No, I wasn’t ignoring it

I didn’t ignore the election, in case that was what it looked like. It was more that I’m confident plenty of other people had more time to dedicate to a commentary on it when I was stuck in the middle of a deeply unpleasant series of exams. Fun was not had.

This week we get to watch the fun aftermath as certain parties dance around each other like pre-pubescent girls at their first dishco, having promised not to dance with the boy their best friend fancies but then accidentally following him out to the bike shed. It’s depressing to say the least.

I don’t believe in this theory that a politician’s job is to get (invariably) himself re-elected. I do believe, however, that politicians do themselves no favours when it comes to supposedly attempting to engage people in the political process. For months now we have had hand-shaking, baby-kissing hurricanes blowing through our towns promising the sun, moon and stars. Even the ’sincere’ ones - the ones who claim to have a backbone, or principles, or in extreme cases both - will inevitably promise more than they could ever deliver.

Then the votes are counted, the dust settles, and they all - almost without exception - quickly and conveniently forget every conversation they have had for the past month, and every guarantee they made, and every dealbreaker they swore by.

In five years time the same people will come calling again. If the apparent naivety of the Irish electorate is anything to go by, we will shake their hand, hand them our identical twins to cuddle (don’t get me started on bertie’s bullshit) and tell all our friends that they promised to fix that one little problem they forgot about last time.

They’re not the eejits. We are.

The end of life as we know it, part two

My last post before today was about the bastardisation of ‘highstreet’ book shops, by means of the removal of all the books!!

Last Friday something happened which in many ways is much worse.

They closed Greene’s.

It would be a bit wrong of me to rant at length now, because if I wanted to do that last Friday would have been the time - or perhaps a month previous, or earlier again in a desperate attempt to develop some sort of hell-no-you-don’t campaign to chain myself across the doorway and keep the nasty book-killers out.

So I won’t rant.

But I will say this. It makes me truly sad that they would do this. It makes me want to cry a little, and it makes me wonder if we’ve already gone too far.

As my dad pointed out, if they tried to close Shakespeare & Company on Friday, there would be uproar. In fact, nobody would let it happen. There really would be people chaining themselves to the door.

But from what I can tell nobody did much of that on friday. Nobody did much of anything. Well, a pack of crooks were told it was all grand, we forgive them, and we’d love them to do it all over again. But nobody saved Greene’s.

Friday was a very, very bad day for Ireland.

I lied, I know…

Catch-up part twenty three?

I blame the evil exams I have been subjected to. Honestly I have never before lost the plot during exams - by which I mean, I can barely remember the last month. With a few notable exceptions…