A Nursery Of Idleness and Insolence
The new Orange Order hero, below.
Few of the readers here will know what I’m talking about, but does anyone else think he looks like a grown-up version of Ginger who used to appear on the DOE’s Road Safety Calendar? I have searched on line in vain for an image.
Now Irish women vomit at bus stops like good English girls, teenagers booze in packs, and alcohol-related violence has rocketed. Drunken Irish football fans even shout in mockney accents picked up from English TV, which carry a certain chav chic.
What the Irish have forgotten is that sobriety is part of their heritage. The 19th-century temperance movement had a nationalist undercurrent. Its slogan, “Ireland sober is Ireland free”, was so successful that even now the country has the highest proportion of teetotallers in Europe.
But that is changing. Ireland is now free, rich, drunk and Anglicised: English shops dominate the high street; that oxymoron, English celebrity culture, is everywhere; British tabloids have taken over; English football is the new religion; and Tesco has “pacified” the country way beyond Gladstone’s wildest dreams.
Personally, I don’t recall a time when Irish women didn’t vomit at bus stops and teenagers didn’t booze in packs. However, what is this thing about shouting in ‘mockney’ accents? Have people any experience of this?
I used to go into a pub in England to watch football on Norwegian satellite TV. (Not that I was a huge football fan: I was in England at the time) There was one big fat guy who would bellow ‘Savoooo!!’ in a mockney accent every time a footballer fluffed a shot, or mis-hit a pass. ‘Savoooo’ referred to Savo Milosevic, an ungainly Aston Villa signing from the salad days of big foreign signings. I don’t know why I am telling this story.
I was thinking of a new TV programme.
My working title is ‘Cancer Idol’. Basically you line up 5 cancer sufferers in need of decent treatment before a panel of intmidating experts, and they have to demonstrate to the panel how deserving they are of the treatment, by singing a song, or dancing a rumba, or giving a sales pitch – doesn’t really matter. The panel passes comment, and the public votes. Of course, 1% of the call costs will go to charity.
Now I know that there was a hoax about a kidney transplant reality TV show some time back, and the public may be a bit reticent about the fact of normal people being forced to humiliate themselves for decent cancer treatment, so I was thinking: Celebrity Cancer Idol anyone?
These stories of wild cocaine nights hold an additional appeal for me now that my life of wild nights out -which had been winding down for the last eight years or so- has now been extinguished for good. Know what I spent my weekend doing? Getting pissed on, and not in the context of a wild party. Rather, in the context of changing nappies.
Have you ever seen someone lie flat on their back atop a horizontal surface and slash effortlessly into a sock drawer a foot and a half away? In Going Sane, Adam Phillips likens the effect of the arrival of a baby in a home to that of a bomb going off. I must disagree. It’s more like a fire extinguisher going off.
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