Doing it with tiles

As I have said many times before in this column, DIY is not my forte. I have no idea what my forte is (and whatever it is, it’s nearer fifte anyway) so by choice I am more a GSETDI man myself. (Get somebody else to do it)
Things simply don’t get fixed in our house. The towel rail has been hanging off the wall in the downstairs loo for the best part of a year now and the extra shelves I promised to put in the corner kitchen unit when we moved in eight years ago still haven’t materialised.
Its not that I am lazy. The spirit is strong but the know-how is lacking. My father hadn’t a clue about how to fix things about the house and so I never learnt anything. I blithely blame him for my lack of knowledge of all things practical.
About two years ago, on holidays in Roussillon, my wife put her eye on these enamel house number tiles which were going for a veritable chanson, she claimed. “That’s fair enough,” I said, “but where are you going to put them?”
She gave me a withering stare. “I was maybe going to stick them up on the landing, next to the picture of the men carrying a boat on their heads,” she declared.
So we bought the tiles and even before we flew home I was starting to get palpitations about putting them up. Such a simple thing, lots of people have them. But what do you use to stick them up?
“You’re the man. You should know these things,” my wife said, when I idly pondered the conundrum out loud. Obviously she hadn’t a clue either.
At home, in post-holiday mode, the tiles of course got put away in a drawer for safekeeping. After about three weeks, I was reminded “not to forget the tiles.”
Now for me, DIY is a pastime best practised on your own. Not being terribly sure of anything I’m doing, I prefer making a hames of the job on my own, so I can tidy it up before she gets home and then pretend I hadn’t got around to it in the first place.
One Saturday she decided to go to the Blanchardstown Centre to buy a pair of boots, which I knew from experience could easily take up to eight hours. With a hammer, I delicately removed the old number plaque adorning our front wall.
I then took down my Rovers biscuit tin, which I laughingly call my tool-box, and emptied it out on the kitchen table to see what “things-for-sticking-up-tiles” I had. Well, it was a toss up between a well-worn tube of superglue – how come it doesn’t stick to the inside of the tube? – and something called No More Nails, which I had bought once for some long-forgotten and probably fruitless purpose.
I plumped at first for the superglue which, in my experience is great for gluing up the sole of your slippers when it comes loose. Sadly though, such was the accumulation of dried glue in the nozzle that the remaining glue was trapped inside forever.
I checked the instructions on the tube of No More Nails. Apparently this was brilliant stuff and stuck everything from custard to Uranium 238, apparently rendering the manufacture of nails quite superfluous. The fact that it failed to mention either tile or brick among its lengthy list didn’t deter me and I applied a healthy coat of the white toothpaste-like goo to both tile and wall.
I must have held the four tiles pressed solidly to the wall for around thirty minutes, (though in all probability it was more likely nearer two) before I nervously released some of the pressure. The first one dropped immediately and as I stooped to catch it, the second one dropped. And then the third. And the fourth. Somehow, none of them smashed as they hit the ground but lay there mocking me. From around the world, I could hear a large collective sigh of relief from nail manufacturers.
I had plenty of time to tidy everything away before my wife arrived back from the shops with a handbag and jacket but no boots, though of course she immediately noticed the missing number plaque from the front wall.
Naturally I told her that I’d taken it down only to find that I had no suitable adhesive to stick up the new tiles.
“What about the cement and sand in the shed?” she asked.
I’d forgotten about those– they were the remnants of when I’d laid an unintentionally rustic path up to the garden shed years ago and I’d hung onto them in case they might come in useful.
Of course, time passed. Without a house number, our poor postman was totally confused, being unable to figure out that our number must lie somewhere between the numbers on the houses either side. We got a spate of wrong deliveries and god knows where half our post ended up.
Eventually my wife again went shopping for a pair of boots and I proceeded to the shed. Now it is about 25 years since I’ve worked as a labourer for a couple of plasterers but 4:1 resonates somewhere in the recesses of my brain as being a good ratio of sand to cement. So I grabbed an old paint pot and measured out three trowelfuls of sand, figuring the more cement there was, the stickier it would be, and one trowelful of cement and then slowly added water from my Rice Krispies mug.
To be fair, it looked like concrete. Only problem was, not only would it not stick to the wall, it wouldn’t stick to the tiles either. Another disaster, though it did leave a nice pale rectangle on my brickwork.
After that episode, the tiles again were forgotten about for months, until my wife came across them one day, even though I thought I’d hidden them quite well.
“What are we going to do about these tiles?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to stick them up with. Sellotape? Back to back stickers?”
She picked up the phone and speed dialled her brother-in-law. “He says to cover the wall and tiles with PVA glue and then use tile grout to stick them up,” she said. “Think you can do that?”
We bought the PVA glue and a small tub of tile grout, despite the fact that we searched Atlantic high and low and there was no tile grout for outdoor use to be found.
Naturally I had to wait until my wife once again went up to the Centre to buy a pair of boots before I could tackle this mammoth feat of DIY. Sure enough, two weeks ago, off she went and I set to work.
Of course it took me 45 minutes to figure out how to open the PVA glue (pierce the cap with the prong of a fork) and having negotiated that little technicality it was plain sailing except for the PVA glue running down the wall like spiders abseiling down a cliff face.
When she came home, clutching two tops and a pair of trousers, the tiles were up and pretty solid they seemed too, even though I say so myself. Now I was a handyman, a genuine DIYer, though I resisted the temptation to ask if there were any other little jobs she wanted doing around the house, just in case she took me up on the offer.
Strangely, my wife seemed unimpressed by my handiwork.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Have I put them too high or too low? They seem solid enough. It’ll take a jack hammer to shift them now.”
“Oh, they’re solid enough,” she said, with one of her famous looks that can kill a man dead at forty paces. “Trouble is, we live at number 89, not number 98.”

In the money

Recession? What recession?
Like everybody else in Dublin 15, the R word had invoked a sea change in my attitudes. Instead of refusing my children’s requests through sheer laziness or miserliness, there was no need for me to choose my words carefully.
“Sorry, I can’t give you a hug. There’s a recession on.”
“Sorry, I can’t give you a hand doing the washing-up. Haven’t you heard about the recession?”
In addition to this, it also provided me with the perfect opportunity to bore the pants off them with lurid tales of how we survived the last recession “way back in the eighties,” informing them in a superior and patronising way that they didn’t know that they were born. Of course, my wife raised an eyebrow when I regaled them with stories of barefooted urchins queuing outside soup kitchens on street corners, whilst portly bankers twirled their gold pocket watches and strolled merrily by, but I think they got the gist.
However, I have just received some exciting news that has totally banished the R word from the Goulding household. While the origins of the email that I received are very much shrouded in tragedy, it appears that there is a silver lining to events that will safeguard our future during the austere fiscal times ahead.
I was contacted by a Reeter Khobe from Sierra Leone, who is obviously still very distraught at the death of her husband General Khobe during the civil disturbances there. Quite how Reeter got my email address is unclear, though possibly she saw the online version of this paper and recognised me for the fine, upstanding gentleman that I am.
Apparently, the late General managed to deposit US$15.7 million with a securities company before he died. Obviously the military in Sierra Leone are paid much more than our poor impoverished soldiers, though it appears that our’s tend to survive civil disturbances better.
Anyway, poor Reeter just needed a foreign bank account to transfer these hard-earned funds into, as domestic legislation presumably precludes her from waltzing out of the country with it in a bum bag. She therefore contacted me in her hour of need, simply requesting my bank account details, pin number etc, which of course I was happy to provide. In return, she has promised me 20% of the account, which my calculator informs me works out at a cool US$3.1 million.
US$3.1 million. Yes, read it and weep, suckers. I have already put my eye on a lovely six bedroom Georgian villa in old Castleknock and am just waiting for poor Reeter to get back onto me with final details of the transfer of funds.
And if you are currently turning green with envy, you will doubtless turn bright puce on hearing that the following day, apparently, my email address was electronically selected out of more than 250,000 addresses worldwide in the Coca Cola grand lottery in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion. Yes, more than a quarter of a million email addresses from “every continent” – presumably including Antarctica – and I just happened to be one of the ten lucky ones to scoop GB£2 million.
Apparently there are a few legal niceties that have to be gone through first before my prize can be claimed. Naturally I must reply to Mrs. Joy McKenzie at her Zambian email address with details of my bank account, pin number etc, which I am only too happy to do. I have heard of Coca Cola, so I am satisfied that this is a genuine communication.
Armed with this further increase to the Goulding bank balance, I am considering buying the four bedroomed Georgian villa next door to my six bedroomed house and converting it into a kennels for the Labradors that we intend to breed.
And of course, when you’re on a roll…
Today I received notification from a Dr James Ubani of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation that a special account had been set up in my name under the instruction of the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The fact that such an important letter was entrusted to someone who cannot find the lower case on a computer worried me slightly but Dr Urbani’s urgent entreaties that I only had two days to verify my account with my own bank account details, pin number etc meant I had to act quickly to safeguard the fortune contained within.
To be honest, I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure out why the International Court of Justice should be favouring me in this way. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps it has something to do with Slobodan Milošević, whom I interviewed once about the shortfall of funding for the Mulhuddart CDP. Maybe he remembered me in his little cell in the Hague and willed me most of his estate before he died?
I am now thinking of buying up the rest of the street and flattening it for croquet practice. I have also contact Boeing about the provision of a private jet.
My only concern is in the ability of the banks to cope with such straightforward transfers of funds. I mean, they really seem to be a stupid lot. Why, only last week, I got notification by email from both Abbey Bank and Lloyds Bank that they feared that my account may have been accessed by an unauthorised third party.
In order to protect the security of my funds, they asked me to verify my bank account details, pin number etc, as they felt there may be some unscrupulous people out there who would actually try and defraud me. Laughable, I know, but with my new-found fortune, I can’t afford to take any chances.
The ironic thing was that I do not have an account with either of these two financial institutions and quite thankful I am too, what with all those breaches in their security. Naturally, I replied to them both to inform them of this and also furnished details of my actual bank account, pin number etc, so they could see exactly where their error had occurred.
I fear though that I am doing some disservice to Lloyds and Abbey though, for disappointingly my own bank appears to be experiencing some logistical difficulties of its own. Obviously the system cannot cope with all this money flowing in because my bank manager keeps phoning me and claiming I am overdrawn.
No wonder the banking industry is in the state its in.

The office Christmas party

Cartoon Fergus Lynch

I am not gregarious by nature.
I work best on a one-to-one basis or in small groups. Put me in a room full of people – even those I know well – and I feel overawed and withdraw into myself.
Alcohol has a similar effect on me. Whereas it tends to break down people’s inhibitions and loosens the screws at the back of the tongue, I tend to get progressively quieter the more I consume.
All in all, I am not the best person to ask to a Christmas party.
This does not deter them however from asking me. I am sure they feel they are doing me a great favour by cajoling me into going and they do not take my protestations that “I would sooner be trampled underfoot by rampaging oxen” seriously.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy – a right barrel of laughs if ever there was one – the author takes a trip to Hell, remarking on the different degrees of tortures prepared for sinners according to their depravity on earth. I was surprised to find no mention in the odyssey of the wretched beings forced to attend an office Christmas party in perpetuity as a punishment for their worldly wrongdoings.
It is a long time now since I ran out of excuses. There are only so many uncles that need to be buried just before Christmas. It is unlikely that my ears would need syringing three Christmases on the trot. Missing the bus and not being able to find a matching pair of socks are excuses that have both been viewed dimly in the past.
Nowadays I just go, on the proviso that I’m determined not to have a good time.
As a professional curmudgeon, I think the thing that horrifies me most about the Christmas party is the camaraderie on show. It may well be a time for peace on earth and goodwill to all men but I find it hard to reconcile the manager who is unapproachable and dismissive for fifty weeks of the year with the New Age reveller who keeps slapping you on the shoulder and telling you to call him Tom.
I think it is an order thing. I know where I stand with this particular individual and react accordingly. However when the lines become blurred and Mr. Burns suddenly metamorphosises into Ned Flanders, life assumes an unreal quality that I find deeply disturbing.
I am at an age now where, to the younger staff members’ disbelief, I do not equate pouring copious amounts of alcohol down my throat in record time with enjoying myself. I watch my less restrained co-workers gleefully pronounce that they are “going to get locked” and hark back to the good old days when I would do the same. Nowadays I know that the following day will be a complete wash out if I follow suit and do not judge the cost to be worthwhile. In short, my hair is not long enough to let down any more.
And then there is the girl – it normally is a girl – who spends the evening taking photographs of everybody and getting other people to take photographs of her. These photographs are then passed around the canteen the following day to those poor souls who were unfortunate enough not to attend. “There’s me and Sheila with a drink.” “There’s me, Sheila and Donal with a drink.” “There’s Donal and me with a drink.”
“It looks like you had a brilliant time,” I remark on these occasions, wondering whether she actually did anything at the party apart from taking photos of various permutations of fellow workers with bottles of drink.
Of course, the one big advantage of being a miserable old sod and observing, rather than participating in, the general mayhem, is that you never get that cringing feeling when you wake up the following day and remember what you said to that girl that you never really noticed before but who had scrubbed up pretty well last night. There can be few tortures currently in use by CIA that are more dreadful than the period between waking up after a Christmas party at which you’ve made a complete ass of yourself and the sheepish and crestfallen entry back into the workplace. During that time, all possible options from emigration to resignation invade your head, for you know that everyone will be talking about you and your lurid antics and what little respect you ever had will be lying on the floor along with the pine needles and bits of tinsel.
Of course, it’s never quite as bad as you feared as most of your co-workers will have been too intoxicated themselves to have noticed your little indiscretions.
Except for me, that is. That’s when I come into my own.

Reaping nature’s windfall

Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum, which to me seems a strange thing to get het up about. Labels that stick into the back of your neck, umbrellas that turn inside out when you look at them sideways, the hit record “Dancing on the ceiling” – these are all subjects that I could wax vehement on for hours. Vacuums, I have no particularly strong feelings about either way, which shows that, in this regard at least, I am not really “at one” with nature.
Where my thinking does coincide with that of nature is in our joint abhorrence of waste. At least I assume that nature abhors waste, though I’ve never actually heard her mentioning this fact personally. Bushes grow berries, bird eat berries and spit out the seeds in disgust, young birds grow, new berry bushes grow – it is all what Elton John was rabbiting on about in “The Circle of Life.” Nothing in nature, it seems, should be wasted.
I got to considering this fact the other week whilst striding down to Dunnes in Ongar to see if they had any Werther’s Originals, for which I have developed a sudden and unaccounted for craving, despite the sudden onset of the recession. I found myself pondering the now nearly-naked young trees that lined the Littlepace Distributor Road and the vast array of brown and yellow leaves that adorned the pathway.
Leaves. Millions of them. If I were Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man” I would have counted them but I’m not, so I didn’t. Just lying there on the road, the path and the black strip that we assume is the cycle path. Never mind what becomes of the broken-hearted – what becomes of all the leaves that nature annually discards at this time of year? Where do they all go to? They don’t gradually decompose and enrich the tarmac, that’s for sure.
I assume of course that in the great circle of life in years gone by, this latter scenario would indeed be the case, when the leaves would rot into the soil, forming compost and so on. But nowadays, it just seems such a waste for these leaves to fall on stony ground, like in the parable. Nature doesn’t seem to be adapting very quickly to the new blanket of tarmac that has smothered our landscape.
When you come to think of it, though, discarded leaves have very few uses apart from the aforementioned composting, which is disappointing, because a leaf is a thing of beauty in itself. When you hold it up to the light and view the veins and the colours and the shapes, it is a work of art that cannot be reproduced by the hand of man – it is natural art, like the Giants Causeway or bobbly sheep’s droppings in Connemara.
The only good thing you can do with leaves is to shuffle through them, when they have drifted up against a wall, or maybe kick them in great quantities around the street. The problem with this is that there is not much money in it. My Uncle Balthazar did this for a living for five years before his wife left him.
As a young man in a bedsit in Ranelagh, I gave 99% of my wages to my landlord and Arthur Guinness and had very little left for luxuries like food. One day I did indeed try to make a homemade soup out of leaves that I picked up in the street. Let us say it was not a complete success and I was obliged to stay within sprinting distance of the toilet for a week afterwards.
Similarly, though striking examples of natural beauty, the leaves do not make good wallpaper. I tried it once on the wall of the kitchen when my wife was away at her sister’s and though it initially looked very striking, as the leaves dried and became wrinkled, the effect deteriorated. In the end, it just looked like a load of leaves stuck on a wall. And be warned, its murder trying to match up the pattern.
I have tried to think up a way of gainfully using all these leaves but the only thing that I can think of is that we should abandon the Euro and adopt the Leaf as our unit of currency. I realise that my grasp of how world currencies work rivals that of Idi Amin (“The country’s broke? Then we’ll print more money”) but there would be enormous benefits if we were to follow the Green Pound through to its natural conclusion.
Firstly, it would encourage people to plant more trees, which would help to counterbalance the effect of all those greenhouses that are heating up the sun. If you are literally being paid to go green, then that can only be beneficial to the health of the world. More trees equals more carbon dioxide equals more ozone layer or something like that, so we could save the world and get rich doing it. Of course, we would need to enlighten the populace on the difference between deciduous and evergreen and which of them would provide a regular source of income.
Secondly it would get rid of banks and their constant ripping us off. There would be no need to keep our leaves in financial institutions as there would be more than enough to go around for everyone. Just go out into the street if you’re getting a bit short. It would also be a fallacy for parents to admonish their profligate offspring with the words, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”
Of course, we would have to tighten up our customs and excise operation to stop people smuggling large quantities of leaves into the country and devaluing our currency. We could employ sniffer giraffes at docks and airports, though naturally you’d have to slip them the occasional five leaf note to keep them happy.
Back gardens in our leafy suburbs would become veritable jungles of shrubs and small trees as we all wait for the autumnal windfall. Farmers would employ Securicor to collect their harvest, though doubtless they would still demand subsidies from the government for doing so. Medical costs would plummet as whole families would get fit by going on long forest walks with big sacks.
But of course, all this will probably only happen in a post-apocalyptic society when the few survivors emerge from bomb shelters and gaze around at the devastation outside. It will be like the dove returning to the ark with a leaf in its mouth or maybe the coast of Greenland being discovered by Leaf Eriksson.
Come on, Brian! You know it makes sense.

The joy of strimming

One of the unforeseen consequences of global warming that doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in the Kyoto agreement is the fact that people’s lawns now grow in the winter. Whereas before, you could safely pack the lawnmower away at the end of September and know that you wouldn’t have to clap eyes on the damned thing again before April, these days the sprouting jungle both back and front is a constant nagging reminder during the winter months that you really should get the finger out.
Being a traditionalist when it suits me, I put even the vaguest thoughts of lawn cutting out of my head and make up spurious excuses why a trip to the shed to retrieve the lawn mower should be shunned. The ground will be too wet, I maintain. The grass needs to grow and breathe for a while without being ruthlessly scythed down every couple of weeks. I feel a twinge in my back.
It was therefore with great satisfaction last week that I cut the grass for the final time in 2008. Due to the inclement weather and a bout of sheer laziness, it had not been done for a month previously and, despite the fact that it hadn’t rained for five days – surely some sort of national record – the ground still resembled Strangford Lough at high tide.
But I persevered, squelching through the mashed grass and finally finding a use for the brown bin which had been put out empty for the recycling people the last few times.
Finally I took the strimmer – which had come free when we purchased the lawnmower eight years ago – and proceeded to laboriously unravel the flex which had somehow become tightly woven around the body of the strimmer like a thin python asphyxiating a sausage dog.
The strimmer.
Surely this model of modern technology has to be the most useless invention ever devised by man? Is there anybody in history who has managed to cut five yards of edging without the bit of cord snapping off?
Sure enough, as I began, I knew that a particularly sturdy looking dandelion three yards away was going to cause problems. There was no escape. We had to go into battle. I whispered a few words of encouragement into where I imagined the strimmer’s ear should be, shouted “Death or glory!” at the top of my voice, startling a jackdaw on my cotonaster, and ploughed into the fray.
It was all over before it began. The green cord was no match for the soft juicy flesh of dandelion stalk and, after the all too familiar “zip” and the change in tone of the strimmer, the two inch green strip went sailing into the hebe further down the herbaceous border, as we fancifully call the few miserable plants straddling the lawn. (My garden is littered with two inch green strips of strimmer cord. One day, I am going to go around collecting them all and construct an astro turf football pitch out back)
I uttered the word that is worse than “feck” and turned the strimmer upside down, tutting impatiently while the rotating bit of plastic slowed to such an extent that it wouldn’t take the skin off my fingers. As I removed the cap, the tightly wound coil of cord sprung out at me like a joke toy and I sighed and commenced re-winding.
It was then that I glanced up. Declan, my neighbour from two doors down, was similarly engaged. As was the man with the white van further up the street. And the man with the dog further down. It seemed that a good fifty per cent of the street was at that moment engaged in trying to thread the required two inches of green strimmer thread through the tiny hole in the base and a blue haze hung malcontentedly over the estate as expletives punctuated the afternoon balm.
Suddenly I realised what a brilliant marketing ploy it had been to hand out a free strimmer with every lawnmower. Yes, it would have cost the company millions but they would have made a tidy profit in the intervening period with all the spools of strimming thread sold to disgruntled lawn cutters who saw the cost as a necessary extra.
Now we like to think of ourselves as a modern society at the cutting edge of the technological revolution sweeping the globe. I work for Intel and their level of expertise is so great that I have no idea what they produce. We can split atoms, whether for profit or simply for amusement, and we have devised machines that can actually tell you that you have just taken a wrong turning and I told you to turn left at that petrol station, you dumbkopf.
Would it be possible, I meekly enquire of our budding inventors and teams of research scientists nervously wondering if they are the next for the dole queue – would it be possible for someone to come up with a strimmer cord that didn’t actually break in hand to hand combat with a thistle or a daisy or a dock leaf? One that flashed brightly like a scimitar in the hands of a crowing Mongol, scything down all that stood up to it?
Maybe – and I am no scientist, so I am open to correction – the material used in the strimmer cord is not up to the job? Perhaps if tungsten steel were used instead, or at least something that didn’t give up the ghost when confronted by something thin and botanical?
Naturally there would need to be limits. We wouldn’t want one that knocked down your garden fence when you tried to decimate the sprouting grass springing joyously up against it or sliced through the breeze block that your shed is standing on but surely there must be some happy medium?
Personally, and I realise that I am abandoning all my principles of snapping up free gifts, I would be happy to pay a modest amount of my hard earned cash for a strimmer if I didn’t have to perform a cycle of running repairs on every circuit of the lawn.
Anyway, all you budding inventors out there, you have until next April.

Junk mail

The other morning a slip of paper came through our letter box, not, I hasten to add, of its own accord, but thrust there by person or persons unknown.
I bounded down the stairs three at a time in a state of high excitement only to discover that my wife had leapt up from her armchair and dashed out of the sitting room before me. As she read the contents quickly I hopped about from one foot to the other, as though bursting to go to the toilet.
“It’s only a flyer for blinds,” she said, handing me the paper and returning to Fair City.
My face fell. I suppose you are either a curtain person or a blinds person and I am the former. My experiences of blinds is limited to holidays in Kerry or Sligo, where I quickly found that I don’t have the necessary hand/eye coordination to operate them successfully. When I’m trying to raise them, they lower further and further or else I end up with one side up and one side down in a very art nouveau but impractical way.
Consequently I trooped out to the kitchen and placed the flyer in the empty cornflakes box that stands by the back door. The box saves us having to go out to the green bin every time we have a piece of green recycling. When the box is full, we bring it out and empty it. (This ingenious invention has actually been patented by my wife and is under copyright. Bill Dyson is said to be raging that he didn’t think of it first.)
Not all junk mail goes straight in the recycling though. If the flyer is of the non-shiny sort and is blank on one side, it is added to the bundle of scrap paper in the drawer held in place by an elastic band. This is handy if I need a piece of paper to work out why the taxman has taken so much money off me or if I need to write a note to my wife to tell her that I’ve gone out to buy the new Lionel Richie album.
The point that I am making, very long-windedly, is that it doesn’t require a lot of physical effort to transfer one small piece of paper from the front door to the green bin. There is no need to hire a hand trolley or a fork lift, unless you are very feeble, although admittedly there is a need to walk six yards from front door to back. However, this unnecessary trip can be obviated by leaving the flyer at the foot of the stairs until such time as someone is going into the kitchen.
I have no problems with junk mail. The green bin truck comes around every second week now and we never find that our green bin is overflowing. I am sure that the nice men in the recycling centre get quite a buzz out of reading all the leaflets they receive every day.
We do not often eat out but if a new establishment opens in the neighbourhood, a flyer would remind us to “give it a bash.” I do not need any handy jobs done around the house, as I simply close my eyes and work around the problem. I am not thinking of buying or selling a house in the area, nor am I thinking of buying a new Peugeot, though I am sure they are very nice cars.
I do not need my shirts ironed and, as my youngest is twenty, I do not need a childminder, though at times I’m not so sure. I will glance through Lidl’s catalogue to see if they have anything “on special,” and do the same for Aldi, even though I can’t be bothered to travel to Maynooth to pick up a pair of retractable garden shears. Nor am I likely to join Leo Varadkar’s blue-shirted army in the near future. Sorry Leo.
Probably the only piece of junk mail I object to is the one that asks me if I want my lawn cutting. Without knocking on my neighbours’ doors, I am unsure if I have been specifically targetted for this leaflet because of the length of my grass out front or if everybody on the street has received it. I suspect the former, as I never receive this type of flyer when my grass has been freshly cut.
But although 99% of junk mail holds little or no interest to me, I will defend to the death the right to deliver it to my door. (Well, not quite “to the death” – more “till I get bored” really. I have no deep desire to be martyred for this cause and become the patron saint of junk mail.)
Junk mail is produced, in the main, by local businesses trying to promote a service to the local community. They have used a bit of initiative and gone to the trouble of producing a flyer that, they hope, will attract more customers and I applaud them for that. I am sure there are less stony ears than mine out there in the community and I hope their efforts are successful. More customers equals more jobs, as I’ve been trying to explain to Brian Lenihan.
It saddens me therefore that a few people are feeling the urge to put little “No junk mail” signs on their letter boxes. Despite what people maintain, we are hardly burdened down by the weight of junk mail pouring through our letter boxes. We don’t need to call out the fire brigade when we return from holidays to help us force open the front door. At most, what do we receive – three, four pieces of junk mail per day? It is hardly back-breaking work to cope with all of it.
It also raises the question as to what constitutes junk mail. Does notification of evening classes fall under this heading? Public information leaflets? The Community Voice? Census information forms? Warnings of an imminent nuclear attack? Does junk mail have to be trying to sell you something?
One letter box in the vicinity is adorned with an essay threatening prosecution under the Litter Act to anybody who dares to drop a leaflet, a menu or a newspaper through it. This person seems very angry. The only explanation I can come up with for this litigious fury is that perhaps there is a baby in the house who is constantly being wakened by the sound of the letter box clattering.
Of course, I feel he is missing out because of this. I have often had the urge to rifle through my green bin and post out all the previous fortnight’s flyers to him in one large A4 envelope. This way he can show support to his local community without the baby being constantly woken.
But I jest. I accept that some people might find the task of transferring junk mail from front door to green bin onerous in the extreme. I am consequently considering offering my services in this regard, calling out to people’s homes to perform this task for them for a nominal sum.
In order to promote this piece of entrepreneurship, I will be sending out a flyer to all houses in the near future.

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.