In praise of Connolly Part II

So my son dropped me at the doors of Connolly Hospital and I got out, clutching my admission form, my 1970s dressing down and a pair of beige slippers.
“See you,” I said but he was already tearing out of the carpark as though practising for Rally Ireland. Idly I wondered if I would see the car in one piece again.
However there were more important things to worry about. Here I was for my first spot of surgery ever. They were going to perform a lumpectomy (possibly not the correct technical term) on my lower back, a simple day case but, at last and for a few short hours, I was a genuine member of the hospital fraternity and not merely an irritant to be shooed out when visiting time was over.
“Good morning!” I said in kinship to a young woman in a dressing gown, standing at the door with a cigarette in her hand. She stared at me as though I had two heads or indeed a golfball-sized lump in my back.
I glided through registration with ease, despite nearly coming unstuck on the seemingly innocuous question of my GP’s identity. Luckily it was on my referral form, so I got 100% and sailed through to Round 2.
Round 2 consisted of sitting on a chair in the ward without falling off until the nurse called my name. Deploying a masterly sense of balance, I passed with a merit and at last I was in the ward.
“Slip this on you and I’ll be back in a minute,” said a nurse, handing me a night gown.
If my borrowed dressing gown was hideous, this nightgown looked as though it had come straight from the textile factory at Hell. Off-white through a hundred washes, the design consisted of the word ‘Hospital’ arranged into triangles and scripted in reds, yellows, blues and greens. Presumably, this was to ensure nobody took one home, the way they purloin towels from hotels. I murmured to myself that I wouldn’t be seen dead in one and then realised with a start that hundreds of people probably had.
“I meant, that you take your clothes off first and then put the nightgown on,” said the nurse when she returned, drawing back the curtain with a swish. Well she hadn’t actually said that. Didn’t she know I was unused to this sort of thing?
When she came back a third time, she asked if she could have a look at my lump. I thought it would have been churlish to refuse so I stood up and turned around, conscious of the fact that the open-backed nightgown also revealed my backside.
“My God, that’s a large one,” she said, leaving me wondering if it was the lump to which she was referring.
When she was done, she pulled back the curtains and informed me that I’d passed Round 3 and I’d be going down to surgery shortly. Now, hospital was one of the languages I didn’t take in my Leaving Cert but I had a suspicion that ‘shortly’ was one of those irregular adverbs. I prepared myself for a long wait, sitting on the chair and nodding at everybody who padded by, in a spirit of surgical kinship.
I had done the hospital a disservice though because the nurse had been using the English definition of ‘shortly’ and fifteen minutes later I was led down the corridor and into a small room. Here I was handed over to the care of a man and a woman all gowned up who looked at my lump and asked me if I’d be better sitting on the bed or lying on it. Again, this was a question that nearly stumped me but eventually I came up with ‘Whatever’s the best for the doctor,’ an answer which entitled me to the grand prize of a lumpectomy.
The three of us chatted away until the surgeon arrived. The anaesthetist talked about having done a 36 hour shift the previous Friday and Saturday and it hadn’t really seemed as though he’d had the weekend off at all. I thought of my own work and felt very humble.
The surgeon arrived. If policemen seem to be getting younger to people of our generation, my surgeon still appeared to be in secondary school. But she was very friendly and would have put me completely at ease if I wasn’t already as relaxed as I could be.
“I think we’ll have you lying on your side,” she said and I smacked my forehead with the palm of my hand. How could I have not thought of that? She pulled up a chair and either she or the anaesthetist started sticking needles in around my lump. I wanted to watch but my head wouldn’t swivel around that far. I made a mental note to make sure the lump was somewhere on my front the next time.
Now this is what my offspring call ‘the gross bit,’ so anyone with a squeamish disposition just skip the next three paragraphs.
“Right, here we go,” she said and I craned my head back as far as I could. Next thing I knew, I heard a small “Oh!” and I saw what could only be described as a fountain of liquid spurting up to within an inch of the ceiling and then come splashing down. After about a minute’s silence, the surgeon said, “Well, now I think we know what it was,” and left the room.
“You absolutely drowned her,” laughed the anaesthetist, tearing off rolls of kitchen paper and carpeting the floor with them.
When the surgeon came back, in a clean gown, I apologised profusely, adding that it was not really something I did as a habit. She explained that it had definitely been a blocked sweat gland. “Normally, they just dribble out,” she said. “This one must have been under intense pressure.”
Anyway she set to work cleaning me out and then patching me up with a needle and thread, before applying a pad. She asked me if I wanted to see what was left of my lump and I said ‘why not?’ It actually reminded me of something that you clean out of a cooked chicken, thin skin and little balls of solidified white fat. “We’ll send it off for analysis but there’s really nothing to worry about,” she said. “They’ll send the results off to your GP shortly.”
They asked me if I wanted a wheelchair to take me back to the ward which seemed rather odd as they hadn’t operated on my legs at all. As I padded back, I wondered if I should enter the ward moaning loudly and put the frighteners on everyone still waiting but I decided to be charitable.
And that was about that. Plain and simple. I remarked to my wife later that it was such a pleasant experience that I wouldn’t mind going back and she hit me.
I was sent home in time for lunch, barely four hours after my triumphant arrival at the front door. I could see when my son picked me up that he was disappointed that he couldn’t use the car for longer.
After two days I could take off the pad and show off my scar. The consensus was it looked like a zip or a fishbone and that I should get a fish’s head tattooed onto the end of it.
As for the hospital tests coming back, the surgeon caught me out good and proper. Fourteen weeks later and I realise she was using the hospital definition of ‘shortly.’

Finding your chapel of love

In 1818 in the parish of Baltiboys in county Wicklow, Martin married Mary Ann Cullen. Over 150 years later, their great-something grandchild was born who later became my beloved wife.
The only curious thing about all this was the fact that, in the church records, Martin, as you may have noticed, didn’t have a surname. It wasn’t that he was too poor to afford one, for even tenant farmers have a right to a surname, nor did he lose it in a poker game.
In those days, the priest would ride out on his horse to the family home, often isolated or a long way from the parish church. To mix religions, it was a case of the mountain coming to Mohammad, because Mohammad couldn’t afford to bring the wedding party all the way to the parish church.
Consequently, when the ceremony was over and the priest had been plied with home-made hooch, he would stagger off on his hopefully sober horse and eventually, the following morning, fill in the marriage register. In poor Martin’s case above, the hooch must have been particularly potent, for it seems that he couldn’t remember the chap’s surname (which, incidentally, was Behan.)
Somewhere along the line, the law changed and church weddings were made compulsory, probably to save a generation from wandering the earth without a name like, again to mix religions, the Wandering Jew. And then, somewhere further down this rather strange line, civil ceremonies were permitted in registry offices for those who were churchless. It would appear also that the captain of a ship also had the power to marry any couple masochist enough to combine a wedding with a sea voyage.
Under recent Government legislation, there is no longer any requirement for couples to tie the knot in either a place of worship or a registry office. Lovebirds can now pledge their respective troths at any public venue, provided it has been approved by the local Council. Our local councillors are, of course, as everybody knows, the people in the best position to safeguard the morals of the country, hence the requirement that they ratify any proposed public venue. So far as I am aware, the only public venue that has been approved for civil marriage by Fingal County Councillors is the olde-worlde and atmospheric Fingal County Offices in Swords.
Of course in America, they have gone the whole hog. You can get married seemingly anywhere that you like and by anyone who has bought the relevant doctorate over the internet. You can get married by an Elvis lookalike while whirling around Space Mountain in Disneyworld; a Jacques Cousteau wannabe can marry you at the bottom of the ocean; doubtless the first Space Shuttle wedding will attract worldwide attention.
We may sneer at their trivialisation of the marriage ceremony but doubtless they would argue, if they could be bothered, that it is not the signing of the dirty deed that is important, but the way that you live the rest of your lives. Is it better for a couple to get married with all the pomp and ceremony of a church wedding and then endure a lifetime of cruelty and misery; or get married by Darth Vadar in Star Wars costumes and live happily ever after?
Personally, I got married once and that was quite enough for me, thank you. But if I ever got married again, I think I’d try and be a bit more creative about my choice of venue. There’s a lovely roundabout at the bottom of the Ongar Road which would do very nicely. Slightly raised, it would give passing motorists a good view of the priest, the blushing bride and me, all dressed as Lionel Richie.
I’m sure that the councillors would approve.

Surviving the Christmas night out

Okay, so you’ve only joined the workforce in the past year and this is your first Christmas night out with your new colleagues. Or maybe, you’ve recently transferred from a company that didn’t believe in the whole concept of Christmas and you’re about to experience the office party experience for the first time. A Christmas night out virgin, somewhat apprehensive about the whole experience, what are the pitfalls that you can fall in to on this most difficult of evenings?
Probably the most common fallacy about the Christmas night out is that it is something separate from the normal routine of office politics. Far from it. Do not be lulled into believing that over familiarity with the boss, or with his wife, will be banished completely from his mind when you show up for work again on the following Monday. Despite his protestations of camaraderie at the beginning of the night, slapping his head and calling him Baldilocks will not endear you to him any time in the near future. Nor will groping his wife on the dance floor.
Which leads us nicely onto the misconception that at Christmas nights out it is necessary to down copious amounts of alcohol in order to have a good time. I am sure some people see this as a way of dealing with colleagues that they can’t abide – and in truth I can see where they are coming from on this – but in reality, if you don’t overdo it, you have much more fun.
It may be harder mentally to dance when not completely jarred but at least a semblance of hand-eye coordination is helpful. Someone is bound to have a camera so unless you want your worst excesses recorded for posterity, there’s no point in overdoing it. It will also save you from going to sleep in an alleyway on the way home and waking up with pneumonia.
But the sobriety issue is particularly true on the following work day when you can sidle up to a sheepish colleague and whisper “How’s the trousers?” and all sorts of lurid thoughts will run through his mind as he tries to make sense of it. “Did Madeleine get home all right?” will also leave him stumped, especially if there is no-one called Madeleine in the workforce.
You should also be prepared for the manager who approaches you on the night out and begins a conversation with “I don’t want to talk shop but...” This is particularly dangerous as it would be unwise to offend but you run the risk of getting cornered for two hours while the geek from accounts gets off with the wan from sales that you had your eye on all evening. Probably the best tack is to endure him for five minutes and then protest a weak bladder.
It’s probably a good idea too to have a set time that you intend to leave at. Naturally, it can’t be too soon in the evening or everyone will think you’re only showing up for the food and not for the joy of socialising with your workmates. And it’s never a great feeling to be the last person left in the establishment with the table groaning with the weight of sixteen pints bought hurriedly when the shutters are coming down.
There is always a certain point in every Christmas night out, after which the proceedings start to deteriorate badly and you are sorry you didn’t leave two hours earlier while relatively capable. The trick is trying to hit that point as accurately as possible. It’s normally some time between midnight and one o’clock so it might be a good idea to get your partner to pick you up around then, giving you a perfect excuse for leaving the jollifications.
The most important thing to bear in mind, though, is that there is only one thing worse than waking up the morning after the Christmas night out and remembering all the embarrassing things you did the night before.
Not remembering them.

Losing your Fathers

I know many of you will be reading this expecting to hear all about my terrifying brush with minor surgery during the summer, as promised in Issue 142, but I simply can’t let this issue go without relating the anguish felt in the Huntstown area over the loss of not one, but both, of our parish priests.
When I say loss, I do not mean that they have simply gone astray in the Blanchardstown Shopping Centre and we can’t quite locate them, like the priests in Fr. Ted who were lost and disorientated in the lingerie department of Dunnes.
Truth of the matter is that the Archbishop works in mysterious ways. Fr. Eugene has forsaken us poor sheep and has headed off to the bright lights of downtown Mulhuddart, while Fr. Ralph has been retired, despite the fact that he is still under eighty. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose one parish priest is unfortunate; to lose two hints at carelessness.
It seems like a veritable age since Fr. Eugene first rode into the parish, tethered his horse to the prefab that served as the church and proceeded to put manners on us. No longer would we get away with mumbling our responses. No sirree. We would sing our Hallelujahs as though we were trying to impress Simon Cowell and anything less than full participation meant that we had to sing them again until the rafters shook.
It was something of a culture shock. Fr. Jones – who, let’s face it, did not have a voice to make Louis Walsh leap up and down with excitement – had somewhat minimised the singing bits of the mass. Fr. Eugene, however, definitely had the X factor and we now were expected to sing three hymns as well as gospel acclamations and responses at full volume!
Of course, we got used to him and him to us. Under his stewardship, the new church opened in Huntstown, as well as the Chapel of Ease in Littlepace. He introduced the wonderful sight of all the children elbowing each other out of the way to be the first up to the altar to participate in the Our Father and I was particularly struck by his revelation to me, on seeing my Shelbourne jersey about how, as a child, he used to play football in the streets with Shels supremo Ollie Byrne.
Fr. Ralph came later. With three masses to be said between Huntstown and Littlepace every Sunday morning, it would have been something of a test for Fr. Eugene to sprint the half mile between the two churches, so one morning this twinkle-eyed, silver-haired bearded priest appeared at mass, like Ronnie Drew with a collar.
I think Fr. Ralph missed his true vocation as a stand-up comedian. He could have them rolling in the naves with some of his self-deprecating observations and his ramblings and asides were of Ronnie Corbett-esque proportions. And to me, he uttered the greatest line I ever heard from a priest as we were leaving mass after Pope John Paul II died. “Look at the crowds,” he enthused. “We should get rid of a pope every week!”
It’s difficult to know what to do when a priest leaves the parish. My own inclination would be to have a bit of a hooley, though I suspect both of our departing priests’ dancing days are over, no matter how many times Fr. Eugene danced around Ollie Byrne fifty years ago. Besides, it’s not quite the same as when a work colleague leaves and everybody goes out and somebody gets up on the table and bares their backside or tries to get off with that girl in accounts.
I understand that the parish have invited them back for a special mass in October, though to me this is like asking a departing postman to come back and do a few hours sorting. An anonymous suggestion that we hold a karaoke night was apparently ruled out on the grounds that Fr. Eugene would blow everybody else out of the water, particularly Fr. Ralph who is notorious for starting hymns an octave too high.
Similarly, what on earth do you get as a present for a priest that is leaving the parish? Certainly not some of the lurid items that are dished out to departing work colleagues. Although I suppose if a priest is supposed to renounce all worldly goods, then buying him a present is a bit like buying a pint for a reformed alcoholic.
Birthdays, the card shop up in the centre, don’t appear to stock a range of “Sorry you’re moving on, Father” cards, or even, “Sorry you’re retiring, Father” cards. It was only when I looked that I realised that Hallmark don’t really cater for priests at all – I have since written to them and pointed out this gap in their market.
Anyway, the pair of them are gone now this past two weeks. Fr. Eugene is doubtless sipping his margueritas by the pool in balmy Mulhuddart and has probably forgotten about us already. I’ve heard many families in the area are now enrolling in singing classes in preparation for the mass. Fr. Ralph, I expect, is busy forming a Dubliners tribute band with a view to touring the country, providing he can start “Seven Drunken Nights” in the right key.
Meanwhile we have a new priest. Fr. Begley is eying us warily and we’re eying him with equal caution. It’s like when you get a new teacher in school. Doubtless we’re going to try and see how little singing we can get away with in the mass and wondering if he’s going to insist on us singing the third verse of the hymn on the missalette.
There are many who no longer see the parish as a geographical entity. We live in one particular area and the things that bind us together are the public transport problems or the local shopping centre or the pub. However, the church in Littlepace has always had a good attendance at Mass and it remains an important social as well as spiritual centre for many families in the area.
So when you lose both of your priests in one fell swoop, it can rightly be regarded as the end of an era. Gone, but not forgotten.

Slide rules ok?

I suppose you have to be “of a certain age” to remember slide rules, though of course that would all depend how certain your age is. It would probably be more accurate to say that people of an uncertain age would definitely not have come across them.
What was a slide rule? God only knows. It was something that we wrestled with in Maths. And not only wrestled with – we fenced with it, rapped people over the knuckles with it and it was great for propelling an eraser through the air at great velocity.
Basically, it was like a normal plastic ruler, split lengthways in three. The middle length could be pulled out, though not all the way, as this would have left you with three separate bits of ruler in your hand. There were markings and notations on all three lengths of the rule and the theory was that you could do long and complicated sums by extending the middle piece outwards until two notations coincided.
Clear? No, it wasn’t particularly clear back then neither. I remember our Maths teacher going prematurely white-haired with the stress of trying to get thirty unimpressed teenagers to use the contraption with any degree of accuracy. A whole autumn term he spent on it and we were still none the wiser.
You could do weird and wonderful sums on a slide rule, in theory. It was supposed to be great at doing multiplication and division and I’m sure that whoever invented the damned thing could use it efficiently enough but whenever we got homework on working out multiplication on a slide rule, I simply worked out the answer on a piece of paper and wrote it down.
The slide rule obviously lent its name to the slide rule pass in football, evidently because it was very accurate but I always got more accurate answers from writing down the sum on a piece of paper. However, the piece of paper pass never found its way into footballing terminology, much to my disgust.
Of course, I tried to get my Dad to explain how it worked but he simply snatched it off me gleefully and used it to retrieve a 50p piece that had rolled under the fridge.
Aside from multiplication and division, slide rules were also great for working out logarithms. Apparently. Of course, if I had ever been able to grasp the concept of what exactly a logarithm was, I might have stood some chance. For years I thought it was a type of small mammal that lived in forests. Even when it was semi-explained, trying to work out a mysterious and incomprehensible formula on a piece of equipment that was primarily used for flicking squares of jelly onto the classroom ceiling was something of a bridge too far.
As it transpired, although we spent weeks trying to get our heads around this bockety ruler and even more weeks using the slidey part as a guillotine on unsuspecting insects, we never had to use the damned thing in the exam. We had to choose five questions out of eight and so everybody plumped for probabilities and sub-sets and avoided the slide rule question like a dose of ricketts. I am sure the teachers employed by the examination board to mark the slide rule question never had such an easy summer.
Remarkably, and I use the word with the utmost sarcasm, I have never had recourse to use a slide rule since slouching out of the school gates for the last time thirty years ago. More than that, I have never set eyes on one and never actually heard of anybody using one. Do they still exist? Has their usefulness been superceded by the pocket calculator? Does anyone in the world still use a slide rule, except to make passes?
All of this brings me around in my usual long-winded way to the point I am trying to make – what is the point of education in an increasingly technological world? Just as we wasted weeks of our lives messing about with slide rules, what is the use of learning Hamlet’s Act III soliloquy off by heart, when we can Google it just as easily? Have I ever quoted it for anything other than comic purposes in the past thirty years?
Where does potassium live in the periodic table? I’m not sure. I believe he had a row with sulphur and moved around the corner but if I really wanted to find out, I could look it up on the computer.
My Dad always maintained that it wasn’t what you learned that was important; it was the fact that you could show future prospective employers that you had the ability to absorb a lot of information on a particular subject and then were able to regurgitate it in a pressure situation.
In that case, why not introduce school subjects that are interesting and relevant? How much more enthusiasm would a boy show for a homework question on the Charlton / Dunphy antagonism in Italia 90 than for the importance of the anchovy to the people of Peru? How much more creative would an essay on Eminem be than on Milton?
Aside from that, I’d say in this day and age, prospective employers would be far more interested in your time-keeping, absenteeism and reliability than in your ability to reel off the notable dates in Charles Stewart Parnell’s life when called upon to do so. In most jobs, you are simply shown what to do and you do it. In this respect, the school roll call would be a much more useful evaluation tool than a grade in a biology exam.
Basically, education has not kept pace with information technology. Children in Greece are being taught on e-books whereas our children still hump three tons of expensive books in and out of school every day. Our curriculum does not reflect the technological advances of recent years. The information is at our fingertips and unless we are training people to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, what is the point in trying to stuff it into children’s brains?
And it doesn’t take a genius with a slide rule to work out that without the need to spend years learning useless information by rote, the available brain space could be turned over to more artistic and creative endeavours, which in turn would produce the individual thinkers that we badly need at the moment.

In praise of Connolly (Part I)

When I go down to James’ Hospital once a month to give platelets, it is the common practice to fill out a questionnaire about my social and sexual history to see if I am eligible to donate. Have I ever had a blood transfusion? Have I ever had sex with a male or female from South America? Have I ever fondled monkeys or handled their bodily fluids? Have I ever had a blood transfusion from a South American monkey?
My answer to all of them is invariably No. I have never had any serious illnesses, never had surgery and never indulged in any lascivious practices. Nor have I ever sold my body for drugs nor spent my hard earned money on piercings or tattoos. The nurses are delighted with me, yet somewhere in the back of my head lingers the thought that I must have led a really boring and uneventful life.
This all changed recently when I had a spot of minor surgery. Forty eight years old and I had never been back to hospital since my mother brought me home at a week old (that’s me, incidentally, not my mother.)
Well, not on my own account, anyway. I’d been there plenty of times for relatives and friends who seem to have a perverse inclination to suffer terrible illnesses or break bones or have babies. To me, hospitals were like New York – okay to go and visit but I wouldn’t like to stay there for any length of time. Besides, when you scan the obituary columns and see how many people die in hospital, it’s probably best to avoid them altogether.
About twelve years ago, I developed a lump on my lower back about the size of a golf ball. It just emerged one night fully-formed, rather like the way JK Rowling describes how the idea of Harry Potter came to her. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a similar way of profiting from my apparition.
Now, I believe in getting my money’s worth from doctors, so I waited until I had a few ailments affecting me before going down to the surgery. The doctor stroked his chin, told me the lump wasn’t harmful and assured me that it wasn’t a golf ball.
So I did nothing about it. The lump didn’t hurt, never changed in size and never really bothered me in any way. However, after a time, I grew rather weary of small children running shrieking from the swimming pool when I was on holiday, yelling about the man with the alien in his back, so I resolved to have it removed.
However, I wasn’t going to give €60 to a doctor for that alone, so I hung on until I had some more things wrong with me. Just my rotten luck – I went for about five years of sickeningly perfect health and never once needed to set foot inside the surgery door.
Then last summer, I thankfully got a nasty chest infection which needed a prescription of antibiotics, so down to the Meridian Clinic in Ongar I skipped. While there, I mentioned the lump on my back, the doctor stroked her chin, had a look and lo and behold, within three months I had an appointment down in Connolly Hospital.
In Connolly, they stroked their chins, had a poke around, assured me again that it still wasn’t a golf ball and told me that if I hadn’t heard from them after six months, I was to phone them up and remind them of my existence.
So about a month ago, after eight months of not hearing from them, I phoned them up and was rather surprised to be told to come in “on Monday week.” It was to be a simple day case and I had to bring in a dressing gown and a pair of slippers.
There are some people who are dressing gown people and some who aren’t. This is the way that many sociologists divide the world and I have always been one of those people who favour the revolutionary idea of “getting dressed” when rising in the mornings. Thankfully my brother in law, who is also a non-DG person, received one of the said items from his mother many years ago, a hideous, multi-coloured specimen that had lived in its packaging at the back of his wardrobe ever since, and so he gratefully delivered the item to me, saving me the frustrating option of having to go and buy a blessed dressing gown in Dunnes or Penneys.
I told them in work that I wouldn’t be in for a week and they asked me did I want to take the time off as a holiday? When I got home that evening, I looked up the definition of the word ‘holiday’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and it didn’t quite seem to correspond with the notion of going into hospital. The following morning, I told my boss that I had checked with Budget Travel and that James Connolly wasn’t in their brochure for this year, so I’d be taking the time off sick.
He asked me if my lump was any bigger than the apple-pip sized lump he showed me just beneath the skin of his forearm. I lifted up my shirt to show him. The last I saw of him, he was running into the boardroom shrieking about the man with the alien in his back.
The hospital told me that I didn’t need to fast at all prior to my operation. Personally, I don’t mind fasting, so long as I can eat something while doing it, but as the scenario didn’t arise, I just ate my normal breakfast of sausages and cream, a delicacy picked up from a recent visit to the States.
I bade my wife a tearful goodbye and solemnly gave her my blessing to remarry if the worst came to the worst. She seemed unimpressed by this gesture and reminded me not to say anything in the hospital that might embarrass her.
Even though my son did not believe that there really was such time as seven o’clock in the morning, he nevertheless offered to bring me down to the hospital, doubtless inspired by the thought of driving my car around after he’d dropped me off. And thus, clutching my slippers and 1970s dressing gown, I was driven off to face the unknown...

The battle of the books

Being a fully rounded individual, particularly in the stomach and backside area, I find myself interested in a myriad of vastly different subjects, ranging from lighthouses to poetry and from League of Ireland football to astronomy. When I finally retire, there is no danger of me sitting around the house bored all day, while my wife tuts impatiently and tells me to lift my feet.
There is however one area of my multi-faceted life that I have shamefully neglected in recent years - reading. I am a staunch believer in the importance of reading widely, yet I am an extraordinarily slow reader. I started a book last Christmas – it was a blue one – and I am still only a quarter of the way through it. God knows what it’s about.
My problem is that I only find the time to read when I’m in bed. And, being a man of extraordinary virtue and a clear conscience – as I tell my insomniac wife - the moment I begin to read I fall asleep.
Of course I have a bookcase full of books that I am looking forward to reading when I get the time but, short of spending several weeks with my leg in plaster like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, that day, like full employment and Brian Lenihan abolishing income tax, seems a long way off.
I do however love a bargain and, although sad for the staff at Borders, who were always very accommodating when the Dublin 15 Writers Group met there, the announcement of their massive closing down sale infused me with a sense of excitement at the thoughts of gaining some valuable additions to my bookcase.
Somehow I managed to persuade my daughter to come along on the expedition, even though it is decidedly uncool to be seen out with me. My wife doesn’t really understand the concept of bookshops, being a true library aficionado. I would be too, but any savings I made would be automatically negated by the fines imposed when I returned the book three years later.
Unable to get anywhere near the store itself due to the heavy volumes of traffic, we parked in the green car park and made our way excitedly over, passing a constant stream of refugees laden down with their literary possessions as we did so. Nearing the store itself, we noticed a breathless Charlie Bird in combat fatigues, telling a television camera about the carnage inside.
The entrance to the shop was blocked by a mill of people fighting to get in, while a corresponding amount of people clutching ripped paperbacks and bruised cheekbones fought to escape. It was time for a strategy. “I’ll go for books, you go for CDs and DVDs,” I said. We shook hands formally and wished each other Good Luck before plunging into the fray.
Squeezing and jostling, I managed to make my way to the first table, which was completely empty, save for two middle-aged ladies sprawled over it in mortal hand to hand combat. One of them had a copy of Cecilia Aherne’s latest held above her head, while the other was trying to prise it from her grasp.
I ploughed on, eventually coming to a seemingly impenetrable wall of backs at the fiction shelves. With brilliant tactical nous, I shouted over to an imaginary friend, “Get the signed copy of the latest Harry Potter book over there!” All heads turned and I managed to slip through the outer ring of combat and into the melee of wild-eyed parents battling over the few remaining school books.
Putting it simply, it was a battle zone. Blood, hair and teeth besmirching ripped copies of Fiúntas 2 and Hörschatz littered the floor like shrapnel, while bodies were flying about like cowboys in a bar-room brawl. Children cowered in terror while grown women slugged it out over bloodstained copies of Philadelphia Here I Come. Never were the poets in Poetry Now so sought after in that maelstrom of kicking and gouging. I was sorely tempted when I spotted a relatively unscathed copy of Leaving Cert Biology on the floor but a large woman dived on top of it as I dithered and I decided discretion was the better part of valour and crawled off on all fours in the vague direction of the poetry section.
Suffering only superficial bruising I made it to my goal. On the way, I managed to secure an English-Spanish dictionary that had been knocked out of someone’s hand. A quick glance at the synopsis on the back didn’t give me any great confidence in the substance of the story but I thought it might be a good read if I ended up in hospital, so I stuffed it down my shirt and ploughed on.
In the poetry section, it was quiet. Too quiet, I thought. People were standing around reading sonnets and eying each other nervously. An air of tension hung over the shelves like gun smoke and several people nervously fingered their Nokias and Erikssons. The phoney war, I thought, picking up a copy of Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle from the shelves and pretending to understand the metaphors.
Then it happened. A tweed-clad man let slip the last edition of Pat Ingoldsby’s latest book from under his elbow. It was snatched up by a young girl but as she turned to run, the man rugby tackled her from behind. He was promptly smacked over the head with a hard cover copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by the girl’s mother, causing him to drop his entire collection on the floor.
The resulting rolling maul wouldn’t have been out of place at the Parc des Princes. Several people were cited for gouging and I, waiting in the sidelines like a scrumhalf to pick up the pieces, saw one particularly unmentionable act involving Thomas Mann that I will bring to the grave. Wielding the Complete Works of John Betjeman, I beat my way out of the shop, only flinging it back into the carnage (with my Spanish dictionary) when I staggered out of the door, my clothing in tatters.
I crawled up to Lidl, where I found my daughter sitting on the kerb, applying a hastily purchased German sausage to her eye. We hugged and vowed we’d never have an angry word again.
“Did you get anything?” she said at last. I shook my head sadly.
“You?”
In reply she slowly pulled a CD case out of the waistband of her torn skirt. I stared at it unblinking for a while as the sheer enormity of her purchase sank home.
“Dad, I’m sorry, it was all I could get” she said, putting an arm around my shoulders as the tears trickled down my face, Lionel Ritchie’s Greatest Hits falling from my fingers into the gutter.