Reclaiming the game

Pic by Pizzapie

This morning I listened to a conversation in work between two very loquacious groups of colleagues. It was in essence the same conversation that has taken place every morning since time began and went something along the lines of “Liverpool are muck, United are great, Liverpool are great, United are muck, hurray, boo, hurray, boo.”
Among the Wildean repartee, there was, as usual, the tendency to refer to the football club of their choice in the first person plural. “We’ll stuff you when we meet you next.” “We need to sign a striker.” “We are the greatest.” Call me a cynic, but I doubted very much whether the persons uttering these claims have obtained the necessary permission from their respective clubs to speak on their behalf. However I decided not to intercede.
Of course, the ‘we’ is indicative of feeling a part of this entity called a football club. They are the supporters, the faithful, from the day they are born until the day they die. Blue and true, or red and true or pink and true or whatever. True football supporters one and all.
The only problem with this little scenario is that football is a sport played in three dimensions. Nay, I jest not. In the real world, football consists of real people, the smell of deep heat, humorous crowd chants and a need to take evasive action when the left black decides to boot the ball out of play in your direction.
The other sport, about which the workplace arguments revolve, is a sort of virtual football called The Premiership. It is a soap opera for (mainly) men, featuring a cast of thousands from around the globe, all earning the kind of money that Matthew Perry and Courtney Cox could only dream of.
In a sort of “Who’s your favourite Desperate Housewife” kind of way, the very young are peer pressured into deciding which Premiership team they will buy into for the rest of their lives. Then they are encouraged to purchase the shirt and buy the Sky package and follow their team in the print media and the two-dimensional screen whenever it might appear.
This is actually not very different from what real football used to be like. There would be peer pressure also from a young age to go and follow the local team and buy the shirt and follow the team in the print media and the three dimensional arena whenever it might appear.
Of course, with the meteoric rise of the Premiership, there has been a corresponding decline in interest in real football. This has happened globally and now kids from Vietnam to Venezuela play in the streets in their Manchester United shirts, while down the road Ho Chi Min City and Caracas Casuals play to half-empty stadia.
Whenever I mention the subject of League of Ireland football, I am informed that it is rubbish, or words to that effect. To back this up, they tell me that they went to a match once and it was dire. When I point out that they have just been lamenting how awful their team was on the box last night, I am regarded with pity. I am often asked which Premiership team I follow, which is akin to asking me for my favourite member of the Royal Family.
By claiming that they don’t follow League of Ireland football because its rubbish, Premiership fans – and we are really talking Big Four here – are really admitting that they only follow a team because they win trophies. Why else are Celtic so popular and Hibs, who are much older and just as Irish, ignored? Why don’t they follow Middlesborough or Aston Villa in such numbers? Dublin fans will never win anything, yet they don’t all go off and support Kerry.
Shels will never win the European Cup and even the League of Ireland looks out of bounds for the foreseeable future. Yet I am convinced that winning our first League title for thirty years in 1993 and beating Hajduk Split at Tolka in 2004 gave me far more pleasure than United fans here had on winning their 800th trophy last year.
It is estimated that by 2012, half the world will be of Chinese extraction and 47% of the global population will claim to support one of the Big Four in the Premiership. In England there is a campaign called Reclaim the Game, which aims to promote real football with mud and crowds but they are small and pitted against Murdoch’s billions.
This season Sporting Fingal joined the League of Ireland. They play in Morton Stadium, Santry and unfortunately are doing rather well in their first season. I say unfortunately as I am a Shelbourne supporter and they stymied our push for promotion recently.
Most Shels fans dismiss the club as a sporting franchise, a Fingal County Council plaything and, based in Morton Stadium in Santry, they are hardly ‘local’ to Dublin 15, despite Fingal’s attempts to make us all feel that we belong to their little empire.
They do however play real football, sometimes badly, sometimes well, but it does actually exist in the real world. You can actually go down to a match, pay your €12 in and actually shout at players and officials in a situation where they can hear you. Sometimes they will even answer you!
Now I am not advocating that everybody climbs down off their barstool and goes and watches Torpedo Fingal. I’d prefer if they came and saw Shels. Or Clonee United or Verona or Castleknock Celtic or some team that is putting a huge amount of time and effort into representing the local community, whether they are good, bad or indifferent. But at least go and watch a real match! You can still follow your soap opera for the rest of the week!
In my confirmation class, I once had the temerity to ask if you could be a good Christian and not go to Church. In reply, I was told the parable of the boy who wanted to be a boy scout (this was back in the mists, when Baden-Powell infamously promoted Scouting for Boys!) He purchased the uniform, practised his reef knot and bowline until they were perfected, lit campfires from two pieces of flint and sang all the campfire songs. Yet he never attended a meeting. Could he claim to be a real Boy Scout?
In the same way, a true United follower can tell you how many goals Giggsy has scored and how many they beat Valencia by the last time they played them and how much shopping Rio Ferdinand bought on the day he was supposed to take a drugs test.
But if he never goes to a match, is he a real football supporter?
Support your local team.
Reclaim the game.

Sunrise, sunset

So there we were in southern Crete, in an idyllic little town on the coast and somebody suggested we book an evening meal in the village above on the mountain “and watch the sun set.”
Okay, a bit yuppie but it seemed like a good idea. We ascended the steep winding path at around 7.30pm and got a steep, winding table for eight on the terrace with fabulous views of the bay below. And it was warm and the food was delicious, even the olives, and the company was great, but the sunset? The sun was like an aspiring actor that has waited all his life for his big part but then proceeds to fluff his lines. It showed no desire to turn luminous red or paint the skies with fantastic oranges and purples but simply sank with a bit of a groan behind the headland to the west. When it had gone, a little strip of cream bordered the headline for a while and then all went black.
I remember sitting on my balcony in Tenerife with a bottle of beer and watching the sun (it was the same one – I recognised it) set over the sea. I was prepared for the spectacular and again was roundly disappointed. Far from crashing into the dancing sparkles of the ocean in a cacophony of colour, the sun never actually made it to the horizon. It became enveloped in a kind of a haze three inches above the sea, shrugged its shoulders dispiritedly and simply petered out.
Now Crete and Tenerife have great advantages over Dublin 15 in many areas, particularly the weather. You may not have noticed but the last couple of summers in this part of the world have been a little on the moist side. However in other parts of the continent, the weather has been veritably Scorchio, to borrow a phrase. One would have thought that entry into the EU would have resulted in some more equal distribution of weather but it appears that this is still a long way off.
But where Dublin 15 wins out every time is in the quality of its sunrises and sunsets. For the benefit of any teenagers reading this, sunrise occurs in the early morning when the sun ascends above the horizon. In our case, the horizon is somewhere over Damastown and some of the most spectacular sunrises I have seen have emanated from behind the large beech tree in Littlepace Woods.
A few weeks ago, the sun was about to burst forth upon a world that, while not unsuspecting, was largely asleep. There was a large grey cloud that looked a bit like the island of Madagascar (without the lemurs) hovering above the Spar and the hidden sun illuminated it in oranges and greys, so that it looked like a stream of molten lava or those hot coals that very silly people run across in the South Seas. This was set off by an absolutely pure pale blue that the whizz kids at Dulux can only dream about, which stretched from the N3 to almost overhead, where it gradually became darker until merging with the night sky above Beechfield. On the far side of the N3, pinks and creams were splashed on this magnificent canvas in what was a veritable riot of colour.
Sunsets can also be quite spectacular, with flamingo pinks and dusky oranges sometimes covering up to a third of the sky. Red clouds, isolated and seemingly on fire, are commonplace and must have terrified prehistoric Dublin 15-ers, before they figured out what they were.
It is very likely that the history of the art world would have been very different if Paul Gauguin had decided against Tahiti and come to live in Blanchardstown instead. What a world of colour he would have tried to recreate, sitting at an easel outside Mace at six o’clock in the morning and gazing in awe at the panorama above Corduff!
In Channel 4’s recent programme “The World’s 100 Greatest Sunrises,” hosted by Brussel Rand, Dublin 15 had seven sunrises all told and three in the final ten. Critics may argue that the eventual winner (the very first sunrise after God created dark and light on the Fourth Day) was somewhat of a bizarre choice as there exists no photographic evidence to back up its claims of brilliance, save for some rather grainy black and white snaps, which prove nothing.
Similarly the morning after the Krakatoa explosion in 1883 may well have produced a fantastic sunrise but solar commentators all agree that this was due to particles of molten ash in the atmosphere and cannot be attributed to a merely naturally produced luminary phenomenon.
For those of you who have difficulty struggling out of bed at such early hours, the Sunrise Channel (number 834 on your digital box) broadcasts repeats of the best ones throughout the day for those of you who missed it first time around. This is normally accompanied by some atmospheric music such as the panpipes or Slade’s “My Friend Stan,” to further enhance the effect.
Of course, you don’t get good sunrises or sunsets every day. Certain criteria have to be met in order to produce a multi-coloured extravaganza such as I have been talking about. The time of day is important. Very few sunsets take place in the middle of the afternoon or at nine o’clock in the morning, so timing is essential.
Also, a good scattering of cumulo-nimbus clouds seems to augment the show, which of course is where the likes of Crete and Tenerife fall down so badly. These sun-kissed islands don’t appear to have the ability to produce good, sunlight catching clouds and frankly, they are the poorer for it. Of course, the mere presence of clouds indicates the possibility of rubbish weather but every cloud has a silver lining, so they say.
Just as Hollywood attracted film-makers with its brilliant blue skies at the turn of the last century, so I feel that Dublin 15 could easily become the sci-fi capital of the world. The alien skies above this portion of the capital would save millions on film sets and push back the boundaries of what is possible in the world of cinematography.
I have written to an Bord Fáilte, suggesting to them that they come to Dublin 15 and record some of our sunrises and sunsets. Then they can play them in audiovisual rooms in Blarney Castle or the Burren Interpretative Centre, with a diddley-i-doh soundtrack and encourage rich Americans to come and sample the delights of Carpenterstown and Mulhuddart. We could establish sunset interpretative centres, where we could explain the complicated astronomical dynamics involved in sunrises and sunsets, with little models and an interactive video game and perhaps an adventure playground.
So far, I have not had a reply but I feel it can only be a matter of time.

The old school tie

I remember being very concerned about that tie.
I was four years old and it was blue and yellow and grey and I knew that somehow I would have to master the art of putting it on. It had hung on the bedroom door handle for a week, along with the rest of my uniform, and I had eyed it nervously every time I passed in and out.
I made a few half-hearted attempts but the “knot,” such as it was, came apart if I looked at it. What on earth was I going to do when the Big Day arrived?
Thankfully Dad came to the rescue and the night before my first day in school, we went through the procedure until I had it perfected. Left hand, little end. Right hand, big end. Big end six inches longer than the little end. Hold out little end in left hand. Pass big end in between tie and arm, let go, catch it and go around again. Second time, come up by neck and down through the gap in the tie just created. Raise knot to neck and adjust to correct size.
Soon I was able to do it subconsciously and without looking in the mirror. If it had been an Olympic event, I’d have qualified easily and would doubtless have been in contention for a medal place.
Like every other schoolboy, I soon learned the trick of pushing the thin end of the tie through the buttons of my shirt, ingeniously overcoming the need to redo the knot if the thin end was too long. I recall excitedly imparting this information to anyone in earshot, with all the eagerness of Sir Isaac Newton explaining the laws of gravity.
Of course, the state of the tie leaving the house was a far cry from the state of it on my return, much to my mother’s frustration. Red-faced and sweaty, I would bound in through the door with the tie loose around my neck and tilted over to the side, or else it would be rolled up in a ball in my pocket along with all the fluff, sticky sweets and other treasures I had managed to accumulate during the day.
The school tie was great for tying around your head and pretending to be an injun. In fact, I would say that any passing Cherokees or Mohicans would have to look again to make sure we weren’t compatriots, such was the uncanny resemblance of the blue, yellow and grey school tie to traditional Native American headwear.
It was also great for tug o’ war, though mums doubtless tended to disagree. You could also tie your mates to their chairs and, in the summer, when jumpers weren’t worn, they would also do for goalposts, though disputes often broke out over their exact delineation.
Over the years, the way that the school tie was worn reflected the fashion trends. At the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, it was considered “hip” and “groovy” to make the knot as large as possible, often the size of a small football and obliterating the very wide lapels on the shirt. It was a great source of amusement to us in those days to grab the thin end of someone’s tie and yank it very tightly, until it was down to the size of a marble and impossible to undo without the aid of a chisel.
This practice ceased with the advent of punk rock when it became distinctly uncool to wear the knot of your tie large and floppy. It was much more anarchic to yank it down to the size of a cherry stone and the more frayed it looked, the better. These were the days when the honour of the school was repeatedly invoked in order to stop the growing trend of cutting other people’s ties with a pair of scissors. Doubtless the founding fathers would be rotating madly in their respective sarcophagi at the carry-on.
By the end of my secondary school career, I was thoroughly fed up with the old school tie, both in a literal and also a symbolic sense. I found it rather difficult to convey respect to a bit of cloth that you wore around your neck for merely decorative reasons just as I was developing a rather deep antipathy to the notion of a school as a kind of father figure that should be venerated due to having been in existence for many years. I had toyed with the idea of going to the doctor, Alex Higgins style, and claiming that the tie chafed my neck but in the end I spent my money on going to see the Clash instead.
The worm, naturally, turns. As a father myself, I was rather looking forward to helping my son master the intricacies of cravatology (okay, I made it up) on his first day at school but it was not to be. My wife returned home with one of those ties with the elastic around it that you simply slip over your neck. What kind of fun is that? Yet another labour-saving device that means schoolchildren now have an extra ten seconds to play with at the start of every school day. And if you try wearing it on your head, any self-respecting Sioux or Navaho would spit on the ground contemptuously.
I could not however share my wife’s righteous indignation when my son returned home with the tie rolled up in a ball or full of mud stains. This was partly due to the fact that it was not me who washed and ironed it but also I was secretly rather pleased at my son’s antipathy to the state of his tie.
My secondary school tie went out in a blaze of glory on my final day at school. It was a cheap and unimaginative shot but it felt good, as though the flames were cleansing my soul.
I did however come across my old primary school tie in the attic recently. My mother must have packed it away with my three-legged race second place certificate and my certificate for swimming twenty five yards without drowning. Despite the battering it had suffered, it still seemed in remarkably good shape and I realised that it was probably the article of clothing that I had worn most often in my life.
Wow, I thought sentimentally, and threw it in the bin.

The legacy of Scaldwood

I was waiting in the barbers in Ongar recently and among the reading material was an ancient manuscript purporting to document the true history of the establishment of townlands in the Dublin 15 area. Blowing off the dust, I opened it carefully and noted that it was dated MDCLXXVII, which to the uninitiated means it even pre-dated numerals and was thus Very Old.
Long, long ago, it seems, a vast, deep, impenetrable forest covered the land between the River Liffey and the North Pole, or at least as far as the Tolka River. This forest was called Scaldwood and it was marked on maps with terrifying legends such as “Here be beasties and creepy-crawly things.” Within the forest lived wolves and bears and hedgehogs and all manner of bloodthirsty creatures, though it is unclear how anybody knew this, seeing as nobody had ventured within its green-leafed canopy.
Scaldwood was a name that struck terror into people’s hearts and often other parts of their anatomy as well. An early version of the “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” for example – used as a lullaby for young impressionable children on the north side of Dublin - detailed how going down to the woods today would doubtless mean getting your head bitten off by a rabid wolf.
And then in the seventeenth century, there appeared on the scene a band of young men who did not know the meaning of the word ‘fear.’ Of course there were a lot of other words they didn’t know the meaning of, for Samuel Pepys hadn’t brought out his famous dictionary at that time.
There was Leopold Blanchard, strong, fair and the bearer of the most magnificent moustache in western Christendom; Randy Luttrell, the movie star; Denis Diswell who, legend had it, could perform cartwheels with both hands tied behind his back; the four amigos, Billy Blake, Hughie Hunt, Harry Hart and Willy White, who had long dreamt of building four towns linked by a semi-circular distributor road; Igor Carpenter, the aptly-named carpenter; Alan Ash, the railway buff; Peter Pellett, Fintan Phibble, Wally Holly, Kieran Kelly, Tony Tyrell and the peculiarly named Warren Warren.
This troupe of gay young blades used to meet in the Undamaged Wall (now the Hole in the Wall) pub on Blackhorse Avenue, where they would drink and carouse and play dominos. Occasionally they would play Spin the Bottle and on one occasion, Alan Ash wagered Leopold Blanchard he “dared not venture a half a league into Scaldwood.”
Reliable witnesses say that all faces turned from the telly at these words and silence fell. Then all faces fell and silence turned from the telly. After what seemed like a minute but was more likely sixty seconds, Blanchard spoke.
“Ha!” he quoth. “I will venture into Scaldwood my lily-livered dandy. Not only will I venture therein but I will travel to the very middle and there construct a town with a wondrous shopping centre.”
“And I shall hack down a portion of forest and construct a whole new estate with management companies!” roared Tony Tyrell.
“And I shall clear a large space and make a fine golf course,” said Wally Holly, brandishing his fork magnificently.
“And I shall rezone a large portion of the forest for housing and maybe a secondary school,” added Kieran Kelly.
“And we shall build our towns and link them with a semi-circular distributor road!” cried the four amigos, clutching each other awkwardly to their bosoms.
When word got around about this foolhardy venture, the city fathers consulted with the city mothers and declared that “whatsoever portions of Scaldwood were cleared and towns constructed, these could be named after the perpetrators,” a handsome declaration made in the expectation that none of the fifteen would ever be seen again.
At 9.17 on a Wednesday morning (the exact date has been lost in the mists of time), after a hearty breakfast of Coco Pops, Leopold Blanchard gave his magnificent moustache a final twirl and led his fourteen companions into the notorious Scaldwood. A large crowd cheered them on, shouting encouraging words about being ripped from head to toe by tigers. Wives and children sobbed bitterly, even those who weren’t related to the men.
And that was the last that anyone saw or heard of the gallant band for five years. Lonely light-putter-outers on the fringes of the forest sometimes thought they heard strange sawing noises coming from the interior as they trudged their weary way home at midnight. And Captain Llewellyn in the Ordnance Survey Office in the Phoenix Park repeatedly wrote home to his wife that “I have strange dreams that I hear concrete mixers at work in the forest, even though they will not be invented for another 250 years.”
And then one day, a massive spruce fir came crashing down at the perimeter of Scaldwood and fifteen bearded but unbowed men marched out, hatchets on their shoulders and a look of triumph in their eyes. Leopold Blanchard, his moustache more magnificent than ever, unscrolled a sheet of parchment and, in a large, powerful voice, proclaimed to a passing small boy that Scaldwood had been well and truly spanked and that henceforth no-one need ever fear its terrible name.
When word got around about the men’s return, there was a clamour to visit the townships that the men had created. Randy Luttrell gleefully showed visitors around his castle and charged them well for dining in his restaurant. Denis Diswell performed handless cartwheels for amazed onlookers around the new estates named after him and Alan Ash proudly showed people around his railway station.
But the most awe and reverence was saved for Leopold Blanchard and the bustling High Street complete with church, pubs and bank that he had constructed. A site had also been reserved for a shopping centre, he told the press conference, with work expected to begin in the next 300 years or so.
And this was how the Greater Blanchardstown area first evolved, hewn from impenetrable forest by fifteen strong men and true who spat in the face of the danger and stuck their tongues out at peril. Today all that remains of Scaldwood is two square yards of woodland in the back garden of 73, Lohunda Avenue. A survey conducted in 2002 reported that “there appears to be no wolves, bears or other wildlife of any significant size currently surviving within.”
As I was ushered to the chair and draped in voluminous cloths that failed utterly to keep any stray hairs from getting down the back of my neck, my mind was filled with the great and heroic deeds of those brave men who risked all to give me a safe place to have a haircut.
And I suddenly felt very humble.

Rain magnets

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

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

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.