Dead tigers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.