Middle Class Heroes

Despite the recent re-design, the Irish Independent’s layout leaves a lot to be desired, to say nothing of the content. Many of the articles are published without attribution, and others appear under the news sections when they are not news at all. One such article was this one, which appears under the National News section.

Here’s the first para:

THERE you are now lying on the beach in Spain or Turkey, and all you can think about is foreign ownership and how nice it would be to say to the Yammy Mammies at the school gate in September that you and Feeergus “have just bought that dahling property in Porto Bandius” and how it was “a steal”.

Turns out the rest of the article is about some house in county Kildare: an advertorial.

Nothing particularly interesting about that, but I was a bit surprised at the targeted readership of the advertorial. The reader is assumed to be knowing enough to be in on the joke (for want of a better phrase) about ‘Yammy Mammies’, middle-class ‘Feeerguses’ and the like, but not knowing enough to know that the purpose of the article is to stimulate the appetite for purchasing a house.

On a wider note, I have often wondered about how much the typical Irish middle-class resident of the low even-numbered Dublin suburbs -the one who gets lampooned in those Ross O’Carroll Kelly books- is in reality a product of the envious imagination of a far more insecure and acquisitively minded middle-class.

By saying this I’m not out to deny the existence of a fair few ponces and braying idiots, since I have met quite a few of them. Rather, I suggest that the common fixation with them comes from the fact that many members of the new middle class are quite conscious of the fact that their prosperity is altogether insufficient to buy themselves a house in Dublin 6.

Air Grievances

I have passed by a lot of articles this last few days on air travel in general, and Heathrow airport in particular.

Over the last number of months I appear to have developed a habit whereby I deliberately ignore many things that might interest me in greater detail, since attempts to understand the ins and outs of a given situation, to arrive at the essence of the phenomenon, end up undermined by the fact that the phenomenon in question is normally a product of mass media interest, and therefore somehow impenetrable, despite, or perhaps as a result of, the apparent abundance of information. I end up a bit vexed, and waiting for Eastenders to start, or for my next mealtime, so that I can lay my rotting brain to rest once more.

Yet, whilst I haven’t read any of the articles on air travel, or Heathrow, that have passed before my eyes, I feel like I have something to add (as should be pretty obvious by now).

Air travel is increasingly unbearable, because of the many minor vexations that assail you from leaving your home to arriving at your eventual destination, many of which are underpinned by your status as a potential bomber and murderer in the eyes of the security organisations running the airport.

Were it a choice between on the one hand strip searching and delousing, with a strict prohibition on any luggage whatsoever, and on the other the current situation with its excruciating absurdities, I would be tempted to plump for the former. At least with the former you know that it is completely absurd, and there is little point questioning it.

With the latter, assuming you are some sort of rational being, you end up asking why? questions to yourself, as though you have an inner 5 year old. Why do they only make some people take their shoes off? Why do they stop you from entering the gate with two pieces of luggage, but they have no problem with you putting one inside the other? Why didn’t they detain my mother-in-law, who was flagrantly violating the established rules by carrying a bottle of water and some perfume in her handbag?

At one point I started to wonder if the absurdity of it all was part of the security conditioning. I am told that, in years past, at Aldergrove Airport at the end of the long moving walkway there used to be a loudspeaker recording that warned you to take care because you were approaching the end of the walkway. The purpose of this was not your immediate safety, but for you to raise your head to look for the loudspeaker, so that the camera could get a good shot of your face.

It is possible, I suppose, that the bans on liquids are merely a way of cutting the security cost of tasting the contents of every bottle in every handbag, but is it beyond the realms of possibility that the point of being bombarded by all the authoritarian and nonsensical demands (you don’t really think that people can make bombs out of the contents of mineral water bottles, do you?) is partly because you are being watched -in case you react strangely?