And The Big Limousine Disappeared

On Saturday night in my local we were watching the World Athletics Championships on BBC2. When they ended the BBC Proms Classical Music programme came on, and we watched it for a while. This is because we are a cultured lot, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the barman was outside changing a keg and none of us could reach the remote control behind the bar.

Anyway, watching it reminded me of two questions I’ve always wanted to know the answer to:

1. Does “La Donna é Mobilé” mean “The Woman is Moving”?

and, if it does, then

2. Does that mean that the aria was the original version of  “for 24 years I’ve been living next door to Alice”?

I’m not really very deep.

Pavarotti – Notti

I may have mentioned once or twice that I drink in the bar rather than the lounge of my local pub. There is a pool of about 40 people who form the clientele of the bar, predominantly male and middle-aged, and on any evening I can just turn up, knowing that were will be between two and twenty people there, and that there will be quiet and interesting conversation. Every so often, though, someone will decide that what would make the evening just perfect is a good singsong.

These are not nights for people with a nervous disposition, or with anything resembling musical taste. The standard of singing in my local is patchy at best. Participants generally fall into one of three categories: those who sound like a grizzly bear who’s just eaten a broken bottle; those who sound like a hyena who’s just been punched in the nuts and, worst of all, those who sound like Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia.

Part of their problem is a widespread belief that quality is synonymous with volume. Thus a man who quietly sings a lovesong (usually about his mother) will be listened to with polite indifference, but a man who yells out some song about drinkin’ or fightin’, making only occasional bouncing contact with the actual tune like a dodgem car will be encouraged throughout with whoops and shouts of “Good on Ya”.

It is widely known in the pub that I am not a fan of these shoutfests, because of my often-expressed opinion that there are only two parts to any song, namely the words and the tune, and if you’re ignoring the latter and don’t know more than half of the former then you can’t really be said to be singing the song at all. We have reached a compromise, though. They have promised not to keep saying “now it’s Tinman’s turn to sing”, and in turn I have agreed to desist from making howling-dog noises during especially loud efforts, and have also promised not to repeat the evening when I pointedly took out my iPod and listened to it.

One of the guys, a bloke called Walty, has a voice very different to the others – very light, and with that peculiar tremble that some people can achieve, and which someone (OK, it was me) has christened Walty’s Warble. His taste is more eclectic than the others, and last night he  sang Bobby Goldsboro’s song Honey. Well, he sang some of it, before reprising the end of the first verse halfway through the second and eventually tailing off into mumbling silence as he realised he didn’t know as much of the song as he thought he did. I, unfortunately, know most of it, and have now been carrying it around in my head all day, and may yet have to resort to you-know-what.

Honey is a unique song in that it is both very sad and also wildly and unintentionally funny. For example, in any real relationship the line “she crashed the car and she was sad/and so afraid that I’d be mad” would surely be followed, not by “but what the heck”, but with “and she was dead right”.

My favourite line, though, is “and I surprised her with a puppy”. There are a number of possible scenes that this invokes, including one that is not suitable for a gentle blog such as this, but whenever I hear the line I picture Honey in the bathroom, having one of those long girly baths that involve oils, candles and lots and lots of bubbles, and just as she is almost asleep Bobby silently opens the door, hurls the puppy in, and shuts it again.

I can hear the yelps, shrieks and splashes even as I type.

A Fond Farewell

Yesterday I was at the funeral of one of the guys who drinks in my local. I’ve been to loads of them over the 24 years I’ve been drinking there, of course, as one by one the stolid and silent old men who sipped their pints of Guinness at the bar died off, but this guy was 53, and the first of our generation to go (I’m refusing to consider the notion that WE are now the old guys at the bar).

Anyway, it was both sad and lovely. His photo was on the coffin and, though I was two rows from the back of the church (there was an enormous attendance) I could see his huge smile, which is what everyone will remember most about him. The priest described him as “having a great sense of humour, but someone who took no prisoners” which made the whole church laugh as it summed him up perfectly. He was loud, argumentative and very, very funny.

A girl played the harp throughout, and not just church music – she did a version of Sting’s Fields of Gold that made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. He had lived abroad for the last few years but when he became sick he returned home and stayed with his sister for his last few months, and his niece – a girl of about 18 – read a poem that she wrote about his time in their house. When she finished, all around the church you could see the rest of the guys my age from the pub staring fixedly downwards so that no-one could see the tears in our eyes.

And last night we all told our stories about him – his jokes, his rows, the relentless way he used to wind up the bar manager over Manchester United.

I’m not really sure why I’m posting this – I’m not trying to make any point, but this morning I was talking to my dad and he asked did I have a nice day yesterday and I said “yes – er, though I was at a funeral” and I realised that, strangely, it had been a very nice day.

It would be lovely to think that Dave saw it all, and saw how popular he was.

Golf Balls

Being in my local at weekends means that I get to see a lot more golf on TV than I would choose to (the amount I would choose being Zero). Sometimes though this can be interesting.

For example, the tournament on at the moment is the Shell Houston Open from  “the Redstone Golf Club, Humble, Texas”. The hours of dull interviews, numerous ad breaks and surprisingly little actual golf became worthwhile just because of the discovery that Texas has a town called Humble.

This is the equivalent of a town in France called Uglygirls, or a Sober, Ireland.

And, when the live US golf ends they show highlights of the Champions Tour, which is the Over 50s. Coverage of this, I kid you not, is sponsored by Viagra.

Please feel free to insert your own jokes here about woods, irons, shafts, longer drives and picking up birdies.

Now You See Me

The Road Safety Authority is to circulate 30,000 high-visibility jackets among rural pubs for them to lend to customers walking home.

I think this is an excellent idea, and fully intend to wear mine the entire time that I am in the pub, since I have often, when my glass is empty, suspected that I am invisible to the bar staff.

Whereas many years ago I used to own a number of rugby-shirts, even though my own career had ended at the age of 13 when I arrived back to training to discover that every 13-year old in the country had put on five inches and two stone over the summer, and I hadn’t. Two games later, fed up with feeling as if I’d been hit by a tow-truck every time I was tackled, I decided soccer would be safer (or parachute jumping, for that matter).

Anyway, the picture on the right is the closest I can find on Google to one particular shirt I used to wear a lot, though mine also had a lot of orange in it.

One summer evening I arrived into my local to find a pint on the counter ready for me. “I saw you coming across the road,” explained the barman. I turned and looked at the frosted-glass door and window. “Well, yeah, I could only see a shape,” he admitted, “but no-one else in here wears a shirt that colour”.

See? It works.

Why? Because it’s There

ClosestWorkBuddy emailed me a copy of a report from the BBC News yesterday. It essentially said that there are nine categories of drinker, as listed below:

The Nine Types of Drinker
Name	Characteristics	Key motivations
Depressed drinker	Life in a state of crisis eg recently bereaved, divorced or in financial crisis	Alcohol is a comforter and a form of self-medication used to help them cope
De-stress drinker	Pressurised job or stressful home life leads to feelings of being out of control and burdened with responsibility	Alcohol is used to relax, unwind and calm down and to gain a sense of control when switching between work and personal life. Partners often support or reinforce behaviour by preparing drinks for them
Re-bonding drinker	Relevant to those with a very busy social calendar	Alcohol is the ‘shared connector’ that unifies and gets them on the same level. They often forget the time and the amount they are consuming
Conformist drinker	Traditional guys who believe that going to the pub every night is ‘what men do’	Justify it as ‘me time’. The pub is their second home and they feel a strong sense of belonging and acceptance within this environment
Community drinker	Drink in fairly large social friendship groups	The sense of community forged through the pub-group. Drinking provides a sense of safety and security and gives their lives meaning. It also acts a social network
Boredom drinker	Typically single mums or recent divorcees with restricted social life	Drinking is company, making up for an absence of people. Drinking marks the end of the day, perhaps following the completion of chores
Macho drinker	Often feeling under-valued, disempowered and frustrated in important areas of their life	Have actively cultivated a strong ‘alpha male’ that revolves around their drinking ‘prowess’. Drinking is driven by a constant need to assert their masculinity and status to themselves and others
Hedonistic drinker	Single, divorced and/or with grown up children	Drinking excessively is a way of visibly expressing their independence, freedom and ‘youthfulness’ to themselves. Alcohol used to release inhibitions
Border dependents	Men who effectively live in the pub which, for them, is very much a home from home	A combination of motives, including boredom, the need to conform, and a general sense of malaise in their lives

When I asked why she sent it to me, she just laughed. I suppose I do mention the pub a lot.

The scary thing is that I reckon I fit into five of the nine groups. Even ‘Border Dependents’, which I had taken to be someone who drinks to celebrate the Peace process is going well, turns out to be one. the only ones I don’t have are four, six, seven and eight, and even seven, the macho drinker, is one I had when younger.

It’s very worrying. It’s enough to drive you to drink.

Frozen in Time

Down in my local (the source of my solace and, increasingly, my material) one of the guys reckons he’s going to get himself cryogenically frozen, so he can be revived in 100 years after they invent a procedure to cure whatever it is he dies of.

This idea has been doing the rounds for many years now. It is widely believed that Walt Disney had himself preserved in this way, though this is in fact untrue (which is a pity, for if it were true then Disney on Ice would surely have been the most tastelessly named show of all time).

The notion is very popular with people who have seen a lot of Sci-Fi, and who believe that the only differences between 2108 and now are that in 2108 everyone will wear one-piece tacky clothing, that machines will speak in soothing female voices and that people will drive really cool cars on surprisingly clear roads. The cryonees will awake, cash in their substantially-increased nest-egg, and slip effortlessly into society.

The sheer awfulness of the reality could not be more different. Just imagine that you had done  this in 1908 – after dying of pneumonia or flu, the two biggest killers at that time, at the average life-expectancy age of 47 – and were awakened today. Ireland is a very different place. The British are gone, our currency is different (indeed, the decimal currency has come and gone during your Big Sleep) and the entire culture has dramatically changed. How would you deal with cars, computers, TV, mobile ringtones, showers instead of (infrequent) baths, pooing indoors?

Olympics 1908 style

Yelena - again

Speaking to women in the way you were accustomed to will now earn you a smack in the face. The world’s first female mayor was elected in 1908, but women still didn’t have the vote. <- This photo shows the archery team at the 1908 olympics. What would you make of the way athletes like Yelena Isinbayeva – sure let’s show a picture of her – dressed in this years? How could you watch the beach volleyball without having a seizure?

Leg of what?

Imagine shopping. In 1908 marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at local corner drugstores in the US. Good luck with trying to buy some today. Everything else in the shops would be a nightmare. “Where can I buy a strop for my razor?” “Call these underpants? They don’t cover my legs.” What is a skinny latté? Sushi? Broccoli? Imagine the first time you went to a kebab shop. One look at that thing revolving behind the counter would give you nightmares for ever. If that’s lamb, how bloody big are the sheep these days?

Even when you thought you were right, you’d be wrong. You’d look at a map of Europe, see all the same little countries that were there in 1908, and think “well, at least world politics stayed stable while I was gone.”

The Taoiseach

So now imagine that you do it today, and wake in 2108.  Getting the one-piece tacky clothing will be fine, as long as Champion Sports is still in business, but I haven’t enough imagination to predict all the other changes, and I don’t think anyone else has either. There may be robots, we might all live in the ocean, or on the moon. Global warming may have dramatically changed the planet, or it might all have turned out to be crap.

There are one or two things you can be sure of, though. The life-expectancy will now be 147, so you’ll have to work to support yourself. What will you be qualified to do? Exactly. Welcome to your job in Spar.

There will be four thousand TV channels, all showing Premier League Soccer. The only programme you will recognize will be Coronation Street, but of course all of the characters will be different, apart from Ken Barlow.

Classical music radio stations will feature the works of Dylan, Led Zeppelin and, rather strangely, McFly.

The average height of a human grew by 8cm (almost 3 inches) in the last 100 years, so if that trend continues everyone in 2108 will be taller than you.

And as the number of Christians is declining and the number of Muslims and Hindus is rising, you will by then be a member of a minority religion, if someone hasn’t proven it all to be rubbish by then.

So there you will be in 2108 – a talentless, shortarse member of a religion no-one believes in.

A sort of 22nd Century Tom Cruise.

Dying to tell you what I think of you

A friend of mine told me last night in my local about a Death Notice that appeared in Tuesday’s Irish Times, so I looked it up on online this morning. It concerned a lady from Dun Laoghaire, and gave the standard details, naming her late husband and her children, giving funeral arrangements, and asking for donations to the R.N.L.I.

And then it said this:

“Those she did not talk to
please do not attend”

Exactly like that – in italics, on two lines, as if it were a quotation from a poem or something. I thought it might be a very, very obscure religious reference – something along the lines of  “I had no truck with thee while I lived, Satan, so keep thee far from me now”, but I’ve googled it, and come up with nothing.

So it can only be the ultimate “Up Yours”. She’s saying “I don’t want any of ye I couldn’t stand turning up for free tea and sandwiches – yiz all know well who I mean”.

If you don’t believe in ghosts, then saying someting like that in your obituary notice is as near as you can get to haunting people.

I didn’t know you were allowed do it, but it might really catch on – “Mary Smith, died Tuesday, funeral Thursday, Bessie Perkins from No 23 is a cow”.

And just think, we virtual people could all do it – we could flame other bloggers, from beyond the grave.

All in the Mind?

Sally who drinks in my local is a very forthright woman. The other night she asked “why are you wearing a red shirt”? At once I got all defensive. “Er, I bought it in Ibiza, and it only cost 3 euro,” I lied. Then she said this: “you must have got no affection when you were a child, and that’s why you wear clothes that get you attention now.”

And then I woke up.

And that’s the problem. If Sally (who’s a real person, and who would say something like that) had actually said it, I could have ignored it. But it was me saying it through her.

I can handle the part about my clothes. I wear jeans and T-shirts all the time, and probably wear clothes too young for me, so I can accept that the mind is processing some embarrassment I might have about that.

But do I feel that I was unloved as a child? I didn’t realise I did, but now I keep thinking about it.

Sweet dreams my arse.

Lost and Found

I was in my local bar last night (someone has to kick-start the economy). There were just three of us left, and conversation had dried up momentarily. I looked over at the coat rack.

“Isn’t it amazing,” I said. “There are only three of us here, yet there are about twenty coats hanging there. How do people manage to go home without their coats?”

Then I looked a little closer. “Actually,” I said, “the green one is mine. I’ve been looking for it at home for about six months.”