Summer’s Gone

In a comment on a recent post, Laughykate in New Zealand asks:

And while we’re talking about the weather, Tinman could you please send me the tracking number for summer? I need to carry out a track and trace as it appears that summer has not arrived as expected. Spring did, but I’m vaguely suspicious that someone’s cracked themselves up and sent our summer to Australia.

I’d been hoping this wouldn’t come up. Because now we Irish have a confession to make.

Summer is like the trophy in one of those competitions where the idea that the final might be a draw doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone, and what happens then is that each team holds the cup for six months. The Northern and Southern Hemispheres share summer on a similar basis, though only for three months each (who gets it the rest of the time? The Martians?) Our turn was from June to August.

And sometime during those three months, we lost summer.

We’re fairly sure we remember seeing it during June. But then it disappeared, and we couldn’t find it anywhere.

Anyway, our time of ownership ran out, and we were expected to hand it over. We had a quick last look in the pocket of our raincoats, behind clouds and, as you do, in hundreds of places that we’d already looked in just minutes before. Shit, we thought, there’ll be trouble over this.

So (and here comes the confession part) what we did was we packaged up two overcast days from March and sent them down instead. After all, we told ourselves, we’ve all seen the Lord of the Rings, the rain is absolutely shite down there, they’ll be thrilled with what we’re sending them, they’ll probably look back on this in years to come as the best summer they ever had.

Turns out, though, that New Zealanders are brighter than, well, their weather, so it seems we’ve been rumbled.

So all we can do is apologise, and promise to keep looking. We’ll find it eventually, probably while we’re looking for something else we’ve lost.

Like our economy, perhaps.

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

As you’ve all noticed, it’s snowing on my blog.

WordPress offered this as an option for the Christmas period last year. I noticed it on about the 23rd and cheerfully clicked the button. I didn’t realise then that I was signing up to get it every year. Nor did I realise that their idea of the Christmas period is the entire month of December. Since my own belief is that Christmas starts when you finish work on the 22nd and ends at midnight on the 25th, I’m not too happy about this.

Part of the problem is that my two posts for December to date have been grumbly ones, and snow drifting gently across my rant somewhat spoils the tone. I feel like Ronald McDonald trying to look sad at a funeral.     

And I don’t know how to turn it off.

No Flash of Inspiration

In Dublin on Saturday there was thunder and lightning, accompanied by a short torrential downpour that brought flash flooding to some places.

I love thunderstorms, so an event like this should have been a Godsend to a blogger instructed to write about the weather whenever he can’t find anything else to write about.

But I don’t live in Dublin, I live in Greystones. And, although it’s only 19 miles south of Dublin, we had no storm, no lightning, no rain. We just had an overcast sky the colour of our town’s name, and I didn’t hear about any of this until lunchtime today.

I could have had a field day. I could have written about the wonderful smell that accompanies thunder. I could have said how much I love that really heavy rain. I could have talked about how much more thrilling lightning becomes when your chest is part metal and your knowledge of the effects of being struck by lightning comes mainly from superhero comics. I could have done all of this, had it not rained on my parade by, well, not raining on my parade.

Now, I’ve always accepted that I will never be able to write a decent autobiography since I had none of the disadvantages that are such an advantage in a truly interesting life-story. My parents were not poor, not alcoholics and showed no inclination to beat us. I was not one of seventeen children. I was not forced to start work to support the family from the age of ten. I did not then put myself through college at night, earn and then lose a fortune by the age of 22, lose part of an ear in a bar-brawl in Barcelona, spend a year as a ghost-writer to Jackie Onassis, wake up hungover one morning with a tattoo of Betty Boop on my left buttock or end up in jail due a case of mistaken identity.

Other writers have that kind of luck, and I envy them. All I have is a couple of mildly interesting maladies and a trio of currently less interesting children.

So if God decides to liven up a Halloween Saturday by making the sky vomit enough water in just four minutes to fill Lake Windermere, is it too much to ask him to make it happen a bit further south?

Some of us have blogs to fill.

Chart Wars

Two posts ago I mentioned that I was number seven in a Google search for “wombat sphincter”.

As Laughykate then pointed out, that post went straight into the chart at Number 3, but later in the day KickOuttheJams reported it had dropped to Number 4.

Did you see what demoted it though?

I was overtaken by WordPress’s Category Listing for “wombat sphincter”, even though the only actual post in it was mine. I feel like a burglar who’s just robbed his own house by mistake.

Their title, though, means they deserve to be ahead of me. “Wombat Sphincter – Blogs, Pictures and More on WordPress”.

Neither Laughykate nor I ever promised pictures of a wombat’s sphincter. And, since I presume they’re not readily available on Getty Images, I can think of only one way of obtaining such pictures, and believe me that won’t be happening any time soon. My digital camera’s not especially valuable, but that doesn’t mean I’m planning to stick it up a marsupial’s rectum.

And… “Blogs, Pictures and More”? What could “More” possibly mean?

Once when I was at school we had to write an essay about any topic at all. Since I was an impish fellow a smart-arsed git I decided it would be funny to write about “the full-stop at the end of this essay”, since every time I started a new sentence I was writing about a different full-stop to the one I’d been writing about in the sentence before. This gave me the chance to spout existentialist crap about the impermanence of all things, and about how unreal reality is in reality (aren’t you glad I didn’t have a blog back then?).

As if the teenage me doesn’t sound annoying enough I then ended the essay with something like “and isn’t it ironic that by ending this essay with a question I’ve effectively rendered the whole thing meaningless?”. It’s a tribute to my English teacher’s tolerance that I’m not wearing the essay-book internally to this day.

Anyway, the reason I’m dragging up this embarrassing memory from the past is that I’m doing something very similar here. Once I post this God knows what Google’s list will look like.

Back last Christmas I accidently produced a “Googleblatt”, a phrase that gives the search result “1-1 of 1 results”. Just by writing about it I made it cease to exist, of course, and I feel that I’m in the same time-warp, Doctor Who-ish, mind-bending area now.

I think I’d better end this post, before my brain melts.

The Big Four-Oh (-Oh)

So, my 400th post, and a chance to defend Wikipedia.

People warn you to beware of Wikipedia, telling you that the information on it cannot be trusted (there’s a great Dilbert cartoon where one of the charcters says “I once passed a gallstone so big it became Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration”, and when one of his workmates says “I find that hard to believe” he replies “Give me ten minutes than check Wikipedia”).

I have to say, though, that I’ve just looked up “400″ in it, and this is the opening sentence:

“400 (four hundred) is the natural number following 399 and preceding 401.”

Now that’s accurate. Not very interesting, maybe, but accurate.

I defy Encyclopaedia Britannica to do any better.

(As you’ll have gathered, I’m now reduced to writing posts based on what number they are. Expect a post about Levi 401s tomorrow).

Six Months Gone

It’s six months today since I started this blog.

I’ve written 132 posts, many of them different. Some of them I’m quietly proud of, some of them make me groan aloud when I think of them. Some of them have been funny (many of these intentionally so), some of them have been angry, some have been full of self-woe. A number of them have featured a picture of Yelena Isinbayeva, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, and sure I haven’t put in a picture of her for a while, so here’s one now.

The blog probably would have been a lot more interesting had I started it last year when the blackouts were actually going on. You could have been regaled with the hilarious tale of my day in A&E at the Mater after I smashed my face off the Millennium Walkway, or the fortuitous story of how I blacked out while on the operating table in St Vincent’s just as they were going to put in a heart monitor to see if they could find out why I was blacking out (now that’s timing).

I still feel that one day I’ll say more about how I felt during last year, when I couldn’t drive, or swim, or walk anywhere alone, and every test that I was being given was coming up negative, but at the moment I still prefer to push last year to the back of my mind, and concentrate on the fact that everything worked out fine. Perhaps around the anniversary of the actual pacemaker operation (Tinman’s birthday, I suppose you could call it) I will do so.

In the meantime I’ll just potter along as I have done. I know it’s not Dickens, but he probably didn’t get too many blog hits either.