Screw that…

Excuse my french, but then wordpress ate my post so frankly the apology is undeserved.

So here’s the summary

• Bad day (broken shoulder blade via obscure sleeping position)
• Survive hellish town-post-work-on-late-night-shopping-day
• Habit of observing people on public transport, especially readers of great books
• Today’s subject: young student, smelly but reading John McGahern so forgiven for lack of control of various bodily functions
• Various attempts to ascertain which of great author’s works he is reading
• Young Reader decides to adjust himself
• Author of this blog finds male ‘adjustments’ of this public nature offensive anyway
• Special case: Young Reader has hands inside trousers
• In a public place
• On a crowded Luas
• Young Reader adds insult to injury: by ‘wiping’ the offending hand on the pole other commuters were using to ’steady themselves’
• Whole other kind of ’steadying’ required given the actions of Young Reader
• Title of book eventually ascertained - was The Pornographer

Give it back (Part 2)

Now I want my post back.

An hour of my life was spent composing a great rant about the most hideous creature I’ve encountered in a long time.

And wordpress ate my post.

Give it back I tell ya, give it back…

Stuffing the past down the toilet…

Even if I wasn’t a history graduate I don’t think I could have grown up in this country and not realise how important history and the past is, particularly relative to the present and future. This is the case across the board - if we don’t know where we came from, how can we know where we’re going, etc - but especially in a society/culture/country where our history has both held us back and pushed us forward so violently (in the literal sense, and the figurative) it is especially the case that we owe it to ourselves to develop an appreciation of that past.

Which is why so much about modern Ireland absolutely disgusts me.

Don’t get me wrong, I have very strong feelings on Ireland and Irishness, and have been variously described as a nationalist, a republican, and most recently a ‘backward northern catholic’ (though being neither northern nor catholic that one really confused me!). That is precisely what leads me to this particular feeling of, for want of a better word, disappointment.

This weekend, and indeed this week, “Ireland” will “celebrate” the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Rising. And it is frankly the most shameful and despicable act in a long list of pitiful acts perpetrated by a pitiful government. I didn’t watch the Late Late Show on Friday, because frankly I never do, but apparently Senator Shane Ross commented that the “90th” anniversary was entirely random and based purely on the fact of an upcoming election. The fact that Fianna Fáil seem terrified of an electorate finally challenging their inaction, and frankly their incompetence. Shane Ross was illuminating nobody in what he said, and that is the saddest thing about it. Anybody who has put a moment’s thought into it must realise what a cynical exercise this is - suddenly laying claim to a day which, in any other proud nation, would be marked annually, and not by releasing pathetic compilation CDs of supposedly Oirish music which will frankly only appeal to tourists drawn in by the chaos of it all.

But pride has nothing to do with it, and I mean that two ways. Pride has nothing to do with marking a day such as this. Celebration, as a concept, is inappropriate in the case of fellow countrymen dying and/or being killed for whatever reason and in whatever circumstances. We should mourn the loss of Irish men and women, on both sides. We should mourn the very fact that brothers fought each other, killed each other, died separated. For the love of all that is good and worthwhile, we should learn from it - we must learn from it. Yet here we are, 90 years later, deliberately constructing divisions within our society for no better reason than ignorance and an absence of the will to do otherwise.

A report this morning stated that some 33,000 children in this state are leaving primary school without basic literacy skills. I mention it because of the impressive PR work on the part of those launching the report (a man whose name escapes me for now, but I will return to amend this, fear not!). They linked this shameful statistic to the 90th anniversary celebrations, making the point that the proclamation of 1916 aspired to treat all children of the republic equally, and that that meant providing sufficient education for all. A point seemingly lost on the glorious government currently in power in this state. Evidently they were too busy selling off copies of the proclamation to go to the trouble of reading it.

Today, against the advice of both the National Library and the National Museum, the government, in their efforts to commemorate 1916, sold our national anthem to the highest bidder - literally. Apparently our national identity is worth around €760,000. Apparently our government didn’t see fit to invest that amount of money in something like a precious, irreplacable historical document. Apparently buying €18,000 worth of make-up for Bertie (per year) was more important.

I would love to be able to feign surprise but I can’t. We live in a country that sees fit to build Par 3 golf courses on the likes of Vinegar Hill (for bookings, call 054 35127), and a motorway through the Hill of Tara. Why not sell off flags, proclamations, invaluable documents. They’re only history after all. Our history. The history of our people, of our nation, of the world around us. In this glorious age of Celtic Tiger Mysticism, all that seems to matter is €€€€€€€€€. Nothing else is relevant. We can’t even seem to pretend anything else is relevant. Unless there’s an election involved.

So there they were, halfway through a cabinet meeting, realising that they were hated to the point that even people who have lived in “FF households” for generations were considering voting for the Greens. Panic set in. How on earth are we going to distract this lot from our long, long list of failures? How will we convince them that we’re their kind of people? Tell you what, we’ll cash in (literally) on the undercurrent of xenophobia by emphasising our past in a profoundly narrowminded way, while linking it to a celebration of our capacity for downright cynicism. Translation? Rewrite history. Sure wasn’t it Bertie’s grandad who ran things in the GPO that day? Honestly I’d imagine McDowell on the other side, he does seem more of an oppressor type…

I’m genuinely afraid of how this weekend will turn out. Will we have more riots? Will everyone stay home and ignore the commemoration, just as they did last year, and the years before? If it goes well, Fianna Fáil will maybe buy back the little pieces of history they sold off today. They have the cash. If it goes badly? Damn those republicans, should never have trusted them, always up to something. I only wish I could believe that the majority of the electorate won’t be blind enough to fall for it.

For the love of… kids and waiting staff everywhere…

I know it’s all too easy to be judgemental about other people’s parenting skills when you’ve never had the opportunity to make the same mistakes, and I’m sure that at some point in the future, should I be lucky enough to have kids of my own I will make plenty of mistakes and utterly ruin their lives in some way or other - it’s an inevitability and the one thing all parents can be sure of. What I do know, however, is that there are some fundamental rules that I have written in my head, mostly based on common sense, that no matter what I will not break. When I see parents breaking them now, it annoys me no end. Some times it pisses me off so much that I’d love to smack the complete strangers in the face and tell them to cop on.

So there we were, sitting happily in the middle of a (fantastic) restaurant this (Sunday) afternoon. It’s not too busy so we have an empty table to each side of us. Beyond that, on each side, is a setting of one parent and one child. On the left, a father with a very young son, maybe 1-1.5 years old. On the right, a mother with a daughter, maybe 3 or 4 years old. At first I couldn’t decide which was worst, as they were both glorifying behaviour which I find frankly intolerable - boozing in front of their kids. It would be one thing if there were two parents, one kid, and one parent having one glass of wine. After twenty minutes, both of these parents had consumed two (very large) glasses of red wine each, while supposedly taking sole responsibility for the welfare of their children. Fricking pathetic and I won’t be convinced otherwise.

As the meal went on, we had more time to analyse what was going on around us. The father and son duo were having serious fun. This started with a lengthy game of “smash your daddy’s keys off the table” followed by some bizarre form of chasing, which involved the son trying to crawl away up the booth, and the dad letting him away with it for a while before catching him and pulling him back. Laughter and smiles all round. The son, at least, was smiling out of sober happiness.

On the other hand, literally, the mother and daughter duo were a sight to behold. The poor child was dressed in a ridiculous Chanel blazer (with ‘designer’ elbow patches to boot) and looked like she was on her way back from pony riding lessons. God help her is all I can say to that one. The mother was one of those insufferable twats you expect spends too much time in Brown Thomas and Avoca. A real type, she couldn’t even hold her fork properly for all her airs and graces. The kid was remarkably happy, all things considered, but you’ve got to wonder what on earth she’ll be like in five or ten years when she realises what an eejit her mother is.

We were admittedly distracted by our own meal, but eventually the wagon (as she will henceforth be known) ordered food, and when the godforsaken waitress brought the food, there were at least eight things wrong with it.

As a sidenote, in the last few years I don’t think I have encountered such competent, well-mannered staff combined with such genuinely impressive food. So in other words, she was talking through her ****.

The main issue was that cheese had been put on the daughters burger, and there were wedges with it (in other words, “as stated by the menu”). The waitress returned with a plain burger with no wedges. And was asked where the chips were. SERIOUSLY! So bless her she came back with a bowl of chips within a minute. Only to be told the chips looked overcooked. Nonsense. Waitress politely explained that that was how the chips there looked, full stop, and that they were in no way burned or overcooked. This was accepted, and everyone attempted to get on with what they were doing. At various intervals, Mrs. Wagon complained about something simply for the sake of it. She was blatantly being bitched about in the kitchen so the waiting staff in some sort of act of solidarity at this point started taking turns dealing with her. To no avail.

Ten minutes and half-way into her meal, the snooty b**ch stood up, walked across the restaurant, verbally abused the guy making coffees, for no apparent reason, stormed up to the cash point, presumably paid, while further abusing yet another random staff member, before dragging her poor unfortunate progeny out of the building. In her ridiculous mini Chanel blazer.

I don’t know if she was just trying to cause a scene and get some attention, or what. Maybe she was drunk. I hope to god she wasn’t driving. But there’s still no excuse. How can you have so little common courtesy? Common is perhaps the only word for it. Airs and graces galore get you nowhere if you’re going to act like that. It’s impossible not to hold such people in absolute contempt. And that’s above and beyond the total lack of respect for her suitability as a ‘parent’.

Meanwhile, dad and son duo were joined by mum and other son. While chatting away to the (happily sober) mother of his children, dad took to rolling cigarettes at the table. Which should be outlawed anyway on grounds of being fairly disgusting, but why on earth would you do that within grabbing distance of your toddler-aged kids? The way I see it you get 9 months notice for a reason. Do some reading. Or at the very least do some thinking. Plan in your head not to be drunk or abusive or ignorant around your kids. Don’t show them up and you’ll look a little less ridiculous if they show you up. They’re allowed to, they’re the children, how hard can it be to remember that? When it doubt, please note, they’re under three foot tall.

Which brings me back to Little Miss Chanel. God help her, her mother had gotten her ears pierced. What’s the purpose in that? It reminds me of an episode of Friends (sorry) where Rachel’s ridiculously immature younger sister is babysitting her daughter Emma for the day, and as a surprise gets the toddler’s ears pierced. Rachel is far from amused, and I can’t blame her. Babies are amazing, all by themselves. They shouldn’t, and don’t, need bits of metal stuck through their ears, nose, or anywhere else, to make them look pretty. Nor do they need to be dressed up like the horses their mothers clearly are.

It says a lot about a place when the food is great, and the décor is great, and the staff are so great that you find yourself almost apologising to them on behalf of the other patrons who are all clearly stuck far up their own asses. So it seems only fair (if you’ll pardon the pun) to give Donnybrook Fair a mention. Nice one.

Sweet nothings…

‘Sweet November’ (2001) was not an especially good film. I got stuck watching it on a flight to Toronto the year it was released. And on the return flight. I know the film all too well. The primary mistake made by the film’s director and producer was the casting of Keanu Reeves. Enough said. Not to mention the fact that the film was a ‘cheap modern remake’ of a more tolerable original [more on that at a later date no doubt!]. The film did, however, feature a scene which is all too appropriate to the situation I found myself in today.

Reeves’ character, ‘Nelson’, is at a business lunch with his potential employer, a big-time ad executive. And I quote (with thanks to the ever-wonderous www.imdb.com):

[Waitress spills ice all over the table]
Waitress: Oh, my, I’m so sorry. Excuse me. Thanks, that’s okay.
Edgar Price: Stop it. You know sweetie, we are what we do in this world, and you’re a waitress. All that requires is that you bring the food to and from the table without making a mess. That’s it. So when you screw up somthing as incredibly simple as that, doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot about you does it.

While I disagree with the viscious sentiment I can appreciate the frustration in Edgar Price’s tone. And I’ll bet my proverbial bottom dollar that he was never a waitress himself. So he didn’t have a full and thorough appreciation of what was wrong with everything around him.

It’s my own fault for having waitressed for five years, and furthermore my own fault for eating out too often (actually, that may be someone else’s fault…). Mea culpa, etc.

Yesterday I went for lunch with a friend. We had an hour for lunch. Some people call this a ‘lunch hour’. I hear it’s quite a popular and widespread concept these days. We arrived, we sat, we looked at menus, we waited. For ten minutes. The place was unfull. I won’t say empty, but it was definitively unfull. Lots of eye contact, lots of all openly staring at the bizarrely oblivious staff. For ten minutes.

An aside seems appropriate. You have one hour for lunch. Take the first 3-5 minutes to gather your belongings, arrive at your chosen destination, and settle yourself. Then another five minutes to choose your food and be graced with the presence of the (hopefully) trained, efficient staff. You will have your food in ten minutes, or, unless you are a complete fool, they will lose your custom. We’ll allow twenty minutes to eat, unless it’s a big meal (or a big chat) in which case you can forget coffee. Then 3-5 minutes waiting to have your plates cleared, 3-5 minutes trying to and/or succeeding in ordering your coffee. Five minutes to get your coffee back, five minutes to drink it and hopefully a few minutes to rush back to your workplace while inevitably causing yourself indigestion…

So, an attempt at making a long story short. Ten minutes waiting to order. Ten minutes waiting for food. Ten minutes waiting for food to be cleared. Five minutes waiting for coffee, which is CRAP when it arrives.

Problem of knowing coffee - you know exactly what went wrong. Because they haven’t rinsed their machine through properly in a week. Because they boiled the milk. Because the milk is sour anyway. Because the coffee was cold before the milk went in it. And it all just tastes awful…

Problem of knowing waitressing - you know exactly what went wrong. They were bored. Or lazy. Or stupid. Or badly trained. Or not trained at all. They didn’t have a plan. They didn’t have a brain?!

I have no problem with bad service, or rather ‘pressurised service’ when that pressure is in evidence - a full house and at least two tables of complete assholes who have decided they are so important to the universe that everyone else pales in comparison (and their appetites and needs along with them). It’s when there are more staff than customers that my patience is severely tried.

Which brings me to tonight. Dinner with my other half in a delightful setting. The food, it has to be said, was good. The service… was not. Another side-effect of having been a waitress? I can’t not tip. My stomach churns when others fail to do so. But sometimes it is specifically necessary to avoid granting gratuities at all costs. Tonight was such a night.

The restaurant was mostly empty. It was 7:30pm on a Tuesday, and too nice an evening to spend indoors anyway. The Maitre D’ took my coat. Well done. The only contribution to my evening by the man in the overpriced suit with the overpriced smile. We were shown to our table, and given menus. All seemed to be in order. But god how long must you leave between serving us bread and water and checking us for signs of life?

Starters came. In two parts, which was not as intended and highly irritating. The mains were good. Watching their remains grow cold in front of us was not. The créme brulée was as it ought to be. It wasn’t too warm to begin with, so its process of growing cold should in theory have taken less time. But my didn’t we get to watch every tiny step in that process. I was tempted to stand up and walk out, but apparently I was feeling patient - either that or trying to stave off the embarassment of my dining companion. Most likely the latter.

For me the clincher was when the desserts were eventually cleared and we asked for the bill. Colm went out to the ATM to get cash for the parking machine while I paid. I need to stress at this point, the till etc. was a metre away if that. And yet, eight minutes later, my friend the thoroughly incompetent Maitre D’ hadn’t managed to make it back from the Bermuda Triangle that was “the doorway”. He had found his friend the barman, and they were having far too much fun comparing tie pins to bother with any of us.

Moments like that make you wonder, would anyone really blame me if I just walked out? I’d be fully in favour or creating a law whereby if your bill isn’t brought promptly you have the right to walk out without paying it at all. Or at the very least be given a bag of potato skins and mouldy fish heads to throw at your choice of staff members.

I wouldn’t mind but the whole process of getting me my bill took less than 30 seconds when the only vaguely competent staff member (the random foreign waitress, typically) was eventually summoned by my ever-increasing state of unrest.

What was really impressive about this whole evening - nay, this whole day - was that a civillian added the cherry to the icing on the cake even after the glorious debácle that was ”my dinner’. As we were leaving, a stupid, stupid man in a stupid, stupid blazer, was smoking in the porch (very specifically indoors, under a roof), and turned just in time to blow a mouthful of smoke in my face as I attempted to storm out of the establishment. I will refer you back to the aforementioned desire not to embarass my companion as an explanation for my current freedom from incarceration…

Give it back!!

There are certain things that should not, under any circumstances, take half an hour. Boiling an egg seems like the most obvious example. Any kind of ‘fast’ food, obviously (to order, eat, and clean up after in full). Buying a stamp. Getting petrol.

Unfortunately the latter impacted very badly on the sanity of my evening when I was forced to spend 28 minutes waiting in a car for petrol, or the opportunity to avail of the petrol-provision services at the garage of choice. It’s the kind of situation that only occurs in a very specific, extreme, circumstance.

We arrived at the station, realising pretty quickly that there was something amiss. Handwritten signs are never a good sign (if you’ll pardon the probable pun). For a start, it suggests that a unique situation has arisen which has never before been faced. Thus, there is no solution obvious to the frankly incompetent staff. Stupendous.

12 pumps. 2 featuring petrol. At a petrol station. Am I the only one who sees those sums as being a bit askew? The obvious comedy value of fellow patrons completely missing the point of the aforementioned handwritten signs wore off after the first ten minutes, giving way to sheer unadulterated frustration, and the kind of piercing headache you can only get from petrol fumes. Bliss. Or, not…

I don’t understand why such simple situations are made deliberately difficult. Everyone who has a full drivers license presumably has some level of basic competence in dealing with everyday situations. Everyone has seen those “one way system in operation” signs - would it take so much for a dozen or so supposedly intelligent beings to instigate such a system without the help of a pre-placed signalling system?

Traffic chaos caused by a division of six. Absolutely ridiculous, and that was before anyone tried to pay the highly, highly incompetent garage staff. Just as well we didn’t want snacks. The only thing more antagonising than their obvious inability to perform basic tasks was the bizarre attitude of the man at the front of the queue, who decided to park his car, at one of the only two functioning pumps, disappear off to pay, come back, slowly, and start wiping and polishing parts of his car. With half a dozen cars lined up behind him.

Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult to be sympathetic to your fellow men. When they’re polishing something - anything - it seems that much more difficult. When it’s a car? God help them, all…

Commuter Hell

It seems like it’s about time I start using this blog properly. Ranting, if you will. Something about this (Sunday) evening has inspired me to start at last - probably the simple fact of having to face commuter-land in the morning.

It’s hard to tell what is most frustrating and/or least appealing about the 9 to 5 gang. I travel into town on the DART and usually this would take 15 minutes but in the mornings it’s more like 25. That I can deal with. And the fact that new DARTS are supposedly air-conditioned would make it that much more tolerable, if said air-conditioning had in fact been turned on. But no matter. After 10 years of DART commuting to school and college I’m well used to the feeling of ’sardinium’ as I like to call it, that special sensation of having your nose stuck in someone else’s armpit for the duration of your journey. In fairness to the powers that be, sardinium is much less of an issue now that they’ve added carriages etc, the Ronnie Drew ads evidently speak the truth.

My latest peeve with these people is their blatant lack of interest in humanity. The sense that no matter what goes on around them they will neither blink an eyelid nor react in any other according way. I realised this when I went through a fun phase of collapsing on the DART a few times (gotta love that kidney problem…). The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe the total lack of reaction. I mean, I’m not saying I felt a little faint but then it was alright. I mean I literally fell over. Luckily at that point I had been panicking enough that I moved towards a recently vacated seat and fell into it. But for god’s sake, the people beside me and opposite me looked straight at me, realised I was the colour of.. .well, a very unwell person… and said and did nothing. I stumbled off the DART, and swayed down the platform in a fairly precarious manner, eventually slumping onto a bench. And..? Nothing!

The second time it happened I was prepared. Nobody would react, nobody would notice, nothing would be done to ensure I didn’t injure myself while falling over. The obliviousness was profound. Now, I knew I was going to be okay eventually, but here’s my issue - what if I wasn’t okay? What if there was something seriously wrong, and those people were just standing there. I’ve read the Metro and the Evening Herald AM (another rant, another day) and I know for a fact that there is never anything that enthralling in there. It’s quite disturbing realising that such a large group of people could act in such a detached and inhumane way. Nobody makes eye-contact. Nobody smiles. Everyone just… goes…

The third time was the big surprise. I collapsed on the platform and ended up sitting on the ground, relatively unable to get up again. Hundreds of people walked past and over me and said and did nothing. Then, miraculously, a woman around my age ran over, asked me if i was okay, said she’d be back in a minute and returned moments later with a newly purchased ice cold bottle of water for yours truly. She handed it to me, and then asked if there was anyone I wanted her to call for me, and whether I worked very far away or would be able to make it there by myself. I assured her I would be okay now that I had water, thanked her a few hundred times, and advised her to get to work in case a shitty boss punished her for any lateness induced by her act of kindness. As she walked away my main thought, beyond overwhelming gratitude, was how upsetting it was that I was totally shocked by this simple act of kindness. That this has become unexpected behaviour is a fairly pathetic indictment of the world we are living in.

So what fun do I face tomorrow? I’m hoping not to collapse, but my latest annoyance is what happens once you’re off the dart and through the station. The way I see it, everyone who gets into town at 8:40am is aiming to be at work at 9am. All going the same direction. All at the same pace. What I don’t understand? Why that pace is so damned slow! I can fully appreciate the lack of enthusiasm for arriving at the workplace, but let’s face it, once you’re that near you might as well keep going - and for God’s sake don’t get in the way of everyone else trying to do the same thing. Maybe there should be a slow-lane and a fast-lane, like they have in swimming pools in the evenings? At the very least those who can’t be bothered moving their legs a little faster should move to one side and let other through instead of simply dawdling for twenty minutes.

It’s all part of the same problem. So many people, in such a small place, all bloody miserable with their lot and desperately trying to avoid thinking about it. How do so many people end up dreading Monday mornings? And would it end war and hunger if people didn’t hate themselves for what they were doing? There’s only so much bitterness and resentment one geographical region can take before everyone becomes Michael Douglas in Falling Down. A-tischoo, A-tischoo, we all fall down…