Monaghan - Even Some People From There Have Never Heard Of It
I was rushing for this bus so there wasn’t time to look twice but I could swear that as I passed a shop I caught a glance of tanks full of fish on the floor, and people sitting on benches with their bare feet in the tanks. Funny, I thought. I never took all that much acid.
Bu that’s a thing now, isn’t it? Supposedly the tiny mouths of very small fish are meant to clean you better than scrubbing or using a soap. Better in what way exactly, I am unclear. More erotically I would think. But perhaps that’s just me.
There’s the Shannon. Just leaving Connacht now and entering Leinster, next stop Dublin. By tonight though we’ll be in Ulster – in the tiny and pretty much unknown town of Ballybay, County Monaghan. By this circuitous route we plan to reach a little literary and music festival tomorrow. But God knows.
Should you be worried by the WHO’s warning on mobile phones? Well don’t let me stop you. On current evidence you’re more likely to be run over by a taxi – hell, you’re more likely to be run over by an ice cream van playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. But the World Health Organization has decided that they are a ‘possible cause’ of cancer. So if worrying is your thing, knock yourself out.
I know what you’re going to say. All this ‘putting things in perspective’ stuff is well and good, but getting cancer in your brain is f***ing scary. I am forced to agree. But if we take precautions in proportion not to how likely a threat is but to how frightening, we’ll all go around with crash helmets over our crotches in case we ever meet that Amazonian fish that swims up you. That’s the scariest thing in the world.
So how can we properly calibrate our fear with only ‘possible cause’ to go on – are phones extremely deadly, or only slightly deadly? With billions using mobiles, the prospect of them all getting cancer would make any previous threat to human life seem laughable. Perhaps everyone has a time bomb in their head right now. It could be. Many years may pass before cellular genetic damage manifests itself detectably. With little more than ten years’ real-world evidence, how can we know?
Well of course they have been around longer, it was just that they were rare until prices plummeted at the turn of the century. Indeed in the form of carphones and briefcase-sized portables, mobiles of a sort have been with us since the 70s at least. These were different from ours though. They were on different frequencies, they were analogue rather than digital, they didn’t use a cellular system. Most saliently of all perhaps, they created far stronger electromagnetic fields. So it is entirely possible that while the phones used by the red-suspendered bond traders of the 80s were deadly, the modern kind is not.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
The question for the rest of us is, should this extremely vague pronouncement change our lives? Well speaking for myself I suspect that, pursuant of very many poor lifestyle choices, I am already too raddled with incipient tumours for this to make any measurable difference. But while the jury is still out I think it would be wrong to let kids use phones unnecessarily.
Which is to say, at all. Let the pristine little buggers text.
Thank you for your perseverance through the downtime. I lost my blogging rhythm for a few days there, between one thing and another. One was the current job – if that’s an appropriate word for what’s turned into a litany of frustration – the other my driving test, which I failed.
It would be easy to say the main reason for the other was the one. Easy, and largely true. I only had time to drive every other day because I was busy working to (oh, the irony) pay for lessons.
Too easy though; I want to resist the urge to blame something other than myself. Driving is about the most responsible thing you can do. Unless you’re a surgeon or a soldier in action, you aren’t usually in a position where one lapse of judgement can kill the person nearest to you. So no excuses, I wasn’t ready for that test.
I probably never will be. Let’s face it, I lack the necessary intelligence and skill to ever be left in charge of a dangerous machinery. Wait, that’s too far the other way now. In reality there were bad habits in my driving technique that I became aware of too late in the game to break. Ah well. I have applied for another test.
So in the last six months I’ve gone from being certain that driving wasn’t for me to being besotted with it – closely followed by the feeling I’d never figure it out, and finally a cautious optimism that I’m going to get it right some day. It’s been like adolescence on fast-forward.
It’s not that I didn’t care about the royal visit. I had really strong feelings. It’s just that they were so contradictory, they averaged out somewhere near ‘Meh’.
So it was a good thing mostly. I was irritated by commentators who gushed like it was the second coming of Elizabeth Christ, beginning of the end of all our troubles. (Slightly disorientating that this coincided with America’s latest rapture attack.) I’m sure that it will be good for our image abroad and for tourism especially, will demonstrate that the Irish still know how to entertain even – perhaps especially – when times are tough. If everything goes well with the Obama visit too, I think this whole summer will be remembered as one brilliant PR coup.
But like all true democrats, I’m a republican (try explaining that in the US), and find the idea of ‘constitutional monarchy‘ bizarre. Genuine monarchy at least has the excuse that it’s what happens when someone wins a fight. But for a self-proclaimed democracy to maintain the post of hereditary pretend-ruler… Well basically it’s just silly, a sort of national charade. This may look like a nice little old lady, but we’re all pretending she’s magic. I resent being required to play along.
So protestors march by, chanting that Ireland is in solidarity with Spain against the EU-IMF bailout. Wait – don’t you usually express solidarity with someone in their troubles, not your own? That’s a bit like shaking hands with a mourner at a funeral and telling them your car needs a new clutch.
But I am qibbling over a choice of words. It is good that people are at least protesting, whether it be against the Spanish government’s cuts, our own bailout conditions, or – to go for the common thread – the destructive role that the financial industry now plays in western economies. Perhaps it will even make the news. Second or third item after after the nation waving a tearful goodbye to her majesty Queen Elizabeth.
Wouldn’t want to spoil that image of us quietly taking the fiscal punishment we deserve.
And that completes the set. Now there are no honest politicians left at all.
Maybe I exaggerate a trifle, but Garret Fitzgerald did seem different. Even though he led a right-of-centre party, even though he could give the impression of being confused and ineffectual, even though he didn’t achieve much of what he set out to, he was the greatest leader that Ireland has had in my memory. There was never any doubt that Garret’s motivation was not personal power, status or wealth. He wasn’t there to be liked by his coterie or cheered by the the masses. He was there to do something about the mess the country was in.
He did that, and he was still liked anyway. Though the sobriquet ‘Garret The Good’ was intended to lampoon his earnestness, no one doubted that it was true. This was a good man in politics. A man who did more than anyone to free Ireland from religious domination, who first dared to attempt what finally bore fruit as the Peace Process. That rarest of things, an intellectual in a leadership role.
And in 1987, the voters of Ireland decided that they would actually prefer to be ruled by Charles Haughey. So perhaps we deserve all that has come since.
The last time I walked along this boreen, I was ankle deep in bright, blue-white snow. Now it’s night. There might be snow for all I know, but hawthorns and blackthorns and, in all probability, whitethorns are the only white I can make out. Then there were sheep in the fields, now there are newborn calves hardly bigger than dogs. Madly cute.
A cow lets me scratch her nose.
The gate to this field I notice bears that most futile of signs, ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’. I bet you they won’t – there is no crime of trespass. I suppose it has more impact than ‘Don’t Come In Or I’ll Sue’, but to be honest the sign just makes me want to go into a field I would otherwise not have the slightest interest in.
What are you going to do about it, field-owner?
On my left, passing a cousin’s house. They just got set up for 3D TV. When I was a kid in 1975, we were definitely going to have that by the year 2000.
On my right now, the well where we got all our drinking water when I was a kid in 1975. So some things changed.
And now I’m blogging in the dark, something I don’t remember anyone predicting. By the year 2011 people will walk around at night, publishing their thoughts in an almost stream-off-consciousness way for no very clear reason. Nope, those rubbish visionaries were way off on that one.
