What’s Brown and Has a Trunk?

…  a mouse coming back from holiday.

I’m in my second day back at work after my week off stuck at home, since we can’t really afford to go anywhere nice after Tinson1 turned out to be surprisingly bright and we’ve to pay €1,585 next month for him to start in Trinity.

I’ve just read that the Space Shuttle, due to take off this morning, is bringing six mice to the International Space Station.  The report says:

“Although Nasa has flown rodents on the shuttle and station previously, they have never been left behind for a long stay in space. The mice are scheduled to return aboard Nasa’s next shuttle mission in November.”

It’s a bit galling when mice have a more exciting holiday than you have.

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.

And It Never Did Me Any Harm

As I said yesterday, I watched Michael O’Brien on Q&A on Monday night in my local with about four other customers, the owner and his wife (and by the way, it’s great to see the way the clip of his heartfelt outpouring has travelled around the blog world).

When he’d finished, we all sat in silence for a few seconds, then started to clap.

Then we all started to tell stories of when we were at school. None of us had been boarders, or had been at “corrective” schools, so we were all thankfully spared the buggery or rape which so many kids, from the same generation as us, had to endure. But we were all at school in the sixties, when corporal punishment was still allowed and indeed enthusiastically embraced, and each of us had a least one story of a savage beating.

This is mine.

Back in those days we used the type of pens with a sharp metal nib that you had to dip into an inkwell, the belief being that this would improve your handwriting, which would be essential for your future job prospects (the arrival of the computer keyboard come as a total surprise to the curriculum setters of my generation). In a class of giddy young boys it was considered the height of wit, if the bloke sitting next to you stood up to answer a question, to hold your pen just below his bum and then pull it away just as he sat down again.

And one day, when I was about ten, I got the timing of this disastrously wrong.

The results were spectacular. My deskmate yelped, leapt in the air, and then started to cry. There was no way of hiding what I’d done, and the teacher produced his leather strap and beat me with it. Since I was horrified at what I’d done, and knew I was in the wrong, and since this was how we were punished in those days, I regarded this as my due. Then he marched me to the headmaster’s office, told him what happened, and the headmaster beat me too. Again, I fully accepted that I deserved this. There were some crimes that demanded that the class teacher’s punishment alone was not enough, and this was clearly one of them.

Then the two of them took me to every other class in the school, told the teacher and the whole class what I’d done, and each of those teachers in turn beat me as well, in front of their own class.

Somewhere in the middle of this even I -ten years old, shocked at my behaviour and full of guilt – started to think “well, this is a bit much”. But they kept telling me that the guy was bleeding (which I realise now was unlikely), that he might get blood-poisoning from the ink on the nib, that he might even die, so I said nothing.

And I said nothing at home. When I related this story in the pueveryone said “no, because you’d have got the same at home”, and, while I certainly know I wouldn’t have been beaten, I’m not sure that they’d have taken my side.

Because that was the way things were then. If children misbehaved, they got slapped. We were all sent off to school to a bunch of people who our parents didn’t fully know, but to whom they’d given tacit permission to punish us physically if these strangers saw fit.

And by the way, not one of the people who beat me that day was a priest or a brother. The school – Harold Boys’ in Dalkey, may it burn to the ground – was under the overall control of the parish priest, but all of it’ s teachers were lay people, married, with children of their own.

An awful lot has been said in the last week about the behaviour of the religious organisations at the time. And rightly so. As followers of God, their’s should have been the benchmark, the standard of care for the young which lesser lay organisations aspired toward. Instead they merely led the rest of the herd in cruelty.

But people have asked how it could have happened. And, while the ordinary people of the time would have had no idea that their priests and nuns could reach such depths of sexual depravity, they have got to admit that they knew and accepted that these people would beat children of both genders, starting from the age of four. They would say “well, I was beaten at school, and it never did me any harm”. In many cases they would beat their own children. They would certainly slap them.

Ireland was indeed a terrible place in those days. But it wasn’t just the religious that were responsible for that.

The Train Now Standing…

You may have read that there were no trains this morning between Bray and Dun Laoghaire because of a fault in the overhead lines near Dalkey.

This is not strictly true. There was one train, the very first of the day, and I was on it.

As a result I had a most eventful trip to work.

Just about here

There were about 30 people on the Dart as it left Killiney and headed towards Dalkey. About half a mile from Dalkey station there was a loud bang and a dragging sound along the roof, and about half the lights in the carriage went out. The train continued for a few hundred yards before silently coming to a halt, right in the middle of nowhere, and the rest of the lights promptly went out as well. The driver came on the intercom and said he would try to find out what had happened, and a minute later we saw him marching back along the far track. It was fairly obvious, though, that this was not a problem that would be solved quickly, and the only issue was not whether the train was going to continue, but rather how we were going to get off it. Sure enough, the driver eventually returned to say that the overhead line was down and that we would have to walk along the line to Dalkey station, and get a bus from there. He told us that ‘de-training’ (Dear God) would commence once staff arrived from the station to accompany us.

About half an hour later we were all led up to the driver’s cabin and helped one at a time down a little set of steps beneath the door which I have to admit I’d never noticed before. When we had all ‘de-trained’ they walked us along the track, telling us all the time to be careful on the stones and sleepers. I was tempted to say that I was ok, I’d walked along here many times. After all, we were in the town I grew up in now, and during my childhood, when there were far fewer trains than there are now, the railway line was one of our many playgrounds.

We reached the station and were directed to the nearest bus stop to get to Dun Laoghaire, from whence trains would still be running (that is the first, and will probably be the only, time that I have ever used ‘whence’ in a sentence). Eventually a single-decker bus came along and we all got on, pretty well filling it at the very first stop. A Chinese lady got on a few stops later and started around her in amazement as she had to stand. “I’m usually the only person on this bus,” she said to me.

Now, you would think that the trains north of the problem would still be running fine, since all they’d to do was tmake the shorter than usual journey out to Dun Laoghaire and then head back in, yet when we arrived at Dun Laoghaire station we found that the next train would not be for another 27 minutes. Rather than stand on the platform for that time I decided to get the 46A bus from outside the station. This, of course, is one of the most circuitous routes in the whole of the city, and indeed the whole of the city is where I felt I’d been when I eventually arrived close enough to the office to get off and walk.

I had driven to the station, been on a train and two buses, walked quarter of a mile along a railway line and more than a mile along different roads, and had travelled during the time-when-no-one-else-is-up, the time-when-people-leave-home-early-to-miss-the-traffic, and finally all-out-rush-hour.

I’d left my house at twenty past five (this is my busy week at work, and I was trying to get in at half-six) and I arrived at the office at a quarter to nine.

 I only live 25 miles away.

Blinded By the Light

So, back to work this morning after my brief and futile attempt at winning Housewife of the Year.

My body clock was all messed up, so I woke at four and lay there till ten to five, then in sheer frustration decided to get up.

This meant I was in total darkness for the first time in ten days. I crept and felt my way along to the kitchen, then turned on the light.

I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to hear your pupils contracting.

The Goodbye Girl

D-Day was yesterday.

Twenty-one terrific people lost their jobs. Their individual stories would break your heart. Fiona has a gorgeous one year old who looks exactly like her. Tony’s partner is pregnant, as is Marcos’s wife. Eoin has been with the company for years, whereas Brendan gave up another job to come here just eight weeks ago. Luka is Croatian, and won’t be able to stay here if he doesn’t have another job by May.

Dear, sweet Mary (TallNeuroticGirl to readers of this blog) left in the same blaze of energy with which she does everything. The only person on earth to be able to get sound out of a ’silent’ keyboard (she’s had it less than a year, and half the letters are worn away) rushed about, tidying this and forwarding that, all the time keeping up a stream of chatter, asking me to make sure that this person was OK or that person was looked after. The office is a lot quieter today, though that would have been the case even if she were the only one to go.

And my great friend BlondieBird is going as well.

We all expected it, her section was the one most likely to be gutted, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

I’ll miss her lovely, and genuine, smile when she’d say hello in the morning. I’ll miss the amazing sandwiches that she’d construct for herself at lunchtime, using tomatoes, cucumber, ham slices, cheese, sometimes rashers or sausages left over from her breakfast, all brought in from home individually wrapped in cling film. I’ll miss her astonishing mutliple sneezes – five, six, maybe ten little explosions with a “chooscuseme” at the end, which was how you knew she was finished & could say “bless you”.

Most of all, though, I’ll just miss her. She became a really close friend of mine, even though she’s twenty-four years younger (I accused her once of fancying me, and she snorted and said “maybe if you were twenty years younger”. “You’d think the ‘twenty years younger’ would be the most hurtful part of that sentence,” I told her in reply, “but actually it’s the ‘maybe’.”). When I was suffering the blackouts she’d make me text her every evening to let her know I’d got home safely.

She and GoldenEyes became really great friends, to the extent that they socialise together outside work as well, and GE was even more devastated than I was.

And today BB’s gone off to sign on the dole. She says she’s planning to turn up there in a hoodie and pyjama bottoms.

One last story about her. As I’ve said before, at Christmas she got her blonde hair dyed a sort of plum colour. Recently I heard her on the phone talking to someone about their website. “It says ‘clink on the link’ to move to the next section, but there’s no link,” she said. Then I heard her say “oh, that link there, I see. Thank you.” She hung up the phone and I heard her sigh and then mutter “I’m still blonde”.

That’s my friend. That’s Jenny.

Waiting

Back when I was self-employed, if things got really bad, if I felt I’d messed something up for a client, or if I was worried about how I was going to make enough money to feed my family, I’d often wake up really early, and throw up.

That hasn’t happened since I came to work where I do now. Until this morning.

Tomorrow is the day when about twenty people here are going to be let go. But in order that this can take place properly their final pay,P45s, etc will have to be ready for them, which means that the person who does all that stuff will have to be given the list this afternoon.

And that person is me.

So for all of this afternoon and the first couple of hours tomorrow morning I’m going to find myself in the kitchen with, in the loo with, or sitting near people who I know are leaving, though they don’t.

As I said, I’ve already thrown up this morning. But I still feel sick.

Gallows Humour

It’s mid-morning on Friday, and an office full of people who may only have one-an-a-half working days left is hushed, filled only with the sounds of typing as these people carry on doing their jobs with a professionalism that would make you well-up with pride, and with affection,  and with sadness.

I’d love  Mark Fielding and the ISME gobshites who called us all malingerers to come in here and see what the employees of this country, of all nationalities,  are really like.

Meanwhile, everyone is putting on as brave a face as possible, and gallows humour is creeping in. We’ve discussed a sit-in, a la Waterford Crystal. There is a group of eight of us who are acting as go-betweens between staff and management, forwarding suggestions & concerns to the bosses & vetting communications that they are sending back, and, although the eight have no actual role in the selection process and are as liable to be made redundant as anyone else in the company we are referred to as the Firing Squad. One area of the office, where everyone in it reckons they’re going, now call their section The Departure Lounge.

And this morning BlondieBird sent me this:

Actual Answers Given by “Family Fortunes” Contestants:

Name something a blind person might use… A sword

Name a song with moon in the title…Blue suede moon

Name a bird with a long neck… Naomi Campbell

Name an occupation where you need a torch…A burglar

Name a famous brother & sister…Bonnie & Clyde

Name a dangerous race…The Arabs

Name an item of clothing worn by the 3 musketeers…A horse

Name something that floats in the bath…Water

Name something you wear on the beach…A deckchair

Name something Red…My cardigan

Name a famous cowboy…Buck Rogers

Name a famous royal…Mail

A number you have to memorize…7

Something you do before going to bed…Sleep

Something you put on walls…Roofs

Something in the garden that’s green…Shed

Something that flies that doesn’t have an engine…A bicycle with wings

Something you might be allergic to…Skiing

Name a famous bridge…The bridge over troubled waters

Something a cat does…Goes to the bathroom

Something you do in the bathroom…Decorate

Name an animal you might see at the zoo…A dog

Something associated with the police…Pigs

A sign of the zodiac…April

Something slippery…A conman

A kind of ache…Fillet ‘O’ Fish

A food that can be brown or white…Potato

A jacket potato topping… Jam

A famous Scotsman…Jock

Another famous Scotsman…Vinnie Jones

Something with a hole in it… Window

A non living object with legs…Plant

A domestic animal…Leopard

A part of the body beginning with ‘N’…Knee

A way of cooking fish…Cod

Something you open other than a door…Your Bowels

It’s the first time I’ve really laughed in a week.

I’m Seeing A Pattern Here

When the boom was on, we all had far too much work.

Therefore we were all expected to work very long hours and not get paid overtime for it.

Now the recession is here, some of our customers will close, many others will be afraid to spend money, and the way to survive is to prove to them that we can provide an excellent service at competitive rates.

Therefore we will all be expected to work very long hours and not get paid overtime for it.

Not With a Bang

So, Happy New Year – or, at least, what’s left of it.

Regular readers may have seen me mention that I have a cold (we men think it’s unfair to keep such interesting news to ourselves).  I first felt it on Christmas afternoon and it got steadily worse thereafter.

Unfortunately I’d to work Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week while feeling at my worst, so I got up at 5.30 each morning, worked from seven to two-thirty, then came home and went back to bed. On Monday I slept from five right through to 5.30 next morning, Tuesday it was from eight, then on Wednesday I finished work and got home at four to look forward to an evening of Jools Holand on TV, fireworks on the hill behind the house (whether we want them or not) and a rip-roaring rendition of that rollicking, raunchy, who-am-I-kidding, lugubrious old dirge Auld Lang Syne.

But I didn’t feel great when I got home, so I went to bed for a short nap at five in the evening. I got up at nine o’clock last night, having slept more or less solidly for twenty-eight hours.

I remember Mrs Tin running into the room, planting a kiss on my forehead and saying “Happy New Year”, and I remember then hearing the fireworks display (wouldn’t make great radio, I have to say). I remember hearing herself and the Tinkids heading out the front door, as we always do, to shout Happy New Year at anyone else who happens to pop their heads outside, and I heard Mrs Tin saying “our neighbours are poo” as she came back in, which I take to mean that no-one else appeared.

But other than that, the metamorphosis of 2008 into 2009 passed me totally by. As indeed did the rest of New Year’s Day, and the really amazing thing is that although I was only up from nine in the evening till one in the morning, I went to sleep again when I went back to bed.

So I was up this morning at nine, the only one awake. And the one thing I’m certainly not is tired. Or hungover, since I’ve had alcohol on only two days out of the last eight. Or overweight, since I reckon the last time I had three meals in one day was December 18th.

I might start my own Health Program. “Snot your way to fitness”, I think I’ll call it.