Bono Vox

I’ve just heard my own voice.

With normal people this would be of  “dog bites man” newsworthiness, not quite matching, say, the first moon landing or the fall of the Berlin Wall for its capacity to enthrall and grip. But I am not normal people, and it’s the most surprising thing that’s happened to me for quite a while.

I was in a shop just now buying a pencil (look, I didn’t say everything about this story is exciting) and the assistant and I both had a look at the label below it to see how much it cost. The label was partly torn, however, and I heard my voice say “it doesn’t help much, does it?”

And it was my voice, and when I heard it I realised that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve heard it. Instead I’ve just heard this muffled, far-away, could-be-anyone voice speaking my (admittedly still sparkling) words instead of me, as if I were a paramilitary being voiced by an actor.

Now, my voice is not pretty. Had I been the narrator of Under Milk Wood when it first appeared on radio it would never have become famous. If James Earl Jones retires I am unlikely to pick up his voiceover gigs. I don’t think I’m high on the list of people they ring when they want someone to play the Voice of God. On the other hand, if the person who does Olive Oyl suddenly drops dead they may well give me a call.

But today, just for that one sentence, my slightly nasal voice with its hint of a Dublin accent was back. And I’ve never heard anything so lovely.

It’s one more sign that the real world might be coming back.

Swine-y Todd, Flying Squad

Our company has a Swine Flu Committee.

We met for the first time yesterday. (Yes, of course I’m on it, that’s the kind of thing that always happens to me, though in this case I’m curious as to why. I spent a lot of the meeting looking at the six people in the group trying to figure out why we were the six specific ones asked to join. In my own case I finally decided that, as the virus is especially dangerous to both the elderly and to those with underlying health problems, they were covering both those angles by having me).

This is us...

I got quite excited when I was asked to join. I pictured us as a pseudo-scientist group called the Anti Coughing, Hawking and Oozing Organisation (ACHOO). We would wear space-suits with our logo (the Flying Snot) on the left breast. Whenever anyone displayed any symptoms we would burst in from all directions like the scientists in ET, and the offender would be dragged away.

Alternatively I imagined we might be more sinister and clandestine. If someone sneezed we would glance at one another, tap our (clean) nose with our (sterlised) finger, and the following morning the employee would be simply gone, his cubicle empty, and with HR having no record of him ever having existed.

The reality, of course, was a bit more mundane, though our name -we’re called the Pandemic Team – is way cooler than my one. We discussed different types of hand-cleaning materials, argued over which posters were too disgusting to put up in the kitchen, and five of the six made the sobering discovery that only one person out of the 110 in the company knows how to do the payroll (by God, whatever drugs are out there, they’re going to make sure I get them).

Then we went out and sent round a company-wide e-Mail about prevention, care and how to recognise the symptoms. One such symptom that we mentioned (and we cut-and-pasted this from an official document) is having a temperature of 28 degrees. It’s a measure of how seriously our e-mail was read that only GoldenEyes (who already has all the handwipes, etc, on her own desk, she’s convinced she’s going to get this) pointed out that this should probably read 38 degrees.

She is, of course, right. If your temperature is 28 degrees you are not a swine-flu sufferer, you’re a frog.

The Excitement is in Tents

Tinson1 if off to Oxygen this morning.

This is his “end of school” celebratory event. A load of the class are heading off to Majorca, and he was going to do that, but he came home one day and said “nah, it’s getting too messy” (and when a 17-year old bloke says that, you wonder WTF they were planning), so he opted for this instead.

This is his checklist, which I found on the kitchen table (sorry that’s it’s a bit hard to read, it’s not easy taking photos & uploading them at 5.30 am):

The list is apparently based on tips from the Oxygen website. The compilers, bless them, sound as innocent and naive as he does.

The second item, for example, says “something luminous to notice our tent”. Ignoring for a moment the construction of the sentence, which would lead you to believe that English is not Tinson1’s first language, a short reflection will quickly reveal the flaw in this plan. Attaching something luminous to your tent so that you can find it in the dark is a great idea, but only if you’re the only people doing it. I have a mental image of a load of half-asleep people wandering blearily around at 4 a.m. in a field eerily lit by a thousand luminous tents, the whole scene looking like a Sellafield housing estate being visited by zombies.

Item 6 – “Lock for tent” – is also touching in its innocence. It’s rumoured  that both the first and second of the three little pigs also invested in locks.

His proposed diet for the weekend is interesting. “16+ nutrigrain bars” and “canned fruit (must have opener tabs)” mean that at least he’ll be getting his five helpings a day, if in the least possible edible form. The second last item, though,  says “Jam sandwiches – keep for a few days!” (his exclamation mark). I fear he will discover that, while this may be true of the jam (there’s a reason why you find it in Tesco in an aisle marked “preserves”) it is unlikely to be true of the bread, and the only thing worse than eating mouldy bread is eating mouldy bread with strawberry jam on it.

I’m mentally blocking out the last line. It’s not just the word “vaseline” that worries me, it’s the “dot, dot, dot, question mark” that follows it.

(By the way, while I’m grateful that the list doesn’t include entries like “condoms” or “spliffs”, I have been a parent long enough to know that he might well have a second list).

I hope he has a great time, though, and I envy him. The line-up for the weekend is incredible (I’ve heard of more than half of the bands, which is saying something) and the whole thing will be a great experience, and hopefully great fun.

The weather forecast, for Saturday in particular, is absolutely shite.  It wouldn’t be a music festival if it wasn’t.

Worse Things Than Dying

When I was a teenager all the girls around my area were in love with either Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson, both of whom were the same age as me, so I’ve never liked either very much.

When I was a teenager Farrah Fawcett appeared in Charlie’s Angels, which we thought at the time was so cool (they had phones in their cars – imagine how great that would be). Farrah played Jill,  setting fire to my heart and several other parts of my anatomy. So it shouldn’t be hard to guess which of yesterday’s two deaths upset me more, and which I would regard as the most sad.

And yet.

I grieve for Farrah. She died far too young after a long illness. But I feel for Jackson too, and not just for his really early death.

Farrah was a beautiful, well-respected actress, had Ryan O’Neal as a partner for over 20 years and of course was the subject of the best-selling pin-up poster of all time (and you all know me well enough by now to know that I’m gonna show it).  Michael was a strange-looking, widely ridiculed singer who had a monkey as a best mate for a disturbingly long time and who was the subject of one of the most famous court cases of all time (and though he was acquitted, in the eyes of much of the world he’s still guilty).

Thanks partly to the poster, Farrah will be remembered for her beauty. Michael will be remembered as a freak.

Farrah was loved when she was alive and will be mourned now that she’s dead. Jackson, whether in or out of one of his strange marriages, always struck me as dreadfully, dreadfully alone.

You get one go at life on this earth. Looking at the pair of them, I know who’s life I’d rather have had.

Into The West

Tingirl’s class left for their trip to the Aran Islands this morning.

The Aran trip is a rite of passage each year for the class who are about to leave Bray School Project. It’s a three day trip with just three teachers and no parents. This is its 18th year, and it’s something the kids look forward to from the minute they start their final year (please note the use of both “its” and “it’s” in that sentence, Jo).

The journey, after the first car trip to the school, features a coach to Heuston Station in Dublin, a train to Galway, another coach to some pier somewhere and finally a boat to Aran, arriving just in time to get ready to start the return trip home. That’s why the phrase “this morning” in the opening sentence was used in its most broad sense, meaning “well, really still last night, but the date is different so I suppose we’ll have to call it this morning”. In other words we got up at 4.30, and arrived at the school at half past five.

But the bus didn’t arrive till 6.15, as a badly parked Eircom truck at its garage had partially blocked it in. This left less than an hour for the journey to Dublin, though the scarily young-looking driver assured everyone that he would easily make it.

“He’s a bit young, isn’t he,”  muttered some parents, ” I hope he doesn’t go too fast”.

Personally I just hoped the journey wouldn’t involve him trying to turn right onto a road that had a car waiting where the STOP marking as in the attached diagram. Because I had just realised that I’ve met this driver before, about a year ago, when I was the driver at the stop sign, and it was only by reversing violently backwards as he turned that I managed to keep his impact with the Tincar down to a brief juddering. In fairness, he’s a lovely guy, was very apologetic, and fixed the tiny amount of damage that was done to the Tinbumper.

Anyway, watching the expert and effortless way he reversed the huge coach into the schoolyard this morning it’s clear that he has improved since my encounter with him, so I kept this information to myself.

So off they went, jabbering excitedly, ready for their first big trip away from home.

Stork Alert

Sometimes nice things happen to nice people.

Congrats to XBox & ET.

Laughykate will get this

Dear Southern Hemisphere

Doesn’t time fly?

Cheers

The Northern Hemisphere

(PS You might think this should been sent a month ago, LK, but anyone who thinks our winter ends on 28th February had never spent March here).

There’s a Hole in the Bucket

I bought these scissors today (and yes, they are in a pink packet, and yes, they are a bit girly-looking, but men have fingernails too):

As you can see, they’re packed in that type of plastic packing that means they could survive being suddenly shot out of an airlock in a space ship. The type that means you can feel rebellious by defying all conventional wisdom and running with scissors.

The type of packaging, in fact, that’s impossible to open unless you have a pair of scissors.

(The title of the post is relevant, by the way, though you possibly have to be my age to get it).

Not Walkin’ on Sunshine

On Thursday Minister Noel Dempsey announced the Dept of Transport’s latest  strategy – “Smarter Travel, a Sustainable Transport Future” – in which “half a million motorists are to be persuaded to switch to more sustainable forms of transport, including walking and cycling”.

Mr Dempsey doesn’t seem to have noticed that the explosion in property prices of the last decade means that most of us live so far out in the middle of nowhere that walking or cycling even to the nearest train station is not an option, never mind walking or cycling to work.

Still, it’s a lovely aspiration, and he’ll have been encouraged by the fact that Irish Rail decided to support his proposal just one day later, when the forty or fifty of us passengers on yesterday’s very first train were turfed out onto the ice-covered platform at Grand Canal Dock. I don’t know about the rest of them, but it left me having to walk the last one-and-a-half miles to work.

This train leaves Bray at 5.40 a.m. In order to catch it I had got out of bed at half four in order to ensure that I’d plenty of time to defrost the windscreen and drive as slowly as was necessary. I went out with a jug of water and poured it over the ice on the windscreen, left the jug back into the house, then found that the lock was too frozen for the key to go in, so went back into the house, filled the jug, went back out and poured it on the lock, left the jug back into the house, started the car and reversed out onto my road.

Which was when I discovered that the water that I’d poured on the windscreen had now frozen, so I left the car running, got out, made my way gingerly back to my driveway (the footpath was like glass), inched my way along my drive, went back into the house, filled the jug, went back out and poured it on the windscreen, left the jug back into the house, and finally set off along roads that were fine in places, icy in others (there used to be people who went out and gritted roads in icy weather, perhaps it’s too cold now for the little diddumses).

Anyway, I made the train and was sitting happily reading when, at Grand Canal Dock, the driver suddenly announced that “due to a broken down train at Pearse Station, this train is now terminating at this station”. What broken down train? This was the first train of the day. Perhaps the last train of the previous night had broken down, and everyone had said “sod it, it’s late & the pubs’ll be shut if we don’t hurry, let’s leave it & fix it tomorrow”.

It didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone in Irish Rail that there are two tracks in each station, that trains at that time are over half-an-hour apart, so that it should have  been possible to pass the broken down train on the other side. Such lateral thinking seems to have been beyond whatever staff were awake at that time, however, presumably because (please forgive me for this) being rail employees means they are used to thinking in straight lines.

Anyway, we were ordered off by the driver, who at least didn’t insult us with the company mantra “Iarnrod Eireann apologises for any inconvenience”. He did try to make us feel better by telling us that “Dublin Bus will accept your tickets on their buses”. He didn’t go on to inform us that Bombay Airlines would accept our tickets on their planes, though he might as well have done, since there is as much chance of seeing plane on the streets of Dublin at 6.30 a.m as there is of seeing a bus.

So I found myself walking a mile-and-a-half in darkness in sub-zero temperatures, having paid a fare to be taken into the city centre. On the plus side, I got to walk along streets that I haven’t been along since I started working on (whisper it) the Northside. I passed Merrion Square, walked along Nassau Street past Trinity College, along Andrew Street, through Temple Bar. And, unlike the council workers of Wicklow and the staff of Grand Canal Dock Station, Dublin City Council had done a great job of keeping their streets ice-free. On the minus side, after all the efforts that I had made, I arrived at work half an hour later than I’d wanted to.

And what about the “Smarter Travel” strategy? Did my pre-dawn forced march help the environment?

If the steam coming out of my ears and the swearing hissing through my clenched teeth count as noxious emissions, then I’ve probably made things worse.

My Other Car’s a Bigger One, Honestly

As the heater and some of the electrics in the Tincar (an apt name if ever there was one) had packed up, Mrs Tin drove me to the station yesterday so that she could leave it in to be fixed. Apparently the mechanic has to order one part, so last night she picked me up in a Daewoo Matiz that he leant her.

It’s amazing how quickly car snobbery kicks in, even when you have no interest in cars. Whenever I’m asked what I drive I always have to think for half-a-second, since when you’re a bloke giving the answer “dunno, it’s red” shows a distinct lack of testosterone.

Yet faced with driving a car that I won’t have to worry about parking, since I can just put it in my laptop bag (see?), all I could do was laugh. And then ask “has Tinson1 seen this yet”? On being told no, that he was still in the gym, I begged to be the one to collect him. The look of astonishment (and the brief flash of fear that we might actually have bought this) on his face will help to cheer me during the long winter months ahead.

Clarkson, not me

One brief serious comment here. Despite the fact that I was now in a car that in a crash would offer me all the protection of a dinner jacket, I couldn’t resist driving it much faster than I would normally drive. It’s as if I was telling the world “yes, I’ve a teeny car, but I’m still all Alpha Male”.

Or perhaps I was just hoping that I wouldn’t have to listen to the racket from the diesel engine if I could travel faster than the speed of sound.

It’s ironic (don’t ya think) that this happened on the week that the live Top Gear Show visited Dublin. It’s unlikely that the Daewoo Matiz will ever feature on the programme, unless it’s down at the very, very end of the Cool Wall.

Or perhaps during one of their mad stunts they might try to fire one out of a cannon through a hoop of fire.