Sunday Independent articles 2009

june 7 :    The Economy
june 28 :  Gardening with Guns
july 5 :      Physics
july 12 :   Conspiracy
july 19 :   Butterfly of Love
july 26 :   Irish Wine
aug 2 :     Spelling
aug 9 :     Leonard Cohen
aug 16 :   Civil War
aug 23 :   Art
aug 30 :   Pot
sept 6 :    Nama
sept 13 :  Women's Rights
sept 20 :  Lotto Luck
sept 27 :  School Daze
oct 4:       Man in the Moon
oct 11:     Harry Potter
oct 18:     Himalayas
oct 25     Psychoanalysis
nov 1      Autumn
nov 8      Restaurant
nov 15    Agony Uncle
nov 22    Web History
nov 29    Living Free
dec 6      Ho ho ho
dec 13    no article
dec 20    Osama Henry
jan 3       Water Water

June 7: The Economy

I can remember Phoenix Park when it was all houses. The credit crunch alas has taken a heavy toll on the market, and these days the President is the only one left, like a captain holding fast to her sinking ship. More and more people are choosing to turn green and knock down their own houses, encouraged by the generous demolition grants from the government. Whether in the long term this will have the desired effect of boosting the construction sector remains to be seen.

In the short and medium terms the widening green holes in our urban landscape are now visible from outer space. All this Celtic downsizing makes me nostalgic for the Rare Oul Times; a gentler age when the ‘Swinging Sixties’ referred not to some hippyfest but to the fact that hanging was still in vogue for possession of a condom with intent to endanger life.

In ’68 I lived in a house in Rathmines where the bedsits were subdivided so small it eventually caused a nuclear explosion. Restaurants were unheard of. If you wanted to eat out you had to kill it yourself first. Lemass was forced in the end of course to legalize chipvans in an attempt to reduce the level of cannibalism after the pubs. I sometimes wonder if that's where we're heading as a nation now in these post-capitalist days- back to more innocent times, when the worst that could happen to you walking alone late at night was to be eaten alive by somebody from Mayo.

Recession's a great leveller. I was in the pub the other day having my negative equity quantitatively eased and watching the Footsie, when I saw my old friend Dow Jones (me and his Missus have a thing going on). He was with his brother Iseq and I'm no psychologist but they both looked a bit down. 'What's with the bag, Dow?' I asked, nodding towards an old Lidl relic at his feet with a bit of hawthorn poking out the top. 'That's my hedge fund,' he mumbled into his cider. 'What's left of it'.

Now if I were to say to you there's never been a better time to buy hedges, you'd probably say I needed my assets frozen for twenty years in the hope that they might mature. But hear me out. Word on Twitter is that toxic hedges are the Next Big Thing. Was it not Karl Marx who said 'For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, but some are more equal and opposite than others'? No, I didn't think it was, but I'm too lazy to Google it.

Anyway, bad debt is the only thing worth buying these days, the price of money being what it is. In fact it is estimated by NAMA (National Asset Management Agency) that the net annual return (NAR) on unencumbered asset hedge management futures (UAHMF) is practically a done deal (DD) and that the real winners in the present worldwide banking crisis will be the ordinary taxpayer (LOL) and the long-term unemployed (LMAO). Indeed the average Irish worker is set to gain a substantial windfall (SFA) from supporting the banks in their hour of need.

So then Dow's brother Iseq leans in towards me. He had one of those lived-in faces, but you could see the fear of repossession in his eyes. 'Wanna buy some bad debt?' he says in his Cayman Islands drawl. 'How bad?' I say. 'Real bad. You're talking toxic here man. You're talking bounce a dead cat off this stuff, cat comes back to life cos two negatives make a goddam positive, know what I'm saying man?'

I knew what Iseq was saying man. The barman was calling time, but I felt I had all of it in the world. I counted out twenty grand in used notes and handed them to Iseq and he handed me the bad debt. I put it in my pocket. It stank. In real terms, the debt was worth ten million; in imaginary terms it was worth nothing. In fact it wasn’t a debt at all, it was a small dead rat wrapped in a handkerchief, and felt unusually heavy for its size nestling in my pocket.

I took my leave of the Joneses and stepped out into the crisp, sub-prime night air. There was the faintest glow in the east from the Asian emerging markets, and the low but unmistakable hum of a recession turning into a depression. The elasticity of supply and demand ebbed to and fro on the horizon, and I could just make out the dim outline of housing confidence index reports by the shore. I felt tired and in sudden need of a stamp duty holiday. I called my redemption manager and he took me home.

 

June 28: Gardening with Guns

'I'm really glad we're doing this,' she murmured. 'Me too,' he purred, in his mellifluous Chicago drawl. She took a carrot seed and dropped it gently in the rich dark Washington soil. Beyond the White House railings a thousand flash bulbs poised to capture the moment, but before they could do so, a huge fork of lightning ruptured the heavens all the way to the horizon, as if the great paparazzo in the sky wanted the world exclusive all to himself. 'Wow', they both murmured together.

Mrs Obama's grand gesture of planting the presidential lawns with veg has echoed around the world. Mr Cowen himself was inspired to open a huge battery farm at the Dail, churning out a thousand dead ducks per week. It is thought that at present rates of expansion, Ireland could be self sufficient in quackery by November.

The environment is the great hot potato of our times. The oil is running out, and without it the supermarket shelves will be bare. Air miles will be irrelevant. An air mile is similar to an ordinary mile, except higher up, which makes it more dangerous. If you're sucked out of a Jumbo at 36,000 feet, for example, your carbon footprint when you land will be infinitely greater than if you just slide on a banana skin. The Indian chief who said 'Tread lightly on the earth' had obviously never fallen out of a plane.

The sun is burning out of control and will eventually burn itself out, although Ireland will remain largely unaffected. Vast wind farms are sucking the life out of our Irish breezes; the cancellation of last year's world surfing championships at Bundoran, for example, has been directly traced to the greed of local wind farmers. Scientists differ about the exact deadline for peak oil, but all are agreed it will happen some time within the next fifteen to twenty minutes.

There's a fresh sense of urgency bordering on panic this year among Irish growers about protecting their vital green shoots. Added to the list of natural predators such as the rabbit, slug or greenfly, a new shadow stalks the land in the form of homo sapiens desperado. The landless majority, with neither the resources, the intelligence nor the foresight to grow their own food, are watching from the hillside estates and high-rise flats through their cheap ebay binoculars, waiting until the moment is literally ripe to strike.

There is no more disheartening experience for the first time gardener than to see whole rows of their fair trade organic lettuce reduced to thin air by marauding nocturnal gangs, many of whom do not even live locally. In this situation the only logical response is to build a fence. It should be at least nine feet high; the world record for the high jump currently stands at eight feet, but there's no guarantee that some desperate Irishman might not beat that by some distance, if there was an organic carrot on the end of it. Hunger has a thirst.

In the unlikely event that one or more human beings manage to breach your fence, either by jumping over it, burrowing under it or driving through it with for example a JCB, other methods may be necessary to dissuade them from advancing on your hard won produce. Humans can become emboldened, especially in a group, and even your own presence in the garden in broad daylight, flapping your arms, may not be enough to frighten them off.

This is where firearms can often prove to be the gardener's friend. They should be used sparingly, and only as a last resort. Verbal reasoning is always the best way to resolve local disputes, although when faced with a hungry mob who have already disrespected your fence, diplomacy has at best a limited role to play, in my experience. Once you have gone down the firearms route, as a rule of thumb it is best to do the job thoroughly, to minimize the risk of reinfestation.

For larger scale crop defence strategies- if for example you suspect an entire village of planning an invasion- why not in these DIY times consider making your own nuclear device. Small fair-trade plutonium starter kits are available online, and you will be helping the indigenous peoples of North Korea to control their own destiny into the bargain.

All the gloomy talk of social unrest however should not deter you from your gardening utopia. There is still no greater pleasure than sitting down with your family to a meal of freshly prepared organic food from your own little patch, safe in the knowledge that it is free from harmful pesticides. The nine foot, fully electric mains-wired fence and the stockpile of weapons merely provide that added peace of mind. Happy gardening!

 

July 5: Physics

I hate to name drop but I'm just back from Geneva. I got a phone call late friday from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, asking me to go and fix their Large Hadron Collider, and being black-hole freaks they want it done yesterday. I cancelled all gigs for the previous week, and off I went.

The plane is late leaving Dublin of course, due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in relation to the space-time continuum and the speed of light in a political vacuum. Eventually I get to the subatomic coalface, a hundred metres underground on the Franco-Swiss border. 'Thank god you're here', spluttered CERN's director, Professor M.C. Squared, known to his friends as E. 'I'll need hot water,' I barked, struggling into my pink Marigold gloves, 'and towels, lots of them, and fifty magnets, the bigger the better. Rent a special crane from Belgium if you have to.'

I made a beeline for Sector 3-4, scene of the accident that closed the place down. They build a 17 mile collider circuit to send hadrons racing off in opposite directions at the speed of light, and then the place has to close down because of a collision? The words 'accident', 'waiting' and 'happen' come to mind, but I don't have the time to arrange the syntax into a coherent sentence.

Sector 3-4 was a mess. It was easy to see how it got its name, since you couldn't tell from the carnage where one sector ended and another began. I could see the source of the problem straight away. Some young hothead of an antimatter detective in a white coat, having just passed his test, had obviously exceeded the speed of light on a fast corner, and of course where there is an excess of mass, disaster follows, as any Irish person will tell you.

Millions of subatomic particles were strewn around in a primordial soup of disrepair- protons, charmed quarks, muons and neutrinos, six whole generations of leptons, collapsed scrums of gravitons and photons; discarded string theories, their loops still vibrating, showing as many as six extra dimensions exposed, with each new dimension curled up so tiny as to be almost invisible to the naked man in the street. I'd never felt paternal towards an undiscovered dimension before, but a microscopic tear came to my eye.

I worked all through Friday night and back into Thursday. I swept up the quarks and neutrons as best I could and stored them tightly-bound in buckets. The wave packets of photons were put in sealed envelopes, taking care to isolate them from the antimatter. The fifty magnets arrived, each a half a mile long, and were bolted into place. Some idiot had put an extra C in the basic 1eV=(1.602x10-19C) x (1 V)=1.602x10-19J cryostat equation which was making the brakes squeal. I fixed that, put on a new set of low energy antiproton rings, changed the oil and was back home before you could say hypothetical particle quantum corrections.

I wonder what my old friend Albert Einstein would make of all this subterranean nonsense. Like all known elements in the cosmos, Einstein is of Irish extraction. I met him in 1943 at the Christian Brothers Primary, a parallel universe composed of 96% invisible dark matter; his Irish was atrocious and he never joined in the hurling, preferring instead to sit in a tree with a high-energy drink, performing his gravity experiments on mice.

Under age drinking was never a problem with young Albert around. Any problem with the bouncers, we would all pile into his rocket and accelerate round the moon a few times near the speed of light. When we returned we all looked ninety years older and felt 47ft tall, an effect similar to cocaine, only much cheaper. 'Imagination is more important than knowledge,' Einstein always said to me, to make me feel better about my maths, I imagine. He grew up to be a genius, I'm just a simple quantum mechanic and the dark secrets of the universe are still out there.

For all their grand equations and underground collisions, scientists in the 21st century can still only account for a paltry 4% of all matter. They twitter on about four dimensions, while ignoring the other six curled up under their noses. In any other profession, even politics, such incompetence would be a resignation issue. It’s time to get angry with our scientists, demand the nationalization of all dark matter and untapped dimensions that are rightfully ours, and send a stark message to Geneva- would the last antimatter detective out of the collider please turn off the lights.

 

July 12: Conspiracy

No one knows exactly when conspiracy theories came into being, but I have my suspicions. Most historians now agree, for example, that the moon landings were faked by a secret trinity of JFK, Princess Diana and Elvis, so that Marilyn Monroe would be blamed for 9/11.

Lots of millennium cults prophesied the Apocalypse, but nine years on, it seems the end was not as nigh as predicted. We've all had to settle for the next best thing- a New World Order, where every individual move and thought is controlled and monitored by cutting edge technology.

Mobile phone tracking, sat-nav, digital tv, satellites, cctv, swipe cards, holes-in-the-wall, barcodes, internet and email snooping, number-plate scanning, the end is listless. I was in the garden the other day with the laptop, dabbling online with google earth's satellite images. I was able to zoom right in on the top of my own head, in real time- a powerful reminder of the surveillance reach of the military-industrial complex, and a traumatic way to discover you have a bald spot.

Microchip technology means that speed cameras are now implanted in the road signs that warn you about speed cameras. At the supermarket checkout, your lovingly chosen items bleep their barcode secrets to the till's computer, while the cctv cameras add your pretty face to the file.

By cross-referencing all the different technologies, big brother has a highly sophisticated behavioural profile for every one us. For example, tall ugly males with bald spots who like beetroot and cling film, can be specifically grouped and targeted for marketing purposes or extermination. I know what you're thinking- surely the best way to fight these affronts to our humanity is to have no phone or tv or internet or credit card or car? That's a silly thought, unworthy of a consumer of sunday newspapers who has recently broken the law, and you should erase it immediately.

The New World Order, composed mainly of reptiles from Orion, the House of Windsor and the Bush family, judging by the tops of their heads, has a special interest in citizens with low profiles. If you are one of those subversives who refuse to buy their own electronic tagging devices, just take a moment to peek out through your closed curtains; see that car parked across the road with the two detectives spouting bad movie dialogue day and night? That's your tail, or my name's not Osama bin Laden.

No, the trick is to fully embrace every spy gadget going, but distort your profile by faking it. For example, as a vegetarian I will occasionally kill a sheep and eat it in full view of the satellites. It goes slightly against the grain, but it makes me feel I am more than a number on big brother's hard drive. Buy food you don't like, drive somewhere you don't want to go- an occasional online shop for your least favourite books or cd's. Obviously you don't want to overdo this to the point where your life isn't worth living. I still bear the emotional scars of a Chris deBurgh concert in Milton Keynes with my slab of Harp, goats cheese, and boiled egg sandwiches. I survived, just about, but my personal profile in the archives must be in tatters.

Last night I was watching satellite tv, and vice versa; flicking vacantly through the channels, a sense of remoteness and control. I took some rubbish out to the wheelie bin, tossing one of my favourite Dylan CD's in the mix for good measure, to confuse the built-in chip. 'Are you who I think you are?' croaked the voice behind me. The question always fills me with ontological uncertainty, even when asked by a human being. 'Maybe, maybe not,' I mumbled, looking down. The alligator shoes confirmed it for me, and I made a run for the door.

Non-human aliens of the New World Order move amongst us, but are notoriously elusive, while the number of the beast is on permanent call divert. At the last Irish census, there were around fifty thousand ‘people’ who described their ethnicity as either Bush family, House of Windsor or malevolent reptilian, and the numbers are rising, due to interbreeding.

Total mind control of the human race is of course the name of the game. Satellites can already read the human mind, by locking onto the magnetic field around the head, which has a unique resonance as individual as a fingerprint. For example a reptile back home in Orion could be reading this article at the same time as you, by reading your mind. We know what you’re thinking.

 

July 19: Butterfly of Love

When the Great Spirit chose me to be a vessel for passing on universal wisdom through the medium of semi-automatic writing in a magazine appropriately called Life, I experienced a mixture of deep humility and awe at the god-like responsibility suddenly thrust upon me.

Drawing on all my thirty seven years as a holotropic Breath Master under Dr Anwar Shri Ohara at the Institute of Light™ in Tibet, I tried to remain calm. Dr. Shri pioneered the idea in the Eighties™ that the world was out of balance, and that only through a combination of breathing, nutrition, tree visualization and magnetic feng shui moon lodge acupuncture, could we realign our inner selves and save the universe from itself.

His best-selling books 'Sacred Money', 'Beyond Sacred Money', 'The Jesus Million' and most recently 'Bankruptcy through Breathing', have become essential reading on colonic hydrotherapy demystification courses worldwide. Dr Shri remains a prisoner of conscience in Tibet, after admitting charges of drink driving, no tax or insurance, assault on a monk and indecent exposure, at his 80th birthday party in Lhasa in 1934.

I first became aware of the powers of the unconscious following a laying on of hands by Brother Krishna in Latin class, from which I awoke speaking in tongues, and seeing stars for several astral weeks. The book that changed my life however was Deepjoy Chakra's 'How to Turn your Negative Voices into Imaginary Friends'. Suddenly the doors of perception were flung open, and in rushed an ecstasy so intense that I found myself singing uncontrollably all night and hugging strangers.

Mid-Ulster in 1972 wasn't ready for this free state of love, and following threats from the paramilitaries on both sides, my deep shamanic intuitions told me to flee across the borders of reality to West Cork. In Clonakilty I founded the University of Yourself, which flourished for almost seven months, before the sustainability grant was cruelly withdrawn by the capitalist, patriarchal anti-joy drones known as Cork County Council.

The next gift from Gaia was a three-day rebirthing seminar with angels and dolphins in Peru; I regressed into my own navel, passing through the afterbirth to the afterlife to discover that I had been my own mother in 1645. She immediately started the usual nagging about tidying my room and the universal laws of Karma, how bad deeds can cause you to be reborn as a worm, and if you don't cut it as a worm you come back as a cabbage or worse, slipping further and further down the food chain until you are practically inedible.

To keep my inner mother off my back, I enrolled on seventeen new courses in bee venom therapy, hand analysis, full-body detox under anaesthesia, internal organ massage, telephone dreamwork, tantric welding, dog whispering and Rolfing- the world famous Harris technique of Australian art therapy, involving the ritual tying down of kangaroos.

In the end it was through numerology that I found the untold wealth and happiness which I enjoy today. While working part-time as a karate dentist in Letterkenny in 2004, I discovered that the human mouth has 32 teeth, each of which enjoys a unique cosmic relationship with its corresponding Irish county. Donegal, for example, is twinned with the maxillary second molar, Louth vibrates to the mandibular central incisor, and so on. By performing a small filling on the maxillary canine, I was amazed to find that the healing vibration amplified to fix all the potholes in Tipperary. The theory holds good as well for American mouths, which have fifty teeth, while Northern catholics have only six.

The question I get asked most by disciples at my Neurolinguistic Consciousness Seminars in packed stadia all across the universe is 'what about the credit crunch?' I tell them the simple parable of the Ass, the Hare and the Crocodile crossing the river, which cannot be repeated here, for copyright reasons, but which is available free of charge to anyone who signs up ten friends to my next Superconsciousness Bootcamp in Monte Carlo in 2047.

In our love-soaked world of infinite interconnectedness, they say that when a butterfly stamps its feet in China, somewhere on the other side of the world a woman whistles and the blessed virgin sheds a tear. In this moment, the only moment there is, look deep into your heart and ask yourself- are you that butterfly? Blessings on the Path.

 

July 26: Irish Wine

It's been a long wait, but the first Irish wines of the new season have finally come on stream. I had a lively little Côte Tyrone the other day, just brimming with farmyard, tar and wet wool bouquets. The Slaney Valley Buckfasts seem a little dry this year, but what they lack in structure, texture, aroma and acidity, they more than make up for in complexity, integration, expressiveness and balance.

Wine making in Ireland goes right back to the Druids, who invented Blue Nun by adding absinthe to barrels of rainwater. The defeat of Strongbow in 1169 was a crushing blow for cider, and by 1620 the grape had seen off the potato as the staple crop. Elizabeth's envoy Lord Chardonnay sent back this glowing report on the Plantations in 1623; 'the wyneries of Royale Meathe surpasseth all of France, eche hillside clothed in vynes, I mean lyk reely reely wikkid ur majisty'. Chardonnay was beheaded in 1625 for his atrocious spelling and drinking on the job.

Climate and geography conspire to put Ireland among the top wine regions in the world. Our latitude and longitude are unique, the exact coordinates being jealously guarded and passed down from one generation to the next. Our microclimate is bi-polar maritime, with short damp days interspersed with long rainy nights- perfect for mould formation on the vine.

This season for my wine-tasting kicks I've been avoiding the big hitters, such as the famous Bunratty merlots, or the traditional red, white and blue varietals of the Antrim Plateau, although I've heard their 1916 Riesling is to die for. Instead I headed out west to the charming island estates dotted around the Connemara archipelago, or to the karstic landscape of the Burren, where the vines, driven underground by the lack of soil, intertwine through a complex system of caves and blowholes, making it the only functioning underground vineyard in Europe.

My favourite little gem of the season was tucked away in the Aran Islands- the tiny Inishere Estate, where the pinot noirs tend to be woody, complex and round, just like their owners. Huge piles of freshly picked grapes lined the shore on my arrival, and I was invited to remove my shoes and socks and join in the crushing.

The grapes were loaded into currachs on the strand, and the entire population of the island climbed in, with much animated jumping up and down and chanting in Irish. The boats were then wrapped in cling film and left to ferment. When all the fruit sugar had turned to alcohol, (about three days) the church bell was loudly rung and the sampling began in earnest.

Wine tasting is a relatively new oral tradition in Ireland, so here are a few simple etiquette tips to avoid coming across like an alcoholic bull in a china shop. First, the choice of glass is all important, and can make a subtle difference to your appreciation of the vintages on offer. I always bring along my own traditional pint glass.

Next thing to do is tilt the wine, to make sure the glass is full. Unlike guinness, a head on top of the wine isn't always a sign of a good pint, and may indicate that it was cracked open a day early. Carefully examine the colour and ask yourself, is it red or white? Don't worry if you get this wrong the first few times- the important thing is to keep drinking until you get it right.

Next get your nose right down into the wine, and have a good long sniff, making sure your nostrils are not actually submerged. Dozens of novices around the world drown every year by interpreting this stage too literally. Establish the ground rules about spitting, which vary from region to region. It's best to ask your host in advance what or who you can spit on. Remember you may be tasting up to four hundred bottles of wine in an hour, so some spitting is inevitable, as tempers become frayed. Wear some old painting clothes if you are worried about this.

Wine tasting can be done vertically or horizontally. Vertical refers to sampling different vintages of the same type, whereas in horizontal tasting, the wine has actually penetrated the skin of the mouth, producing a feeling of mild intoxication.

The final step is to actually score the wine. This is where controversy rears its head in Irish viticulture, since a suspiciously high number of tastings seem to end in draws, requiring endless mid-week replays. But in the end the real winner is always Irish wine. Slainte.

 

Aug 2: Spelling

'Get out of my shop. Now.'
The manager of FCUK is angry. Funny how you can touch a nerve, just by pointing out a simple spelling mistake in a shop sign. I reverse towards the door, recognizing the classic cornered-rat-with-its-head-in-the-sand syndrome. People hate to admit they're wrong. In the small hours I return with a ladder and chainsaw and rearrange the letters as best I can. Another small act of healing on the English language, but I refuse to go round and fix every FCUK sign in the entire country. I really do have better things to do with my time.

Some signs are beyond redemption. When I came across the shoe emporium SCHUH all I could do was mark it for demolition by spraying a large red x on the window. When the Witnness festival was launched a few years back, I campaigned long and hard against the extra 'n'. In the end they caved in, only to replace it with the satanic mutation of Oxegen. I'm a patient man but I feel it's time for some direct action at Punchestown, as the name suggests.

It's becoming increasingly difficult for us freelance 21st century orthographers to have any kind of social life at all. After perusing the menu in a restaurant I invariably end up asking the waiter 'I've got this allergy, have you anything at all without a spelling mistake?' I usually end up making do with the Chicken Kev and skip the desert. In the nite club the other night, the choons became so old skool and phat that I ran out the door screaming. Is this the death rattle of English, when the only way to woo the yoof is to be wilfully wrong? Is illiteracy the new rock'n'roll?

In a recent survey, teenagers born and reared on text and online chat could only name two of the five english vowels. School essays are cut & pasted from faded internet parchments originally keyed into Word, one letter at a time, back in the 20th century. Meanwhile a leaner, more hungry language called Irish lurks in the wings, like a vulture with a long memory, ready to strangle the old Sassenach bird faster than you could text 'chukkie ar la'.

The poet Michael Hartnett once described English as 'the perfect language to sell pigs in', but the credit crunch has taken a bit of shine off that title. English has become associated with the stigma of poverty, unemployment and worldwide recession. Irish parents used to encourage their children to speak it in the belief that it would help them to get a job, but not any more. Its vocabulary is the largest of any language, but it is now emerging that the level of borrowing from other languages has been massive- eg from Native American (tomato, canoe, genocide); from India (pyjama, call centre, slumdog); from Brazil (football) and from Irish (boycott). The natives want their words back and are demanding an apology (Greek).

Irish on the other hand is as old as time itself, which explains why there was no past tense to begin with. The first Ogham stone was written in 542 AD by Malachi Ogham- the greatest breakthrough in world communication since Nostradamus invented predictive text. The most complete surviving stone fragment, etched on a burial stone at Dowth in the sixth century, has been roughly translated as 'Where r u?', possibly part of a sacred ritual to contact the spirits of the Celtic other world, or somebody late for a funeral.

The war of words between Irish and English raged for centuries until the decisive Battle of Swords in 1602. The Irish vocabulary, outnumbered ten to one, lost twenty thousand nouns of every gender, fifteen thousand verbs, eight thousand adjectives, and an unspecified number of prepositions, adverbs and pronouns, many of them personal. A small band of verbs was spared, mostly auxiliaries and irregulars which the English found impossible to conjugate.

The irregulars fled to the west and founded Cumann na Gael (Gone with the Wind). Its aims were two-fold. One, to preserve the Irish flame, and two, to undermine English by a systematic process of infiltration, sabotage and glossomania. Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is the most famous example of these guerrilla tactics, while the notorious double agent Terry Wogan widened the campaign with his euro vision. Whether the Cumann succeeds one day in its ultimate aim- world domination for Irish, and the total disintegration of the English language, remumghs to be suf mmmb mfff.

 

Aug 9: Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen is smiling. We're sipping tea on the roof of Belgrade's ultra chic Hotel des Astres; the trademark Fedora shields his face from the low November sun, with Lake Guardiola glistening in the distance like an aubergine. It's the morning after the final night of the epic European tour. 'How does it feel?' I ask. 'Wonderful. Just wonderful,' answers the Fedora.

245 dates spanning five months, from Athens to Zaragoza, climaxing with last night's seven hour extravaganza at the Red Star Arena in front of 200,000 ecstatic rain-soaked believers. One towering image stays in my mind from the three-hour encore, performed entirely in the kneeling position. For the final number a 60ft cross slowly descends from the multi-coloured heavens, without any visible means of support, and our naked hero is borne aloft, still singing as he ascends into the clouds. The tantalizing glimpse of Cohen's mythical rod has already set the blogosphere buzzing with alternative readings of 'So Long Marianne.'

Cupping his tea in heavily bandaged hands, the newly risen 87 year old legend looks a bit like a giant panda in his black suit. There is no danger of extinction though for the reputation of this particular reclusive Canadian. Bono describes Cohen as 'our Byron, our Shelley', while Cohen calls Bono 'our Celine Dion.' Born Leonard Nimoy in Toronto on September 21, 1934, he grew his ears long in the Sixties in protest against the Vietnam war and withdrew to the Greek island of Vulcan. His first book of poetry 'I'm a Lumberjack' remained in the Ontario Top Ten for 57 years.

He changed his name to Cohen on the advice of his manager, Captain Kirk, and made the big musical breakthrough after singing a cover version of his own song 'Hallelujah' on the gospel reality tv show 'The Factor'. He was runner up twice on 'I'm a Celebrity Get me out of Here', and was the first Canadian zen buddhist to eat spiders live on tv. In 1987 he was voted one of the 10 sexiest men in New York, which inspired him to write 'Democracy is coming to the USA'.

As we admire the Danube together from our 5-star perch, I am curious to get beneath the skin of some of the maestro's more enigmatic lyrics. The combination of tea on an empty stomach and the fresh Serbian air is lending me wings, and I decide to go straight for the jugular.

KMA: Is it true that 'Chelsea Hotel' was about a passing encounter with an entire football team in London in 2007?' Cohen shifts uneasily under his hat, and I sense a tightening of fists inside the bandages. Suddenly he looks more like a boxer than a panda. 'Chelsea Hotel', he explains patiently, a bit too patiently for my liking, was written forty years ago, and he never discusses the past.
KMA: Some people have read an erotic connotation into the line 'giving me head on the unmade bed.' What's your own interpretation?
LC: Confucius believed superstition brings you bad luck. I never ask my lyrics where they’ve been, or who they were with.
KMA: You're passionate about the environment now?
LC: That's right.
KMA: Isn't it time then to rewrite the line from 'Suzanne'- 'She feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China,' sourcing these products closer to home perhaps, thus reducing food miles?
LC: Well I-
KMA: Some people have suggested that, coming from Canada, you may be bilingual?
LC: I really don't think-
KMA: 'Bird on the Wire.' Would it be less insulting towards half the population in 2009 if you made it 'Woman on the Wire?'

I was on the floor before I even knew Cohen had hit me. He was standing over me, the bandages were off, and the long, chord-hardened fingers of his left hand held my eyes, nose and mouth in a sustained E7th, while he strummed my midriff with his powerful right. I'd fought tougher celebrities, but I really can't remember when. Not since Phil Spector held a crossbow to my throat in '65 for pouring cold water on his Wall of Sound. Not since Aretha Franklin picked me up like a ragdoll and threw me out the 42nd floor window of Atlantic Records for a bad review of 'Respect' in '73.

As I write this dangling upside down over the ultra chic edge of the Hotel des Astres, with the Danube now above, I'm grateful for the reassuring strength of that famous grip on my ankle. Leonard Cohen is still smiling.

 

Aug 16: Civil War

The rocket attack which demolished Liberty Hall on Friday is being seen by many as the 'point of no return' in the Second Irish Civil War. The pre-emptive strike by private sector forces on SIPTU's HQ is the latest bloody skirmish in a fight to the finish with the public service legions over jobs and money. 'They want strikes, they'll get them,' said a masked militia spokesman who didn't want to be named, Brian 'Mad Dog' Lenihan.

Families have been split down the middle by the private v public carnage, and tales of atrocites on both sides abound. Two jackpot winners in the public-controlled National Lottery had the shirts taken off their backs by staff in Dublin, before being turned away empty handed, when their passports betrayed their occupations as private sector. In Malahide a man with a 'smug expression' suspected of being a civil servant was dragged off the Luas and stoned to death by an angry mob of unemployed bankers and builders.

SIPTU's self-styled military commander Jack 'Chemical' O'Connor is rumoured to have escaped the Liberty Hall meltdown on a CIE-controlled bus and is holed up in RTE for one final stand, with an unholy alliance of tv executives, teachers, gardai, politicians and card-carrying judges. At the time of writing, the bombardment of Montrose by private artillery is in its 11th day, with no sign of arbitration.*

On the face of it, the Second Irish Civil War should be much shorter than the First. Public service forces number only around 350,000, up against 1.5 million from the private ranks. The military picture is clouded however by strategic factors; public forces are said to control the country's army and police force, for example. Power supplies, transport, the tv media, hospitals, are all in the hands of the public warlords, while the education system at every level has been infiltrated by teachers.

Decentralization is another thorn in the side of the private classes. In the good old days, a couple of days blanket bombing of the Pale would have smoked out the civil service axis of evil for good, but these days they are scattered in inefficient pockets around the country, making it almost impossible to weed them out. In Thurles for example, an advance party of 25 from Sustainable Energy Ireland has established a sleeper unit in the local community like swine flu in the night, while in Ballina, ordinary decent private sector workers suddenly find themselves forced to live next door to scum from the Department of Finance.

As ususal in a war-zone, it is the weak and the poor who suffer most, in this case the Irish banks. South of a line drawn from Limerick to Waterford by the idiotic Roads Service, not a single bank building remains intact. A flying column of 150 JCBs from the Office of Public Works, backed up by 5,000 Gardai and 10,000 nurses, has gouged every single ATM from its moorings, with not a hole in the wall left standing. In a rare counter attack, private forces captured an isolated cell of 57 decentralized revenue commissioners in Kilrush Office, recovering 3 billion Euro in used notes. The money was loaded onto 25 private security trucks and returned to its rightful owners, the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

In the present state of emergency, the following guidance notices have just been issued to private workers who, through no fault of their own, may come into contact with a member of the opposite sector suspected of having a job, or a pension, or both.
1. Do not touch them.
2. Do not contact the Gardai. Remember they are part of the problem, and are likely to help the suspect to escape.
3. Do not try to tackle the suspect on your own. If you feel threatened in any way by a public sector worker, scream as loud as you can 'STAY AWAY FROM ME! STAY AWAY FROM ME.' This will alert other private sector workers who may be in the area to the problem.
4. Remain calm.

Identifying a public sector worker in a crowd can sometimes be difficult, but here are some clues:
1. A look of benign complacency, totally at odds with the alarming facts about current levels of government borrowing, roughly 17 billion Euro per second.
2. An abnormally flat backside, from years of sitting on it.
3. Speaking Irish.
If you think you are developing any of these symptoms yourself, stay in bed and rest until 2016.
* For the very latest situation on the ground, go to www.civilwarlive.ie
   or text WAR to 1922

 

Aug 23: Art

You are cordially invited to the private view of my new exhibition ‘Woollen’ at the Qube Gallery, Buenos Aires on December 7th. ‘Woollen’ uses a combination of painting, video art, live performance, architecture, theatre, accountancy, sculpture and digital imaging to re-present the cultural ambiguities in, for, by, to, under, with, and around which we attempt to negotiate (more often than not unsuccessfully) what Cascarino perhaps somewhat flippantly terms ‘the moral origami of existence’.

The new work marks a departure from, and a moving towards, my earlier preoccupations with alienation, beauty, semen, blood, money, alcohol and transcendence in a post-apocalyptic, post man universe. I first had the idea of using sheep in my work when studying for my BAA at the Ecole d'Art Moderne in Grimsby in 1987. Sheep are the universal symbols of group conformity, and have also come to represent drug abuse, prostitution, cookery and death.

To prepare for 'Woollen', I spent nine months trawling the Irish marts, hand-picking the 3,200 sheep to accompany me on the 12,000 mile truck drive from Dublin to Buenos Aires. Presuming we all survive the Atlantic crossing, and blag our way past customs in New York, on December 7th I will be installed in the Qube with my immigrant flock, and the shearing can begin.

The shearing will be performed exclusively by myself in front of a live audience, at a rate of 15 sheep per day, over the 7 month duration of the exhibition. A specially commissioned version of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', sung in Spanish by Maradona, will provide a looped soundtrack to the performance. I will then spin the wool and hand knit 400 aran sweaters which will be available for sale in the gallery shop, as an ironic comment on the global art market's obsession with the bottom line, and to cover the diesel. For the final tango, I plan to swim the Rio de la Plata with my flock, whisper a poignant ‘adios amigos’ at the Fray Bentos factory, burn the truck and fly home. Hope you can make it.

As a conceptual artist living and working in Dublin, Nagasaki and Helsinki, my work is about nothing if not the attempt to blur the borders between art and life, fact and fiction, truth and lies. The fact/fiction is that artists are thriving like weeds these days, what with no proper jobs to be had. The Arts Council is doing what it can by cutting funding to the bone, but they keep coming. Even the total cull on opera singers, who can now be shot on sight, isn't guaranteed to stamp out loud roaring during a recession, and no derelict factory is safe from the viral new wave. Works on canvas are up 61% worldwide, forcing the oil paint producing countries to release another 4 billion tubes as demand threatens to outstrip supply.

If as the critic Dunphy asserts, 'the future is dead', then reality becomes in a sense a funeral which we are all forced to attend- not because we knew the corpse well, but because everybody else is going. This is the mood I wanted to capture with 'Fear'- an exhibition, a video installation, a court drama, and ultimately an incarceration. A series of deliberately atrocious watercolours was produced to provoke negative reviews. I then tracked down the reviewers who had swallowed the bait, and expressed my 'displeasure' to them with baseball bat in hand, while a hidden camera recorded their reactions. In court I argued that the resulting video installation had artistic, and indeed comedic, licence, but the judge disagreed.The final 'cell' part of the performance ran for nine months, and dealt with issues of confinement, punishment and, ultimately, freedom.

Art has the power to liberate, and even solve credit crunches. In fact a tiny bit of creative lateral thinking from Bord Snip in the art department could still save us all. By making just small cuts to the top 100 works of art in our National Galleries (no one is demanding we ship the entire paintings abroad), we can keep the World Bank smiling for the next thousand years.

Few on the minimum wage would disagree for example that Jack B. Yeats’ later works had far too much background in them anyway, particularly on the left hand side. Most figurative sculptures would benefit greatly from having another limb removed, as the Greeks did so successfully during the great depression of 29 BC. What are you waiting for Brian? Get in there with your chainsaw. Because if you don’t, I will.

 

Aug 30: Pot

'I inhaled frequently. That was the point.'- Barack Obama

So after inhaling frequently at a friend's house in Darwin, I was driving down the track towards Katherine when I became aware that I was being followed by a police helicopter. It was hovering so low the car was shaking. Every time I speeded up, the chopper hovered lower, making the car shake even more. When I eased off, he eased off. I settled on a shaky compromise of around 20mph, and eventually made it home, hounded all the way by my police escort. When I got out, I discovered I had a flat tyre.

I’m presuming my stoned intro is safe to tell, now that Obama himself is out of the drugs closet. I don’t want another helicopter on my tail. In the US, the 'Yes we Cannabis' lobby was expecting radical changes from the new president, but as the summer of love turns to fall, they are still holding their breath. Desperate financial times call for desperate measures however. In California there’s a lot of thinking outside the box going on, as to whether legalizing marijuana could yet rescue the Golden State from the toilet, while avoiding the ultimate social horror of higher taxes. Unfortunately the media have used up all the hilarious lines on the subject involving 'high' and 'grassroots' and 'stimulus package', which means there are none left for me.

So let's be serious then. California is the eighth biggest economy in the world, and pot is by far the leading cash crop, worth $14 billion a year. Slap a state tax on that little slice of space cake, and Governor Schwarzenegger could be laughing all the way to the bank. Decriminalization would also free up lots of space in American jails, while putting tens of thousands of eager consumers back on Main Street. Ronald McDonald's eyes must be lighting up already at the marketing potential of the Triple Grasswhopper with Chocolate- the cause of, and the solution to, all of life's munchies.

So what’s not to like? There remains one very large ‘but’ in the way, (or in this case lots of very small buts ha ha ha, I like that, small buts heh heh) and that big ‘but’ is the moral question. Schwarzenegger's scientist pals out at Berkeley are locked in a think tank even as we speak, burning the midnight oil at both ends to roll out a series of long white papers on marijuana. Their brief is simple- to conveniently prove that pot isn't half as bad for the brain as previously suspected. But will the tank hold water?

Short term memory loss, clouded judgment, derailment of trains of thought, inability to concentrate or focus, inappropriate laughter, food cravings, paranoia- these are just some of the qualities of ordinary Californians the report writers will be relying on to sway the argument. Not to mention short term memory loss. Was California crazy already, or did pot turn her that way? It’s the old sixty four chicken question: which came first the thousand dollars or the egg. The wild and wacky west gave us the atom bomb, peace and love, Manson Family values, Hollywood, and now the wise old ex-Terminator himself, direct spiritual descendant of Ronald Reagan and Nancy, the original Cheech & Chong. Can there be many more marbles left to lose?

I lost my first few back in the Nineties, which were really Northern Ireland’s Sixties, due to the time difference between Belfast and Berkeley. It’s tempting to look back through rose tinted glasses, if you can remember where you left them, but I got cured at Glastonbury ’93 by a mischievous little hash brownie that had me hiding in my VW Camper for 4 hours until the yawning gap that had opened up between space and time gradually closed again. I managed not to fall down the crack, but it was a close shave.

One of the lovely things about Glastonbury was sitting around the fires at night, but that year they spoiled it a bit by using crocodiles’ heads for firewood. In the glowing embers, it was hard to tell from the expression in their eyes whether they were laughing or crying. Now that I’m straight, I can spot a dopehead a mile off. Last year for example I was boarding a flight from Dublin to Amsterdam, when I overheard a voice from the cockpit singing ‘I believe I can fly.’ I made my excuses and left. So Californians lend me your ears- if some mad scientist from the funny farm with a large white paper in his hand asks if you want to buy a fluffy new Drugs Bill, just say no.

 

Sept 6: Nama

By far the most depressing thing about the financial hole we find ourselves in, is having to explain it over and over again to idiots out there who haven't even the most basic degree in economics. Yet again this week my inbox is crammed with Joe Soap rabbiting on with the usual inane questions about Nama and the banks and unemployment etc etc. Lucky then that one of the people-management skills I developed as Senior Investments Analyst at Goldman & Poor was an almost superhuman patience when dealing with my intellectual inferiors. In that spirit, I make one final heroic attempt here to spell it all out in terms even a layman could understand.

Why are the world's banks in trouble?
I thought you might ask me that. People deposit money in banks. The banks loan that money out to businesses such as property developers, to use a very topical example. Banks loan out a lot more money than they actually have, but this is not a problem in normal times, since obviously the total equity coefficient of a product will only be compromised by an abnormal surge of non-collateral creditor demand, such as happened with Fannie and Freddie on Wall Street, as any Tom, Dick or Harry will tell you.

So far so good. Where the complication seems to arise for you lay people out there is that, whereas a child of seven can grasp that no long-term inequity in the supply driven side of the monetary equation can be allowed to run unchecked by government without ultimately compromising the very fundamentals of 21st century capitalism, it takes a slightly more sophisticated economic mind to appreciate that those same fundamentals are by their very nature driven by unpredictable currents of macroeconomic index-linked marginals, and that the person best equipped to underwrite those quid pro quo marginals is- yes you've guessed it- you, the humble taxpayer. If all you do today is just hold on to that one mind-numbingly simple economic fact, you're well on your way to being able to run with the bears or the bulls with the best of them.

What is Nama?
Nama is not the person who won the Eurovision for Ireland in 1970- you're thinking of Dana. Lord give me patience. Nama is the National Asset Management Agency, set up by the government to rescue the banks' toxic asses. You don't have to be Jason Sherlock to have detected that homes are worth less, but with money now flowing back into metals and vice versa, it hardly needs pointing out that moves to impose transparency on crude futures has created a huge domino effect on fire sales in the property sector, which can only spell good and bad news for the Irish taxpayer respectively.

Where is the best place to put my money?
Mattresses are currently regarded as the most flame-resistant depositories for your life savings, with the added advantage that you can sleep on your nest egg, unlike a bank which kicks you out on the street at half four. Mattresses offer a highly competitive 0% fixed-rate interest, although you may find better deals out there if you are prepared to sleep around. For added security consider additional duvet cover, either synthetic or the more expensive duck down, which is the preferred government strategy for weathering recessions.

Most analysts agree that a radical shake-up of the political system is needed, from the top up. I myself have repeatedly called for the abolition of the maximum wage, to entice the cream of financial commentators like myself to put country before column and make the ultimate sacrifice of leading the nation back to the greatness of early 2008.

What is a mortgage?
A mortgage, from the old french word meaning death, is a relic from a bygone age when banks loaned people money. If you think you might still be paying off a mortgage, cancel it immediately and write a stiff letter to the offending bank, demanding repossession. Since you now own the bank, it is possible to have the debt written off, if you talk to yourself nicely.

So will I, the ex-humble Irish taxpayer, be rich beyond my wildest dreams when all my banks recover?
Is the Pope a Capitalist?

Does a bear shit in the woods?
Yes, there is mounting evidence of forest-based ursine excretory activity worldwide, but under Nama the Irish government will seize control of these toxic deposits and hold them in trust until they mature for future Irish generations yet unborn. Have a nice day.

 

Sept 13: Women's Rights

'What do women want?' I've never understood the need to ask that ridiculous question, never mind answer it, which leads me to suspect I might be a woman. When it comes to the crunch though I'm as red-blooded as the next man, and I write this standing behind Hugh Hefner in the dole queue. Hefner's stunningly simple formula of dressing up women as rabbits has been much imitated but never bettered. One thinks of spectacular commercial failures such as Igor Pasternak's 'Bear Necessities' gentleman's club in Tashkent, or Stud Hogan's Sheilaroo Mansion outside Sydney, but none had the erotic charge of the Bunny Empire that brought out the inner rabbit in every woman and the breeding instinct in every man.

How we could do with sending Hugh Hefner to Afghanistan, to inject a much needed thimbleful of excitement into the debate on women's rights. A wife's right to choose not to have sex with her husband is enshrined in law; this is intricately balanced by the man's right not to feed her. All sick jokes about the Afghan Diet aside (email for a catalogue), I'd hate to be a fly on the wall for the arguments about the washing up.

In certain countries 'topless beaches' refers to the number of deviants going around like headless chickens after being caught in adultery or wearing trousers. Legal discrimination based on gender was rife too in the Roman Empire, where crucifixion was regarded as unladylike, leaving women with the boring right to choose between stoning and decapitation. This glaring anomaly was finally put right in 364 AD by the Emperor Macho, with the small stipulation that women had to face inwards on the cross to preserve their modesty, although subsequent historians suspect he may have been an ass man.

Naturally I don't look at any of the other pages of this magazine, but sometimes through the silky gossamer-thin paper, more like a sigh than paper, I can detect the shapely outline of a woman acting the rabbit, usually draped over a sleek Lamborghini or the Irish equivalent, the prize-winning Friesian. Women are much more highly evolved than males at taking their clothes off in public- something that the men in suits would do well to learn from. In fact it's becoming increasingly clear that the degree of sense talked by our public servants is in inverse proportion to the amount of clothes they are wearing.

When Obama wants to get his point across in a steamy town hall in Pittsburgh, for example, he strips off his jacket and rolls his sleeves up to the elbow, revealing just enough manly forearm to make America believe he just might be telling them the truth about healthcare. Dylan wrote 'even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked'; given the size of the credibility gap in Ireland, it's hard to see how Brian Cowen can avoid anything less than a passionate full frontal address to the nation, if he is going to get all his points across.

French women rightly demand to know why only men are allowed to go topless in public swimming pools; the usual defence offered to this is the slightly wobbly argument that men don't really have anything of substance to hide up front, to which I can only reply 'speak for yourself'. Germans of all sexes go naked at the drop of a hat, but here in Ireland, eight hundred years of bondage, not to mention the rain, has done slightly strange things to the national libido. Latest news from the Irish catwalks is that people will yet again be wearing clothes this autumn, and lots of them.

Still we're getting there. Men's lib took a huge jump forwards when Sinn Fein burnt their balaclavas and exposed their naked faces to the world in all their hairy glory. The average age of an Irishman leaving home and separating from his mother has dropped dramatically from 58 to 55 in just under two thousand years. There has been a 33% improvement in the number of men leaving the toilet seat up, or down, or whatever the hell way those women want it left, I can never remember.

Women's rights have come a long way since Suffragette Emily Pankhurst threw her horse at the queen during the Epsom Derby in 1968. Margaret Thatcher sorted those big union boys out overnight by making it illegal to have sex with a miner, and this just in- Usain Bolt has shocked the sports world by announcing he's a woman and his real name is Betty. What more could women want?

 

Sept 20: Lotto Luck

You wait all your life for a stroke of luck, then two come along at once. First I won the Spanish National Lottery, a small matter of €24 million, thanks for asking. The ironic thing is I didn't even buy a ticket, but it's there in black and white in the 'Congratulations' email, and I never argue with the Spanish Government- I learned my lesson in 1936.

Next thing Miss Dian Ponzi gets in touch, a 21 year old orphan from the Ivory Coast, and she only wants to deposit eighteen million United States dollars in my account. Ok the sting in the tail at the end was that I only get 15% of the deal, so I rattled off a reply to Miss Ponzi holding out for a 50-50 split and I offered to correct her grammar and spelling free of charge. She jumped at it. You hesitate to criticize a third world orphan's grasp of English, but this was criminal.

Since Spain is on the way to Africa, the most logical plan was fly to Malaga, pick up the lotto money, nip down the African coast for my bank date with Dian, then home via Egypt, where I have a nice little nest egg tied up in pyramid schemes over the years. I landed in Malaga at the ungodly hour of 5am, due to the time difference, which seems to be getting worse rather than better. They send Christopher Columbus to the moon, but they can't make their own clocks run on time.

I rang General Franco, having found him in the phone book with my lucky pin among the 300 other Francos, and explained that I had come from Ireland for my winnings. Before I became a multi-millionaire I would have been much more deferential towards world leaders, but now when I click my heels, they jump; the jackboot is well and truly on the other foot. I told Franco I was in a hurry to get to Africa, and ordered him to bring the €24 million to the airport right away. He said 'Yes of course sir, right away sir' and laughed heartily, which goes to prove that top-brass Fascists can be just as cheerful as the rest of us if you catch them early enough in the morning.

Six mananas later at Malaga airport and still no sign of Franco with the fat suitcase of euros. I refuse to be kept waiting by tinpot dictators, so I set sail for the Ivory Coast. He can post the money to Ireland, he can chop off his own head and stick it on the parcel to cover the postage for all I care. If he tries to swim after the boat with a cheque in his mouth, panting his pathetic apologies, I will turn round and shoot him like a common shark. There's something about sudden wealth that unleashes an exhilarating recklessness in the brain, it's true what Kissinger said that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

For six days and six nights our little schooner rode the balmy trade winds south, hugging the west coast of Africa like a koala, buffeted by albatrosses and endless sunsets. At dawn on the seventh day I caught my first glimpse of Abidjan, the commercial jewel of the Ivory Coast; I could almost smell Miss Dian Ponzi's cool eighteen million wafting towards me from the high-rise banking quarter. But there was another, stronger smell. Danger.

I took the crumpled email from my rum-soaked pocket and read it again. Dian's father had been a wealthy cocoa merchant who was poisoned by his own business associates. I didn't want to be next. I made a mental note on the back of my hand to avoid the cocoa and checked into the Abidjan Hilton. There was a fresh camel head waiting for me on my pillow. I rang reception and explained that I was a vegetarian, they apologized profusely and gave me another room, which was fine apart from the snakes and scorpions and the unfriendly Russian in the bath with the machete.

Next morning I was awoken by the usual five hoodlums crashing through my window and trying to poison me at gunpoint, but I knocked them unconscious, adding 'this one's for Dian' as the last one fell. I tied them up with the dead snakes and called the night porter on 007. I needed a drink, preferably something long and stiff, like the jail term those bad guys were going to be serving.

She was sitting alone at the end of the bar, dressed like a dead cocoa baron's daughter from head to toe.
'Hello Dian,' I said confidently. Her dark eyes were tinged with the sadness of a woman sitting for too long on a fortune she couldn't spend.
'I knew you would come.'
'It's getting late,' I said gently. 'Let's go to the bank.'

 

Sept 27: School Daze

'With reflexive verbs, and verbs conjugated with avoir, the past participle agrees with the preceding direct object. In the case of the other sixteen verbs conjugated with être, the past participle agrees with the subject,' I said to the kid trying to rob me at knifepoint in a backstreet in Barcelona in 1978. I knew it would come in useful one day as a diversionary tactic, all the old nonsense they'd stuffed into my head in school. 'Cien pesetas!' the poor lad demanded weakly, his knife going limp; then a couple of tourists showed up, his chance was gone and he ran away.

'Best years of your life' the old folk used to cruelly taunt us, when we were right in the middle of serving our school sentences with hard labour, for the crime of being innocent. I was picked up off the street myself aged five, interrogated daily for thirteen years and forced to make written statements on a wide range of intelligence matters I knew absolutely nothing about. They wanted to know from me, for example, who caused the first and second world wars, with the obvious implication that I had some sort of hand in both of them myself. In the end you tell them what you think they want to hear, just to avoid the beatings.

Our only way of fighting back was to inflict minor verbal damage on some of the softer screws. Example one: 'Ok McAleer, read the summary,' says old Brother Mullins in geography class.
'I can't sir'
'Why not son?'
'Summary has taken my book.'
Example two from the shady underworld of chemistry: 'And what does the colour of the litmus paper tell us about the solution?' asks Mr McQuaid.
'It's acidic,' says Slevin.
'That's right. And what makes it acidic? Anybody?'
McAleer raises a Lenny Bruce-like finger, and goes for the kill. 'The acid sir.'

I hate to admit it, but head of year six Brother Doherty beat me to the lifetime achievement for best one-liner, apart from winning Psychopath of the Year nine years running from 1968-1977; Kerry eat your hearts out. The Doc taught Irish, PE and religion, all at the same time. One day he decided to take on and defeat communism in RE class. 'Right lads, can any of ye define communism?'
Torney put his head above the parapet. 'All for one, one for all, sir?'
'Ah no son,' says Doc after a perfect beat that Sinatra would have been proud of, 'you're thinking of the three musketeers.'
How we laughed for days, all thirty of us crammed into that little room, and the first one who stopped was taken out into the snow and shot.

I blame my irregular heartbeat on being force fed a diet of irregular verbs in five dead languages, and it came as no surprise in later years to learn that not only is there no Father Christmas and no God, but the entire third conjugation of neuter nouns in Latin was invented by sadistic Jesuits in the 1955, all the Victorian poetry I learned off by heart was a figment of Wordsworth’s fertile imagination from start to finish, while Pythagoras’ theorem is a fairy tale to hide the frightening truth from children that the area of a circle doesn’t exist.

Yet these shedfuls of broken facts from school continue to clutter our minds for life, taking up valuable space on our tragically small hard drives. I’ve made my peace with them all, and have even developed a familiar affection for some of the more irrelevant titbits, they way a kidnap victim forms a bond with their captor over time. ‘The crew of the Battleship Potemkin mutinied at Odessa.’ Of all the five events leading up to the Russian revolution, that will always be my personal favourite.

Any war or revolution worth its salt, you had to have three causes and five events leading up to it. There is one basic cause of rain- the cooling of warm air. The main industry of Enniscorthy is razor blades. Franz Ferdinand caused the First World War while Oasis started the Third. When the plural of the noun ends in s, the apostrophe comes after the s. In every other case, the apostrophe comes before the s.

Today we’ll tell our own children anything except the ultimate adult secret- that god, apart from not existing, invented education and sleep in a desperate attempt to keep parents and kids at bay for at least sixteen of the twenty four available hours, lest the failed social experiment known as the nuclear family explode in our faces. These are the things they don’t teach you in school. Oh and Leitrim has a coast.

 

Oct 4: Man in the Moon

It's forty years now since the Americans ruined my life by landing on the moon. I'd gone for my usual early morning moonwalk with my moondog on the Sea of Tranquility, which is normally very tranquil, as the name suggests. I had just sat down to read my stars in The Sun and eat a Milky Way when next thing I know the Eagle has landed and I'm choking on gray dust from the turbulence and Boris is going crazy on the leash and howling at the earth.

Boris as you know was the alsatian sent up by the Russians in 1960 who faked his own death so he wouldn't have to go back. He's been a great companion to me I have to say, these fifty odd years, and has never once complained about the lack of food, water, air, or life forms in our modest little lunar hideaway. He'll take himself off to the Dog Star for a dirty weekend now and again, If he ever feels the seven year itch.

Invasion of our little moon by humans was inevitable, I knew that. I wasn't sure what I had done to annoy JFK's earthlings in the early Sixties, but he made no secret of the fact that he personally was hell bent on taking me out before the decade was over. When I got my retaliation in first with my lunatic strike in Dallas in '63, the rocket attacks only intensified as the Sixties progressed, and it was a question of when not if the moon was going to get hit. Even Khrushchev joined in as the Sputniks and Apollos rained in on me from every direction.

Maybe it was my fancy job title The Man in the Moon which made them jealous. Maybe it was being only nine inches tall and green and made of cheese that labelled me as 'other', and triggered the lunaphobic attacks on my supreme sovereignty. Whatever it was, on that fateful July morning in 1969 when I saw Messrs Armstrong and Aldrin at the top of the ladder in their ridiculous sumo outfits, and observed Michael Collins, the original Irish space cadet, hovering in the getaway module thirty miles up in the big blue, still bearing the scars of Beal na mBlath, I had a bad feeling my Sea of Tranquility was about to become the Ocean of Storms. And so it transpired.

Armstrong started it. He was probably in a bad mood anyway after fluffing his big intro about 'one small step for man one giant leap for mankind blah blah', but when I stepped forward to the foot of the ladder and demanded in my loudest moon voice to see his alien landing papers, he said something extremely racist about my size and colour and kicked me so high into the rarefied atmosphere that I was in serious danger of becoming the first Man in the Moon to orbit his own backside. I landed thirty miles away in Lake Disappointment.

Eventually I found the rim of East Crater and loped back to the scene of the crime just in time to see the Eagle flying away. They had stolen a 30kg lump of my best moon rock, but worse than that they left behind their rubbish, all caked nicely in dust from the departure engine's exhausts for good measure- an American flag, a ladder, and the following insult to lunar gravity: 'Here Men From The Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 AD. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.' - signed Richard M. Nixon, the diplomatic equivalent of a Darth Vader turd through your letter box.

I don't mind admitting that I took the Man in the Moon job in the Fifties for a quiet life. Most people believe you don't exist which suits me just fine, and there's quite a cheesy little all-nighter scene on the Dark Side. You just have to remember to change the phases regularly, rise a little later every day, which comes naturally to me, go round the earth once a month, and keep the water well out of sight. What neither myself or Boris was banking on was getting kicked around our own planet on a regular basis by fat americans, or being forced to get personally involved in intergalactic presidential assassinations, impeachments, and sabotage of NASA's space programme in the form of spectacular 'accidents' and 'disasters', all to protect our little patch.

Three months ago I quit the moon job and moved to Killarney, where my small, green, cheesy credentials were instantly in demand in the leprechaun sector. I'm only in the job about three hours when who floats down the three small steps of the tourist coach only Mission Commander Neil Armstrong himself, and what does he want begorrah only to have a closer look at my big shillelagh. I let him have it.

 

Oct 11: Harry Potter

Harry Potter flew high over London town with the lost symbol in his cavernous beak. A swarm of Gargs came at him out of the high cirrus to the west, and he casually eased into warp seven on his Mitsubishi 4 x 4 x 16 x 64 turbo Broom. Harry liked nothing better than a round of Garg-swatting, but this was not the time for a fight. Seven seconds later he was over the Irish Sea, and through the eyes in the back of his enormous feathery head he observed the Gargs return to base empty handed, their yellow cardboard helicopters disappearing one by one into Glastonbury Tor like disappointed bees.

Harry allowed a wry smile to play around the corner of his beak, but he was careful not to let it expand into a full-throated laugh, lest the lost symbol slip from his grasp and plummet seawards to the bottom of the stormy ocean, five fathoms down to nestle no doubt in the slimy intestines of some mysterious ghost-ship from the Dark Ages. He didn't want another sequel on his hands.

'What's the ETA?' asked Obama.
'The ETA?' said the Pope, looking puzzled. 'I thought everybody knew that. It's the Basque terrorist organization.'
'No no no,' said Obama, waving an impatient hand, 'ETA, Estimated Time of Arrival. What time is Potter getting here?'
A shaft of golden sun penetrated the passageway to the ancient heart of Newgrange where they crouched, illuminating the secret spiral on the wall behind them, which was the celtic universe's rather cumbersome way of saying it was 9pm.

Suddenly the Boyne Valley was shaken from Tara to Drogheda by Harry Potter's Mitsubishi Broom making a less than wizardish landing. He shook off his giant chicken persona and became a normal 27 year old schoolboy again to squeeze through the narrow passage of Newgrange.
'Your Holiness, Mr President, apologies for being four seconds late, the Irish headwinds-'
'At ease Harry,' interrupted the Pontiff. 'Why have you got a dead goat draped around your shoulders, may I ask?'
'Dead goat your Holiness? Why, that's the lost symbol sir.'
'Symbolizing what exactly?' asked Obama a little sharply.
'I - I don't know sir, I believe it's from the latest Dan Brown novel, which I haven’t read yet, I was asked to deliver-'
'OK Harry. Now do me a small magical favour. Get on your telepathic blower and tell Rowling and Brown I want them here pronto.'

There was a whooshing sound and J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown slowly materialized in front of them, accompanied by thousands of their latest titles, which had flown off the shelves and were flitting around Newgrange like bestselling bats.
'So nice of you both to drop in,' said the President drily. 'Pope Benedict XVI and I just need a little background to the plot here- specifically why are we stuck in this goddam Irish cave with this jackass of a dead goat for company?'
'Harry Potter!' exclaimed JK, 'what on earth are you doing here?'
'Well, er, I presumed you sent me, with Dan's symbol.'
'That's not my symbol,' said Dan Brown angrily. 'I would never, on principle, use a goat, dead or alive, for a lost symbol. That's ridiculous.'
'I am afraid,' said J K Rowling slowly, scanning the earlier paragraphs, 'we may be in the presence here of a poorly crafted parody. Hmm yes...cardboard helicopters...giant chickens, this is drivel.'
'You mean they could be parodying us now, even as we speak! Holy gumbleworts Rowling!' cried Harry.
'Button it Potter,' snapped JK. 'I'm in charge of your dialogue now, don't ever forget that.'
'This parody guy has to be eliminated,' said Dan Brown darkly, ‘before he does any more damage.’

Brown’s last remarked worried me, to put it mildly. I had obviously lost control, not just of the plot, but my characters as well, and there was no telling what they might do next. Night descended on the Boyne Valley and the Newgrange assembly fell quiet, adding to my sense of foreboding. The dreaded knock came on the stroke of midnight, and on my humble doorstep stood Barack Obama, the Pope, Dan Brown, JK Rowling and Harry Potter. ‘You’d better come in,’ I said.

‘Listen folks I’m really sorry-‘ I began.
‘Save it,’ said JK Rowling. ‘We’re all after the same thing here, right? A blasted ending, so we can all pack up and go home. Ok Harry, it’s all yours.’
Harry Potter stepped forward and turned me into Cecelia Ahern, and we all lived happily ever after.

 

Oct 18: Himalayas

It is with genuine sadness that I say goodbye to the Himalayas and my trusty guide Kumar. He has been with me for every minute of my gruelling nine day solo trek on K2, carrying my flimsy survival kit of tent, provisions, video camera, laptop, tripods, 42" plasma tv, espresso machine, tumble dryer, portaloo and diesel generator on his wiry 75 year old shoulders, with an unrelenting cheerfulness that gradually ceased to amaze me.

On the final morning at the Sangakkara base camp, Kumar wakes me as usual with a steaming bowl of yukka, the traditional Nepalese delicacy of yak butter, smoked millet and heroin. I have my first shower for nine days; while it feels good to get all the black ice off my skin, I can't help feeling I have washed away a little bit of my soul as well. For out there on the mountain summit, with nothing between peak and blue heaven except your own small head, a man cannot help but be filled with the awe-inspiring majesty of his own achievements, and the universe seems a very puny thing indeed by comparison.

Nothing stirs on the vast white panorama save for the tiny black dot of Kumar a mile below, struggling to catch up with the gear; no sound but the sound of silence, punctuated by his saintly groans drifting on the sweet breezes like Krishna's own didgeridoo. I haven't eaten a thing for thirty six minutes, and in a moment of hallucinogenic epiphany I suddenly realize how Karen Carpenter must have felt when she sang 'I'm on the top of the world, looking down on creation.'

We pack all the stuff in Kumar's 1957 Austin Cambridge and he drives me to Kathmandu airport. He insists on giving me a piggyback to Departures and we arrive at check-in with tears of farewell streaming down both our craggy mountain-worn faces. The Cambodia Air representative, a seven year old girl with a Kalashnikov, is not impressed, and it takes me several hours to convince her that I am neither drunk nor homosexual before my boarding card is released.

Most people go to Phnom Penh for the buffalo racing, but the sight of grown men sitting on overweight cattle and thrashing them to within an inch of their lives with bamboo rods to make them run faster doesn't float my particular boat. I'm more of a camel man myself, and since public transport in the Cambodian desert is notoriously unreliable, I go scouting for a two-hump banger at the world-famous Killing Fields Retail Emporium. The KF is the largest covered market in South-East Asia, where everything from snakes to ladders is up for grabs at a price.

It's my lucky day, with 'buy one hump, get one free' all day in the camel paddock. The first thing to look for in a second hand camel is of course the teeth; there's no point coming away with a bargain if you have to turn round and throw it at a dentist. In fact it's often cheaper these days to have the beast put down when faced with a round of expensive root work, just as with human beings. Shop around- there are enough good camels out there who brush their teeth religiously, without having to waste your time and money on the pie-footed morons who don't.

Haggling is actively encouraged; I have discovered over the years that if you haggle long and hard enough, and act slightly strangely, many traders will actually pay you to go away in the end. Thus I manage to get my twin-hump for a snip, after pretending to be Robbie Williams for five hours- the owner wanted ten bhuk, I kept thrusting a five in his face and saying 'take that.'

Spiritually I find many similarities between the vast Cambodian Desert and the Himalayas, with the crucial exceptions that it is flat and covered with sand. While the mirages tend to be more visually interesting than the African variety, with far greater depth and tonal range, the standard of oases is abysmal, and it is midnight before I find one with a decent belly dancer and a bar. My camel, anxious to make a good first impression, brushes his teeth and puts himself to bed.

The most exciting part of travelling the world of course is coming home. I am thrilled to find on the mat a letter from my old Nepalese pal Kumar. It is a bill for 'extras.' K2 excess baggage handling x 9 days: €9,000. Yukka breakfasts with added heroin x 9: €5,000. 1 x taxi Sangakkara to Kathmandu airport €700. 1 x Airport piggyback: €800. The tears flow freely again as the priceless memories come flooding back.

 

Oct 25: Psychoanalysis

My therapist becomes hysterical if you slap him in the face, but I know he's not really angry with me, he's angry with himself because I haven't paid him for the past three months. The credit crunch has placed a huge strain on the normal patient-counsellor relationship, and it came as no surprise last week when twenty thousand psychoanalysts took to the streets and brought the capital to an emotional standstill by lying down on couches in O'Connell Street and weeping bitterly for shorter hours (currently 60 mins) and better pay and conditions.

I'm seeing a second therapist on Thursdays just to talk about the problems I'm having with my regular Tuesday man, who has been my rock and guiding light through thirty-four happy years of neurosis and insecurity. Recently though the spark has gone, and I have actually found myself faking the odd tearful trauma just to reassure him that he's still the one, whereas my Thursday woman seems to know just what buttons to press to get me all tired and emotional.

Of course I'm racked with guilt about all this, and could never bring myself to tell Mr Tuesday- at his age the shock would finish him off, which is something I have begun to fantasize about with my Saturday and Monday therapists. The whole thing is making me extremely anxious and needs to be confronted, according to my young, attractive Wednesday counsellor, who takes a more pragmatic cognitive approach to transpersonal dynamics, and also arranges contract killings on the side.

The one person who might be able to steer me through this emotional minefield is alas dead- through no fault of mine, I hasten to add. Sigmund Freud is regarded by many as the father of modern psychology, and by many others as one mean mother. Like most disturbed bald men who attempt to turn nature on its head by cultivating a bushy beard, the young Sig buried himself in the psychopathology of academic inquiry. He discovered that by mixing base metal with gold and injecting it into the dreams of sleeping psychotics, it was possible to restore emotional stability by hypnotizing the patient into believing that Oedipus had killed his father and slept with his mother, a theory that remains as valid today as it did in 1492.

Freud painstakingly decoded every hidden symbol of our unconscious in his 'Interpretation of Dreams.' It's a measure of his genius that not one of his conclusions, which he arrived at by pure intuition, has since been disproved by rigorous scientific enquiry. For example, in dream language, a large brown bear with a bible on its head shouting obscenities from a boat still means fear of intimacy with an Austrian, while a strong desire to kick the backside of someone who has deliberately stubbed out a cigarette in your dreaming mouth remains the universal symbol of either drowning slowly in a bath of organic brown rice, or losing your car keys, depending on the brand of cigarette.

Early forays into psychoanalysis in Ireland were hampered by the fact that everybody knew everybody else. Thus your attempts at being painfully honest about revisiting the deep emotional scars of your childhood were likely to be interrupted by the therapist saying 'Ah come on now I knew your mother and father well and they were both grand people, grand people. I won't hear a word said against them. An act of contrition now, and go home and wash your mouth out.'

Freud's 'talking cure' was even further hampered in the North, due to the counter-culture philosophy of 'whatever you say, say nothing,' and ‘never use one word, where none would do.’ In fact many early psychoanalytical sessions consisted of an hour of heavy silence followed by a death threat, while cross-community encounter groups where you were encouraged to express your anger were all too often victims of their own success.

It was only in 1997 that I realized that Sigmund Freud had actually caused the thirty years of conflict. I was talking to the Reverend Martin Smyth, Grand Master of the Orange Order, and he was reminiscing fondly about the good old days in the North before the Troubles, a time when things were so civil, he said, that Catholics even had a key to the local Orange Hall. (I remember those days myself, you could go in any time you liked, make yourself at home, light a fire). 'So where did it all go wrong?' I wondered. 'Too much chat,' was his wordy reply.

 

Nov 1: Autumn

'April is the cruellest month' said TS Eliot, who obviously hibernated through November. First they inflicted the blatant daylight robbery on us last week of knocking a full hour off our already impoverished Irish evening- a measure rushed through with obscene haste in the middle of the night, without so much as a whimper of demand for a referendum or two from the brainwashed Irish electorate. 'Necessary seasonal adjustment,' bleated the government, all too ready to blame the global tilt factors for the problem, rather than their own axis of incompetence.

Next we humans can look forward to getting our noses rubbed in the cold dark evenings by watching all the superior species getting ready to leave town- the swallows booking their flights on the phone wires looking down and laughing openly in our faces, the bats hanging upside down like smug Australians in our attics, and worst of all the hedgehogs going around stuffing their fat snouts so full that they can all sleep it off right through to April. Christmas day pales by comparison. If Band Aid had written a song about hedgehogs, their answer to the question 'Do they know it's christmas time at all?' would have been a triumphant no.

The one crumb of good news is that mice can't hibernate, and this is the time of year when they tend to move indoors, in search of warmth, food and reality tv. Mice are essentially hedgehogs without the prickles, so it affords us humans an opportunity to turn our smouldering jealousy to constructive revenge. There are many ways to discourage mice from coming into your house. You can for example purchase in most pet shops a device that emits an intermittent high pitched whine which is harmless to humans but repulsive to rodents, known as a cat.

By far the most effective and enjoyable way to put these failed hoglets in their place however is by killing them. Many people feel squeamish about their first mouse trap, but these childish reservations soon fade with practice, to be replaced first by a warm glow of indifference to the plight of small creatures, and ultimately by a genuine rush of excitement at the thrill of the chase, as the human soul discovers the amazing depths of its own tolerance for gratuitous violence.

Cheese, chocolate, peanut butter, butterflies, bees, these are a few of my favourite things for mouse bait. It can sometimes take a subtle cocktail of three or more ingredients to achieve the desired results, and at times you feel more like a master chef than a mass murderer. There is something primally satisfying, I would go so far as to say noble, about pitting your wits against your intellectual equal in the deadly nocturnal game of chess and coming out on top. Wishy washy liberals will always seek to lower the tone of the debate of course, by asking mundane questions like, 'is the mouse trap quick and humane', and the short answer from me is yes, as my many online videos at www.youtube/makemydaypunk/areyouwatchinghedgehogs/mouse graphically illustrate.

You can't even grow anything in November, and anyway the polytunnel is full of hibernating foxes after I accidentally left the door open overnight. I'm looking forward to seeing the expression on their faces in April when they all try to get out again. What you can do though is make your own compost. Nothing renews the human spirit in the dark time of year quite like seeing a pile of rotten vegetable matter decomposing in front of your eyes and turn to fly-infested slime.

The secret of a good compost base is newspaper, but not just any old newspaper. Choose a good quality broadsheet of sufficient density to absorb all the muck that will be thrown at it. Add the fox droppings, cheese, dead leaves, chocolate, peanut butter, butterflies and bees, and carefully fold in the mice. Compost is ready to use when it tastes like christmas cake.

The ancient Celts believed that the decaying leaves on the trees every Autumn signalled the imminent death of the world, and on All Souls Day they would gather en masse on Tara, quaking in their boots, for the sacrifice of three score and ten virgin sheep to appease the angry gods. We now know of course, with the combined benefits of science, rational thought and hindsight, that it should have been hedgehogs.

 

Nov 8: Restaurant

There's life in the old dead tiger yet with the opening last week of La Carota in Drumcondra's nouveau chic Latvian Quarter. The brainchild of Caitlin Loughnane-Zola and her sultry Italian husband Giorgio, the top-end restaurant blends rustic Irish commonsense with Venetian zest and passion to produce an epicurean hybrid that startles the palate and wallet in equal measure.

Giorgio sold his 9,000 acre olive farm near Treviso to purchase the defunct Millennium Carpets building with its stunning views of Glasnevin Cemetery and the Royal Canal. The sensitive restoration retains many of the original features such as breeze-block walls and exposed beams, reflecting the young couple's core values of functionality and authenticity, with a passing architectural nod to the fact that the builders went bust.

La Carota’s proud boast is that no ingredient has travelled more than four miles to get to the customer’s plate, aided by the fact that there’s a large Tesco’s three miles away. Caitlin makes all her own monosodium glutamate fresh every morning, to a top secret family recipe of crushed Pringles and Bisto, while Giorgio fills his gondola with organic diesel for the daily fishing adventure on the Royal Canal, and every catch brings a new surprise in the nets.

The Canal is teeming with a rich biodiversity of marine forms, many of them unknown, not just in Italy, but anywhere else in the world. Giorgio’s English is impeccable, but he frequently struggles to put a name to many of the items in the protozoic medley writhing in his wicker basket, and has to enlist the help of his wife. She just offers an exaggerated Gaelic shrug of her beautiful Tipperary shoulders when faced with the latest exotic mutation, and they both throw back their heads and laugh with the gay abandon of newly-weds with not a care in the world except each other.

What strikes one on entering La Carota's state of the art temple of glass and steel, is the abundance of natural light from strategically placed table candles, and the 96" plasma screen with a direct feed to the dramatic action in the kitchen, combining live theatre with dining elegance in one gourmet package. Thus you can observe your very own goose being cooked in glorious High Definition, while providing the happy proprietors with free video surveillance of their own personnel at a price they can afford. It is clear from the outset that a family atmosphere permeates the workplace, in the sense that the staff are young, hate their bosses almost as much as themselves, and bicker incessantly like cats in a bag.

For my starter I decided to play it safe with the 'Auld Triangles of Royal Canal Squid with Medallions of oven-fried Brie on a bed of pan-baked Phibsboro Dock Leaves drizzled with your choice of Ice Cream or Custard'. The custard was rather dry. My partner's baby octopus was tender and sweet- every bit as good, she declared, as the one she'd had in Melbourne on New Year's Eve 2002, but not quite up to the standards of others she'd devoured in Toronto, Kinsale, Anchorage, Rio or Rome in 1978, 2007, 1971, 1989 and 1967 respectively.

For the main event I chose the Whole Sandymount Seagull in Marmite, while my partner ordered Sun-drenched Rabbit with Dolmens of organic Croke Park Poached Red Cabbage in a Rosemary, Basil and Brine Teriyaki Roulade, only to be told it was off. You can really tell your bird is going to be fresh when you look out the window of the restaurant and see the head chef on a bike with a butterfly net trying to catch it, aided and abetted, rather inefficiently I have to say, by the entire kitchen staff on foot. It took four hours but it was more than worth the wait- slow cooking at its finest. A side salad of fresh dandelion, haw berries and refried squirrel with nuts completed the orgasmic smorgasbord.

Having been forced to reluctantly concede that we hadn’t room for the crab apple and roadkill tart from the sumptuous dessert menu, we finished off with an excellent local cappuccino, brewed with berries stolen from the coffee trees in the Botanic Gardens hothouse, and all the sweeter for that- a full-bodied hit with delicate chocolate overtones achieved by sprinkling chocolate on top. The entire bill, including five litres of house white, parking, service charge and compulsory private health insurance, came to a modest €700. We will be back.

 

Nov 15: Agony Uncle

Dear Dr Kev
I am married to a wonderful man and we have five beautiful children, and two ugly ones. Recently however, I am being haunted by the memory of an old flame from the past. I was engaged to this particular individual for fourteen years, but he would never commit to marry. In the end I lost patience and poisoned his porridge and buried him under the patio. My husband and I are fast approaching our silver wedding anniversary, and he has promised me a complete makeover of the garden to mark the occasion. I am sick with worry that my shady past will be discovered; I love him very much and don't want to lose him. I feel incredibly guilty about what happened in the past, and blame myself. Worried, Cork
Dear Worried
First of all, it is completely natural to harbour some feelings of residual guilt and self-reproach when you are the one responsible for ending the relationship- it is these feelings which make us uniquely human, and separate us from the sheep and the goats. However it is clearly time to move on, and stop letting this man from the past ruin your life; you have a loving husband and a happy family- why allow a foolish infatuation with yesterday to get in the way? Think of it as sowing your wild oats. This man had fourteen long years to pop the question but spectacularly failed to do so. Speak frankly with your husband about your feelings and explain to him why it is so important to you that the patio be left intact. If he loves you, he will order the biggest load of concrete you have ever seen in your life for your silver anniversary. If he doesn't, it's back to porridge.

Dear Dr Kev
I have been engaged to a kind, considerate man for thirty five years, but every time marriage comes up, he just changes the subject. I am at my wits end. I don't love him very much and want to lose him. Confused, Kerry
Dear Confused
Thirty five years may seem like a long time to you, but in fact it is only half your life. What you need is a hobby to take your mind off things, such as landscape gardening or herbal medicine or archery. I am putting you in touch with Worried of Cork. A problem shared they say is a problem halved.

Dear Dr Kev
I am the minister for finance of a dear little island called Erin. I love her very much but she is completely hopeless with money, and I recently learned to my horror that she has been running up huge debts behind my back. When I confronted her she broke down and begged me for even more money, to get back on her feet. All my friends say she's just a gold-digger; I am at a complete loss as to what I should do. Desperate Dan, Dublin
Dear Desperate Dan
You say you love this island, but it clearly isn't reciprocated, and you should leave her immediately. There are plenty more big fish in the sea without getting hung up on an insolvent goldfish. She obviously doesn’t deserve you, and is taking you for every penny she can get. If you stay, you risk losing everything, including the next election. I am sending you a one way ticket to Palookaville.

Dear Dr Kev
I have been a happily married man for almost twenty years, now with four grown up children, but recently I have become physically attracted to their mother. What should I do? Curious, Belfast
Dear Curious
It is rare but not uncommon for a man to have heterosexual feelings towards the mother of his own children from time to time. This can sometimes be exacerbated by alcohol, or the onset of premature dementia. Try to limit your intake to 350 units at the weekends, and arrange an appointment with your GP to have your head examined. I am putting you in touch with Worried of Cork, Confused of Kerry, and the Irish Minister for Finance.

Dear Dr Kev I am being blackmailed by a confused Kerrywoman over a dark incident from my past involving a patio; she appears to have inside information, and is threatening to go to the papers if I don’t reveal my secret recipe for porridge. It’s my silver wedding anniversary on Tuesday, and I would hate anything to spoil the big day. Worried Sick, Cork
Dear Worried Sick
It is clear that this woman doesn’t love you, and is only using you to further her own selfish ends. Tell her Dr Kev says to keep her nose clean if she knows what’s good for her. Good luck with the concrete!

 

Nov 22: Web History

Every school child knows the story of how Robert the Bruce invented the internet in a cave on Rathlin Island in 1306. The Flower of Scotland was feeling a bit wilted that winter, having been forced to hide like a skunk from England's armies, who had pledged to have him hung, drawn and quartered, and not necessarily in that order. 'I quit' said Robert gloomily to his lone companion in the cave, a Ballycastle spider who had devoted her life to web design, mostly on windows. 'Are you sure you want to quit?' teased the IT-savvy black widow, weaving the final web-link into her latest interactive social networking site for lonely flies.

Bruce was roused from his torpor and stung into action. If a hairy Antrim geek with eight legs could design intricate local networks attracting dozens of hits per day, then surely he, the original Stenhousemuir Academical, could fashion a world wide web that would secure his name in history, a utopian society in which all information could be shared freely by all, except for the English yahoos of course, who would be sent homewards tae think again with their broadbands in a twist.

The first logical step was to invent a computer, using whatever materials were at hand, necessity being the motherboard of invention. A quick hunting expedition around Rathlin produced two ram, a mouse, an arrow and a bag of micro-chips from the trusty local McDonald's clan. Bruce looked high and low for something that might serve as a cable or a connector, but found the entire island to be wireless. Back at the mouth of the cave, he burnt his last remaining CDs to produce a firewall for extra security; inside, he took out a meagre bundle of software on a stick and unwrapped all his worldly possessions- an apple, a plastic mac, two memorial cards, some shortbread cookies, a blackberry and a tin of Dundee spam which he opened with a file.

It took him all night, but at first light the dawn chorus expressed a loud twitter of approval for the world's first PC. Robert the Bruce booted the ram awake, took a byte out of the apple, and the mac spluttered to life with a great belching of black smoke from the primitive search engine. 'Congratulations Robert!' gushed the online wizard, 'you have mail!'

The first email in history had details of an outrageously generous bargain- twenty five years' supply of Highland Viagra for the price of seven years. The second was an anonymous offer to extend a certain delicate part of the Flower of Scotland's anatomy by nine inches, which Bruce deleted, unsure whether it constituted a promise or a threat. The third simply said 'King Edward of England is now following you on Facebook.' Robert hacked the computer to pieces, kicked over the traces of the firewall and logged off Rathlin on a phishing boat.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon forty years ago, the module had the computing power of a modern mobile phone. Mobile phones on the other hand, were the size of space rockets and were visible from outer space. It took a while for all the dope-head Sixties scientists to realize their mistake and switch the circuit boards around, so that phones became 5,000 percent smaller overnight and rockets a lot smarter.

It’s impossible for the youth of today to imagine the darkness that reigned over the permanently offline abyss of pre-1990, before home computers and the internet made life on earth almost bearable. Indeed the only way to glimpse those horrors now is to google ‘boredom’ and check out the Eighties online. People just stood around endlessly relating to each other to fill the emptiness, knowing in their heart of hearts there had to be something more- or god forbid watching tv, that self-obsessed old parody of a PC droning on in the corner day and night like a boring uncle. Many of my friends were even driven to going to bed with a book, and I confess there were times when I took some comfort there myself.

Now that I’m virtually born again, connected and saved, sometimes a little voice tries to spoil things by whispering in my ear that it can’t really be healthy to spend so many of my waking hours mooching around websites and emails, that I should get out more, meet some people, go for a walk, but I tell the little voice to go back to hell to the Eighties where it belongs. Besides, I just did the ‘internet addiction’ online quiz, and it turns out I’ve only got 43% of the symptoms.

 

Nov 29: Living free

'Live every day as if it's your last,' my grandmother used to say to me. I can still feel the soft skin of her hands around my neck. Grandma's gentle words of wisdom came back to inspire me a year ago when I decided to burn all my money and swop the rat race for the human race. I became part of the freeconomy, the cashless eco-friendly alternative, where people's carbon footprints are so small they can hardly stand, where the only currency is human trust, the only legal tender is love, and mother earth pours milk and honey from a great height on all her penniless children.

No more dreary shopping, bills, electricity, travel, work, or living indoors- my one regret is that I didn't see the light sooner. It's only when you clear out all your bank accounts and begin feeding the boring 50-euro bills one by one onto the cleansing flames that you realize just how repulsive money really is; I could feel the roots of all evil literally unclenching themselves from around my soul as I watched the satanic little notes writhe and perish in the fires of eternal redemption all night long.

When the last watermark had sizzled to a halt, and my life savings were a shimmering hologram of embers, I threw on my driver's licence and passport for good measure, since I wouldn't be travelling any further than I could walk in my new utopia. My younger self's photo stared back approvingly at me from the flames, and a faint smile curled around the blackened corners of my mouth as a thermal current whisked me up and away towards the great embassy in the sky. I didn't cremate my credit cards of course- as any eco-nomist will tell you, nothing gets up mother earth's nose more than burning plastic, so I cut them in strips and ate them. For what it’s worth, the American Express scored tops for flavour, followed closely by the Egg.

It's difficult to convey the sheer ecstasy of money-free living, to the unfortunate masses still stuck on the treadmill of work-earn-consume. After torching the house, I drove away in my Punto for the last time, and donated it to the first hitcher I met- a young backpacker who informed me he was on his way to 'the west end of the North', which is German for Donegal I presume.

He was a bit shy at first about trading places, even claiming that he 'couldn't drive'; it was only when I produced the rifle that he quickly got behind the wheel and discovered an inner Schumacher he didn't even know he had, achieving an impressive 0-85 in nine seconds in 2nd gear as I admired his progress from the roadside through the telescopic sights. (Yes I'm aware of the ecological hypocrisy of owning a military rifle, since lead-mining is so harmful to the environment, but I just can't seem to let go.)

One of the many things they don't teach you in school is how to sleep in a tree. No five-star hotel can compare with the thrill of a wild night in the upper limbs of a mature sycamore- a force seven gale whispering sweet nothings in both your ears, and you can shower while you sleep, nine nights out of ten, and wake refreshed. Farmers tend to forgive you your trespasses when you camp on high. 'Get off my land' sounds normal in Ireland. 'Get out of my tree' sounds silly and pretentious.

Many freeconomy eco-warriors still make the farmer’s mistake of growing their own food, which is a criminal waste of energy when you consider that the supermarket skips are bulging with ‘best before’ freebies, just shrieking out ‘Please eat me!’ to anyone with ears to hear. Recent studies have shown that more people died in the first and second world wars combined, than have been killed from eating out of date food or credit cards.

The one bit of plastic I’m glad I didn’t eat is my library pass. I’ve used it nearly every day over the past year to infiltrate the nation’s reference sections, liberating books for the daily fire. Burning books to keep warm can never be regarded as a waste, since the trees have already been butchered, impregnated with toxic inks and imprisoned on shelves in the cause of human vanity.

I have to admit that on this, my first anniversary of total cashlessness, all the talk about bonfires is giving me my first twinge of nostalgia for the devilish old 50-euro note. Should I now continue on my ascetic but sometimes lonely path of pure eco-freedom, or make a dash back to normality by robbing a bank? I’d toss a coin if I had one.

 

Dec 6: Ho ho ho

Trouble-shooter is my middle name, given to me on confirmation day in Derry in 1969 when the bishop smacked me in the face and I retaliated like any normal war child with maximum force. So when I checked in for work at the Agency on Monday morning last, and the boss was enlisting personnel for a covert mission to seek and destroy some fat-cat maverick operating out of deepest Lapland, I was in the Lear jet and hurtling towards the Arctic Circle faster than you could say ho ho ho.

Six miles high on a light breakfast of vintage champagne and very little else, I touched the iPod Touch and the sanguine stereo tones of the Boss briefed me the brief. The target of the operation was a psycho named Claus who was running a clandestine toy-cloning racket using under-age elf labour, and threatening to undermine the entire economy of the free world by handing out the stuff free, using a fly-by-night global distribution network capable of saturating the market in a matter of hours. I had until midnight Christmas Eve to save the world.

The iPod self-destructed in flames in my palm, and I silently cursed myself for not investing in the Apple three-year extended warranty. Off to my left there was a gaping black hole in the ocean where Iceland used to be before the meltdown, off to my right Helsinki glittered like a giant Christmas tree in the midnight sun. I eased the luxury jet down through the gears and Korvatunturi's runway rose to meet me like an Irish road.

I had a crude photofit of Claus in my hip pocket that Intelligence had patched together from some old christmas cards, but as soon as I pushed open the swinging doors of the 'Elf Saloon' I realized I wouldn't be needing it. About forty father christmases in full red-suit regalia were scattered around the saloon in various states of disrepair, some playing cards in groups like off duty polar bears, some standing by the bar knocking back whiskey shots, while in the corner a ninety year old elf played sadly out-of-tune covers of Snow Patrol on a barely upright honky-tonk piano.

I ordered a pint of Mickey Finn from the bar-elf whose name tag said 'Snowy Bowy', and tried to look casual in my thermal overalls, boots, mittens and orange balaclava. The sound of jangling spurs made me turn around, and I was face to face with the biggest, meanest looking son of a father christmas I had ever seen, standing seven foot six in his black leather boots, not even counting the pointy red hat, and weighing seven hundred and forty five pounds. He took off his beard and tossed it casually on the bar, hitched up his broad leather belt and said in a deep, forty-below voice 'What brings you this far north stranger?'
'You talking to me?' I drawled.
'Don't see nobody else in here.' I let the double negative pass.
'Maybe that old snow blindness is clogging up you eyes, try this,' I suggested, throwing the pint of Mickey Finn in his face. It froze in mid air before it reached him and tinkled around his rawhide reindeer boots. I sunk a mitten in his considerable belly and was out the swinging doors and onto Rudolph the red-nosed hired reindeer, pursued by a posse of seventy desperado santas and elves on husky-driven sleighs, toboggans and snowmobiles.

Back in the safety of my glass igloo, with the barking of the hounds still mingling with the hunters' ho ho hos far off in the unspoilt Lappish wilderness, I lay on the rotating bed and stared through the heated glass roof at the Aurora Borealis playing footsie with the Northern Lights. There was more to this land of midnight sun and noonday moon than met the eye, and the assignment wasn't proving quite the piece of xmas cake that I had anticipated.

Far from the picture postcard of twinkling snowflakes and childhood magic, it was clear that Lapland was bandit county ruled by gangs of vicious rival santas and their mercenary elves, engaged in bloody turf wars for control of the lucrative peace & goodwill to all men franchise. And somewhere out there in the midst of all this baloney and bloodshed was the real Father Christmas pulling all the strings.

It had been a long day- three months long in fact. I closed my eyes, but was immediately jolted awake by the sound of two shady figures in red struggling down the narrow chimney of my igloo and placing suspicious looking packages under my bedside tree. I opened one eye. It was my mother and father.

 

Dec 20: Osama Henry

And so the first decade of the new millennium sprints towards the finishing line, with history holding its breath as the wisest columnists in the world unite as one to pass judgement on the best and worst of times through the shocking and awesome Noughties. Up until a few short weeks ago, the collapse of the twin towers was on everybody's lips as the worst disaster, only to be pipped at the post by the nightmare of 18/11 at the Stade de France, when five million innocent Irish people lost their World Cup dreams in one moment of mindless thierrorism.

A few short sad weeks ago too, Barack Hussein Obama's victory night was the hot favourite for the decade's Most Tear-Jerking Moment award, only for the title to be cruelly snatched from under his nose by another young, fit and black pretender with a winning smile and hidden basketball talents, the aforementioned Thierry Osama Henry. The mourning and weeping in Ireland post 18/11 has caused the worst flooding since records began with the Horslips in 1934.

With the corpse of Irish soccer hardly stretched in the grave, and the heart-breaking month's mind only two days old, we are now being glibly encouraged to 'get over it' by singing jolly Christmas carols. Luckily the spirit of Plunkett, Pearse, Keane and Kilbane is made of sterner stuff, and the newly formed breakaway Provisional IFA has pledged militant resistance to the Blueshirts by any means necessary, to end the cruel apartheid that would deprive Ireland of its rightful place at the league of nations in South Africa. Even Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams to their credit have vowed to do everything in their power to lead us to the Orange Free State by June 2010.

Yesterday the IFA militants claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Percy French statue in Ballyjamesduff, while a consignment of 3,000 Henry hoovers was burnt outside the Embassy in Ballsbridge. Paris Hilton has cancelled her forthcoming Croke Park gig on the advice of the Gardai for safety reasons, in case she be mistaken for a French hotel and burned to the ground.

There is widespread unease around the world in FIFA and the FBI as to how Henry managed to conceal for so long his true nature of pure evil and deep seated hatred of all things decent, honest and Irish, biding his time like an Al Qaeda sleeper rattlesnake. Born in a cave in Afghanistan in 1977, his father was Oliver Cromwell and his mother Diego Maradona. At the age of six he cut off his own hands and replaced them with hooks to 'look more evil', but had them sewn on again after puncturing fifteen footballs in his first season with Taliban Juniors.

Henry drifted around the shady training camps of Europe, from France, to Italy, to London, where he perfected his silky deception skills, making the 666 shirt his own at Arsenal. It is now known that on the fateful evening of November 18 at ground zero in Paris, Henry was the ringleader of a highly trained all-French suicide squad with one goal on their mind- total elimination of the Irish nation by sudden death.

Documents found in Henry's flat, following his arrest for genocide and treason, showed that he was a keen admirer of the Black & Tans, and that he had drawn up detailed plans to have the entire Irish team shot on the pitch during the first leg at Croke Park, if things weren't going va va voom for the Frogs.

There are increasing concerns too over possible long-term contamination risks to the moral fibre of Irish players, after being exposed to 210 minutes of relentless continental degeneracy. Now that the awful French word 'cheat' has entered our language by the back door, our native sportsmen’s souls are being monitored round the clock for early warning signs of venial sins.

The French government is to be congratulated for the speedy extradition of Henry to stand trial in Ireland. The public debate continues to rage as to what we should do now with the mass-murderer of Irish hopes and dreams. Some feel strongly that the ultimate punishment for Henry would be if he were simply left to rot in Portlaoise for the rest of his days, others argue that he should be sent to prison. My own seasonal wish is that the Dail act swiftly to bring back the death penalty for premeditated hand-ball in the box, so that this thing can be wrapped up on Christmas morning and we can all go home and enjoy our turkey and Beaujolais in peace.

 

Jan 3: Water Water

‘No man is an island, except when he’s having a bath,’ said the comedian Norman Lovett. I wish I’d written that, but I have now, as Oscar Wilde put it. I wish I’d written that too. I wish I’d written everything. Many men were islands in Ireland recently, and women and children too, as the flood waters reached record heights in 2009. The old Nationalist ditty in praise of the sea, with the immortal line ‘thank God we’re surrounded by water’ (I’m glad I didn’t write that) may be due for revision, as it becomes clear that rising sea levels threaten to turn the dream of a United Ireland into a nightmare of sectarian archipelagos.

Now that scientists are telling us that the repairs to the holes in the ozone layer are actually causing Antarctica to melt faster, we all have to do our patriotic duty by leaving our fridge doors open all night to get those CFCs flowing again- it’s what Padraig Pearse would have wanted.

Australia’s one million wild camels are green with envy towards our soft Irish weather. When 6,000 of their drought-stricken brethren invaded the town of Docker River looking for water, the Northern Territory government responded to their plight by gently shooing them out of town, before calmly inserting an extra 't' and shooting them all from helicopters, leaving the carcasses to rot in the desert.

These swift and decisive measures were in stark contrast to the Irish government's dithering reaction to the Murphy Report on clerical child sex abuse, when the fatal delay in scrambling the Air Corps allowed thousands of stampeding bishops time to fan out and bury their heads in the sand, while continuing to breathe normally through their enormous backsides. Indeed many Irish clergy are seriously considering a gap year down under in 2010. The serious shortage of water there is matched by a surplus of wine, following the collapse of the New World markets, so any white collar worker with the knack for turning the one into the other is being welcomed with open arms in Botany Bay, regardless of their shady past.

They say the next world war will be fought not over oil but water, in which case Ireland is sitting smugly as the new Saudi Arabia, with 98% of the world's natural reserves in our lakes, rivers, bogs, paddy fields and housing estates. We already export more that 20 billion bushels of the soft stuff per annum from the lucrative Ballygowan and Tipperary fields, and it’s been another bumper year, with a litany of smashed rainfall records nationwide that would make Usain Bolt look like a retired priest.

Irish people are singing in the rain and riverdancing in the streets, and there’s a new buoyancy in the economy to match the brave new decade, as the export pipelines to Africa, Australia and Arizona near completion, boosting the construction sector by 200%.

The modern Irish precipitation industry owes much to the vision of Sean Lemass; it was he who scooped out the Shannon with his bare hands in 1933 and stacked the mud and rocks high all along the western seaboard from Cork to Donegal, creating mountains such as Carrauntoohil, the Twelve Pins and Errigal to hijack the warm currents of the Gulf Stream and convert them into soft Irish rain, while giving new words to the language of the fledgling republic such as 'tourism' and 'hydroelectricity'. In 1930 there were no waterfalls in Ireland; today there are over 30,000, with new ones miraculously appearing on hillsides every year.

With every Irish success story of course comes the begrudgers, and bang on cue over the horizon it’s the environmental lobby moaning until they’re green in the face about man-made disasters and the end of the world etc. It’s time to tackle these communists and inconvenient truth-mongers head on, with their absurd claims that climate change is caused by the weather, that Barack Obama is American and John McCain is an extinct polar bear.

What these enemies of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness don’t realize is that the sole cause of greenhouse gases is the hot air from their own boring arguments. The film-maker James Bond proved in his documentary ‘You Only Live Twice’ that carbon pollution actually comes from volcanoes inhabited by evil left-wing scientists who want to destroy the universe. It’s time to bomb these volcanoes and their liberal agents of doom to extinction. Happy 2010, may the river rise to meet you.