a switch and on they’d come.
However when I suggested to my wife that perhaps we ought to leave the Christmas tree up throughout the year and simply turn it on again in Advent, she gave me one of her famous withering stares that can reduce a man to jelly.
My daughter tried to turn it into a joke. She got a teaspoon from the kitchen drawer (after asking directions from us) and threaded it carefully through the tightly woven foliage.
“Who’s that?” she declared.
Seeing our blank faces, she gave the answer immediately.
“Wreath With a Spoon.”
I have since written her out of my will.
Of course I suspect that many of the neighbours thought that we were just too lazy and could’nt find the time nor the energy to remove the damned thing. The social embarrassment was acute and I took to leaving the house only under cover of darkness and then with a jacket over my head. Eventually, when my wife was up in HMV one day looking for the new Lionel Ritchie album that was rumoured to be the best thing he had done since “Hello,” I decided to take matters into my own hands. Rooting out an old paintbox set, I coloured in a portion of the wreath in a convincing light brown.
“I see the wreath’s starting to go,” I murmured over dinner, as she failed to spot the offending withered patch such was her disappointment following her fruitless shopping trip.
The hapless object is now adorning the shed in the back garden, at last genuinely brown and a sad reminder of a Christmas passed all too quickly.

Alternatives to Childminding

2008-02-12T00:57:00.000-08:00

(Over the years I have been writing these articles, my wife has censored them stringently, mainly because they reveal too much of the idiosyncrasies of our daily life, which she doesn't want revealed to the world. Sometimes whole paragraphs are erased and once or twice, complete articles.
There has only been one occasion though when Fergus himself has rejected an article, on the grounds that it was "a bit disturbing." This is it)
.
The cost of childminding these days is fast causing a whole generation to become celibate. Queues form daily at the Rotunda with young mothers claiming that “there’s been a dreadful mistake” and can they have a set of rustic placemats and an electric blanket instead? Orphanages are putting up “House Full” signs. Crèches are becoming so successful and enjoy such a high income per capita that many are threatening to secede from the Republic and set up their own thriving autonomous theocracies. Grizzled old prospectors no longer dream of striking oil but now yearn to strike children, to coin a phrase, so to speak, in a metaphorical way.
The whole childminding issue was very much to the fore in the last bye-elections in Kildare and Meath and there is no reason to believe the temper tantrum has abated any in the past two years. Parents in Castleknock are so incandescent with rage about the whole issue that they have been known to tut and shake their heads despairingly whenever the subject is raised.
But what can be done about these toddlers that are breaking their parents’ hearts and bank balances?
The more enlightened companies in Ireland today actively encourage their employees to bring their children to work, though it is hard to complete an urgent report on last month’s unexpected downturn if your three year old is sitting on the keyboard picking her nose. Of course there are still some professions – mountaineers and astronauts come to mind – where bringing baby along is actively discouraged, for some reason.
A taskforce was recently set up by the Minister to pursue the possibility of finding gainful employment for these two to five year olds. If they could prove useful to the economy rather than being serious non-contributors, if they could somehow pay for themselves, then perhaps the social and financial drain on parents would not be quite so acute.
A proposal to send them down t’mine seemed to be on a winner until it was discovered that the last coalmine in Ireland had closed more than a decade previously. Suggestions that “we could send them down anyway” fell on deaf ears, as it was generally seen to be unprofitable to have toddlers wandering around deserted mines eating charcoal.
One of the members of the taskforce, a Mr. O. Schindler, suggested that maybe you could rub them in petroleum jelly and push them up the inside of armament casings to clean them. Again, a quick flip through the Golden Pages revealed a complete absence of munitions factories in Ireland and the plan was reluctantly discarded. A similar suggestion that maybe you could strap them to a pole and use them to clean first floor windows was dismissed when it was pointed out that a simple squeegee incurred far less running costs.
Nappy adverts appear to be almost the sole gainful employment of our country’s pre-schoolers and sadly there are far more applicants than jobs on offer. Unsuccessful auditioners, rejected by Pampers’ equivalent to Simon Cowell, have been known to hit the bottle in an alarming way, sometimes pouring the entire contents over the floor in a fit of temper. Many simply become demoralised and roam around the back streets disconsolately until Barney comes on.
One solution that the Government is seriously promoting is the notion of child farming. Farmers on the outskirts of the capital are frantically seeking profitable usage from their land after the latest round of subsidy cuts has seen them forced to keep their current BMW for more than six months. Some are opting for eco-tourism – hiring out the leaky barn to couples with zithers – though most have developed a sudden yen for growing apartments. Still, child farming is becoming quite a popular alternative.
Farmers drive down to the local market – normally Tesco or Dunnes – and round up all the stray youngsters sitting on the floor in a strop. These are then herded into a trailer by a sheepdog invariably called “Boy” and then the farmer drives them back and sets them loose on his land.
“You have to round them up in the evenings and bring ‘em into the barn,” says Vladimir Duffy of Whitechurch Farm, Kilbride, who wishes to remain anonymous. “The noise does get to you at times but once they get a handful of Hunky Doreys they’re generally quite docile until morning.”
The E.U. subsidy on child farming is still comparatively large compared to turnips or sugar beet and many farmers can have a quota of up to 300 toddlers an acre. On the better run estates, farmers employ local lads to go around pulling faces and blowing raspberry noises on their forearms to amuse the kiddies, thereby significantly increasing the tonnage.
Generally the farmers keep the livestock until they are ready to go to school and then send them back to shell-shocked parents, providing they haven’t moved in the meantime. As well as pocketing a sizable amount from Brussels, the farmer also receives the cost of comics and rusks from the parents.
But though the financial rewards are high, anybody venturing into a child farm enterprise should realise that it is not a big bowl of cherries, as Farmer Duffy, his face in silhouette, explains.
“Its hard work rearing childer,” he states, spitting on the palms of his hands and rubbing them on his trousers to emphasise the point. “They’re very dirty animals and mucking out is not a pleasant job at all at all, so it isn’t. I’ve heard some people actually let them into their houses but you couldn’t keep the house intact if you did that.
“Most of the time they’re quite content to wander around foraging for worms and the like, but sometimes you’ve got to sit down and read ‘em Goldilocks and the three bears or some other fanciful nonsense, just to stop ‘em hyperventilating. But no pain, no gain – isn’t that what they say?”
He is critical of human rights organisations who claim that the children are treated like cattle and forced to exist in barbaric conditions. “My childer are the happiest childer y’ever saw,” he claims. “We shear them three times a year and dip ‘em every week or so. They have all manner o’ biscuit tins and cardboard boxes to play with and sure they’re well used to the branding by now.”

The drive of death

2008-02-05T01:04:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, just occasionally, and a lot more rarely as you get older, you experience something that thrills you and excites you to the very marrow of your being. Something that you know is a whirlwind knuckle-clenching ride to oblivion as you laugh in the face of danger and dribble in the face of certain death. For some people, it is parachute jumping, or white water rafting, or maybe the new series of Desperate Housewives.
I have just had one of those experiences. As I type this, my body is still shaking with the sheer excitement of it all. I am on a high and my body has not yet adjusted to the dull, maudlin reality to which it has returned. I need to tell the world about it.
Yes, I have just come down the New Ongar Road at 60kph.
For those of you who live in the south of Dublin 15 and have never had occasion to venture out into the sticks, the New Ongar Road is a brand spanking super highway that links the Power City Roundabout (not the official name!) on Blanchardstown Road South with, well, New Ongar. It has liberated a whole generation of Littlepacers and Ongarites from the horrors of the N3 and the Blanchardstown Centre slip-road and given them an alternative route to the holy shopping Mecca only two miles away.
In short it is a godsend and I always include the Roads Department of Fingal County Council in my nightly prayers by way of thanks for their divine and munificent intervention.
It is a wonderful road. It consists of a lane for ordinary traffic, a bus lane, a murderous and psychotic looking pink strip (commonly known as a “complete cycle path” – sorry, but the old jokes are always the best) and a pavement for pedestrians. And there’s another set of four travelling in the opposite direction too. It is an eight lane, straight as a dye, ultra highway that would have your average American drooling in envy.
There are no houses on the New Ongar Road. The good citizens of Mount Symon, Allendale, , Lohunda et al, whose estates border this infrastructural jewel in Dublin 15’s crown, may sleep soundly in their beds, protected by a long high wall that runs the length of the road in both directions. Just the kind of wall that the deafened citizens of Pheasant’s Run and Swallowbrook on the N3 would give their right ear for. As it is, nobody is inconvenienced by the high pitch scream of traffic tearing up and down the New Ongar Road at 50 kph.
I say 50 kph (that’s 31 mph for those of you still operating in pounds, shillings and pence) because up until this year, that was the speed that the Road Traffic Authority had deemed it unwise to surpass. And rightly so. A long, straight stretch of road with a bus lane to separate the cars from pedestrians and cyclists and no houses on it? Sure, you’d want to be as mad as a Lionel Ritchie fan to want to risk exceeding 50 kph.
However, and I know it is hard to believe, some drivers felt that tearing along at 50 kph was too slow. They had this reckless habit of overtaking on the inside – nipping into the bus lane to try and get past the car in front. No matter that a bus is very seldom seen on the New Ongar Road since its official opening – a bus lane is still a bus lane, whether any buses use it or not. Of course such despicable activity soon drew the attention of the local Gardaí whose radar gun soon put a temporary stop to this practice.
But the RTA, or some man in an office somewhere, acceded to the pressure to raise the speed limit and since the beginning of the year, the red bordered circle with the black six-oh in it was planted at either end of this Formula One track. Again for the benefit of English and American readers, I convert this as 37.2 mph, a speed, I’m sure you will agree, that is physically very difficult for the human body to endure.
Purely in the interests of research for this column, I have just driven down the New Ongar Road at a speed that approached this limit. (For the purposes of clarification, I always regard the journey from Ongar to Blanchardstown as ‘up’ and the reverse as ‘down.’ I realise it may well be an optical illusion but I fancy the latter run would make a damn fine ski slope, should our oil run out and global freezing make a comeback)
The G-forces as you approach 60 kph have to be felt to be believed. The loose skin on your cheeks is pulled back and it feels as though your hair is being pulled out by the roots. It was only with great difficulty that I managed to prevent my head from snapping back, knowing that to take my eyes from the road ahead would mean calamity. Now I know what those brave astronauts go through whenever the Space Shuttle is launched.
Despite this, and I cannot verify this for certain as I was struggling to maintain my grip on the wheel, I have the vague impression that I was still being passed on the inside by cars going even faster. Now, my knowledge of quantum physics is decidedly sketchy but I am sure that Einstein had a theory somewhere about what happens when speeds of 60 kph are exceeded. Time begins to warp and you actually reach the end of your journey ten minutes before you began, I think he said, which is great if you are late for an appointment at the hairdressers, but would have poor Gay Byrne turning over in his grave, if he were dead.
In his wisdom, the man in the office somewhere has placed three sets of traffic lights along the New Ongar Road, perfectly synchronised that, although you may get through one and possibly two of them, the third will always pull you up. The worst one is at the junction with Shelerin Road, obviously designed by the same man that designed the infamous Snugborough Road interchange. Each road gets a go in turn – and there’s about five of them, then the pedestrians. Just miss a green light and you have time to read another chapter of “PS I Love You” (why this work of art was not even shortlisted for the Booker Prize is one of the great travesties of modern literature) before the lights turn green again
Of course, as the traffic coming up the New Ongar Road builds up, waiting for the green light, some drivers at the back nip into the bus lane at the lights, afraid that they will not make the next green. Or maybe it is important to them to get three cars ahead, I don’t know. Whatever reason, not only is this practice extremely dangerous, as it runs a risk of colliding with the bus that has hardly ever been seen on the road, but it also infuriates the drivers in the proper lane.
The Rules of the Road state that the proper course of action in this situation for the law-abiding driver in the correct lane is to make sure the first car in line makes a smart getaway and is followed in close proximity by all the other cars in the line, thus preventing Mr. Impatient from getting back in line and keeping him in the bus-lane where he is summarily nabbed by a waiting traffic policeman thirty yards up the road.
In practice though, the first car normally makes an extremely slow getaway or the car ahead of yours obligingly leaves a large gap to allow him to come back in. And of course the traffic policeman has more important things to do than dealing with traffic.
I am calling on the Minister for Transport to step in here before somebody gets seriously annoyed.

A warning to all house buyers

2008-02-05T01:02:00.000-08:00

The recent case of the Pigg brothers that made headlines across Ireland recently should serve as a salutary warning to all those first-time buyers who launch themselves into the property market without researching fully the implications of their actions. While putting money into real estate and property is generally regarded as a sound long-term investment, the tale of two of the Pigg brothers shows exactly what can happen if a few simple steps are not followed.
The three brothers grew up in the countryside ( a green place the other side of Clonee) and on reaching maturity were promptly handed a puckle of money and kicked out of the family home by their mother, who claimed they kept their rooms like a pigsty. Each of them caught the Expressway into Dublin, alighting in awe as the Q building came into sight on the N3.
On opening their puckles, each brother found they had enough money to invest in the property market and promptly set about securing lodgings in that mythical suburb known as Dublin 15.
The first Pigg brother entered a very dodgy estate agents and decided that a cheap house would be the best bet. That way, he would still have enough money left over to go and have a good time. Accordingly, he purchased an “idyllic rural retreat made from traditional materials – may need some renovating” up near Hollystown. With the money left over, he was able to go to Heaven every night with a Swedish flight attendant on either arm and life was great.
The precise events of the night in question are still sub judice but according to local sources, there was a sudden gust of wind and the whole house simply collapsed. Rumour has it that the traditional material used in the construction was in fact straw and not even good solid Irish straw at that but a substandard variety imported from Taiwan. It is believed that Mr. Pigg then absconded to the Costa del Sol after the house insurance company issued fraudulent proceedings against him, though the presence of a solitary pork chop in amongst the rubble has fuelled macabre speculation amongst local residents.
The second Pigg brother decided to go down the eco-friendly route. Convinced by another shyster estate-agent that chopping down 145 trees to construct a house was the only way to safeguard the planet, he opted for a wooden chalet built alongside the railway track on the far side of Clonsilla Railway Station. He bought the site and then drove up to Ikea in Belfast where he purchased a flat-pack house and garage.
He found that, after all this, he still had time to go to the Vortex in Dunshaughlin every Saturday night and sometimes managed to score with one of the young wans that had travelled up in the minibus from Dunboyne.
However, a similar tragedy befell this brother. One night towards the end of November, locals said they heard a strange huffing and puffing, which might well have been the last train out to Maynooth, but could equally have been something more sinister. When daylight dawned, as it is wont to do in Clonsilla at that time of year, the house lay in ruins and the eager locals took it away for firewood before somebody thought to call the police. With much of the forensic evidence crackling away in neighbouring fireplaces, whispers soon began to circulate about the sturdiness of flat-pack housing until Ikea threatened court action.
Again the second brother appeared to have vanished completely, though sightings of him in a Kibbutz outside Tel Aviv remain unconfirmed.
The third brother bought a lovely two bedroomed semi-detached house in Latchford from a reputable estate agent. Of course, he was fleeced by the bank whose interest rate charges bore no relation to the current economic situation and he was only able to get up to the Hartstown House for a solitary pint every month with his neighbour, Nigel, but he was pleased with his investment and felt very secure in his compact abode.
Latchford of course is built on the site of the Great Scaldwood, a huge forest that once spread from Cabra to the River Tolka and home to hoards of marauding bears, spiders and wolves. Having done his research and not entirely believing the history books that claimed that these wild beasts had all been eliminated, he purchased security chains and an alarm and a cowl for the top of his chimney.
One night, he wrote, in a letter to the Times, he fancied he heard a strange scraping on his roof and a mysterious panting noise. Having just watched a David Attenborough programme about how wolves had learned to remove cowls from the tops of chimneys, he boiled up a big pot of water in the microwave and placed it in the fireplace.
Sure enough, within a few seconds, a big hairy beast landed in the pot with a yelp and disappeared back up as quickly as he had come down. A photo fit description of the intruder closely resembled a wolf, though police still called at the home of Fingers “The Beard” McGee and questioned him closely about his whereabouts on the night in question.
The third Pigg brother naturally wrote a book about his experiences called “Huff and Puff” which topped the bestseller list for non-fiction over Christmas, following his appearance on the Late Late Show. Although the book reads well as an adventure story, Citizen Advice Centres have recommended it as essential reading for all first time house buyers as a guide to the pitfalls inherent in a foray into the property market.