Blogarrhea

I've been pretty irregular with my blog postings this year. I can but blame two serious medical conditions:

Blogarrhea: (n) Excessive and frequent evacuation of blogular faeces, usually indicating an abundance of free time or extreme boredom.

Blogstipation: (n) Difficult, incomplete, or infrequent evacuation of blogular faeces from the mind.

...apologies.

Amateur Dramatics

Firstly, a hearty thanks to Bosco Malarkey for the title of "Operation Cabaiste" in my last post (the post's previous title of "Operation Abhaile" just lacked a certain je ne sais quoi...or even a certain níl a fhios agam).

A few months ago, I tried to get in touch with a teacher who has been frankly the biggest educational influence in my life to date. Ms Cadogan is her name, and she taught me in fourth, fifth and sixth class, roughly between the years 1991 and 1993. I sent an email to the school inbox where she now works in Cabinteely, only to receive no reply. Ouch. Though to be fair, I hadn't spoken to her in about seventeen years, so she probably thought I was in trouble with the law, or wanted her to hide a gun for me or something.

But she was a great teacher, very fond of music and art, and strengthened my love of both. One particular example of Ms Cadogan's work stands out in my mind. It was an annual school play (the plot of which has been possibly mashed together with the various other school plays I did). The play was about a group of orphans and nuns putting on a production of The Mikado, when the bank comes along to close the orphanage due to lack of money. And in the middle of it all, an alien lands in the orphanage and somehow saves the day. So, kind of Annie-meets-Sister Act-meets-E.T, but with an all-male cast. Let's face it, there was definitely a slot in the market for such a production.

Weeks of happy preparation involved designing and painting backgrounds for the orphanage, cobbling together a spaceship for the alien (using the staple primary school materials of tin foil, cardboard and toilet roll holders) and rehearsing various songs for the musical-with-a-musical. And of course, there was the casting process. With understandable reluctance, several of the boys were cast as nuns. I was cast as an orphan with two lines (like a young Bobby DeNiro, the critics said). A kid called John, who had previously spent most of his life in Canada, was controversially cast as 'the alien'. Then there was my mate charlo who with canny foresight was cast as a banker. He now works for RBS.

Ms Cadogan was brilliant in managing the whole process. I still remember her gesturing wildly in the wings for us to put more 'feeling' in our lines. And dancing like a maniac when we forgot any. She generally kept her cool however, despite any obstacles. Of which there were many.

Firstly, being young boys, our attention span wasn't incredibly vast. This made learning lines rather difficult. I remember one of the lads, Simon, who during a live performance forgot his only line ("what are we supposed to do now?"). Another kid rescued him by uttering this line, prompting Simon to pipe up: "oh shit yeah, er...what are we supposed to do now". Cue maniacal dancing in the wings.

I also remember Ms Cadogan wanting to rehearse the song Anything Goes by Cole Porter for the play, before deciding on the The Mikado. However, she didn't have the lyrics to hand and didn't know where to find any back in those pre-internet days. I personally tried to save the day by mentioning that the song appears in the opening credits of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So Ms Cadogan went and rented out the movie, and indeed, the song does appear in the opening credits of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Albeit sung completely in Mandarin Chinese. As far as I know, the video shop didn't give her a refund. My bad.

I could go on for longer about the various obstacles the play encountered, but I will mention lastly, something which happened on the last night we performed. Ms Cadogan had an idea that we would come out at the end of the play, to our parents' proud applause, and hold up a letter each, spelling out 'MADE IN JAPAN' referring to The Mikado. Unfortunately, one of the kids (a borderline narcoleptic), apparently dozed off at the end, leaving one letter out. Hence our parents were treated to the cryptic message 'MADE IN A PAN', provoking a bemused crescendo of clapping.

Overall, the play was a success, and a great testament to Ms Cadogan's brilliance as a teacher. If you ever read this Ms Cadogan, I salute you.

CB

Operation Cabaiste

A relatively (very relatively) serious post to finish off the year now.

In the closing months of 2010, I felt this almost magnetic pull dragging me home to Dublin. I couldn't really explain the rationale behind this feeling, any more than I knew why I came to London in the first place. Most people thought that it was an insane idea, given all the crazy shit that's been kicking off in Ireland lately: a wallabie died of an overdose in a Dublin nightclub; a radio DJ unconsciously pleasured himself on a Ryanair flight. And then there was the bizarre matter of the Irish Government giving away free cheese to placate the masses, lactose-intolerant bedamned.

I didn't let the press coverage of Ireland's financial woes put me off. If I had believed everything I read, I would have expected to step off the plane to find Ireland reduced to a barren countryside of half-exposed thatched cottages, with whole families huddled together in rags and scrabbling for potatoes in the turf.

But then disaster struck on 22 November 2010. Whilst away on holiday, a friend was perusing the day's news on her iPhone and read out one headline in particular: "Ireland Officially Bankrupt."

Then I began to rethink things. And the move home was ultimately cancelled.

The financial situation couldn't be argued with: the papers couldn't really sensationalise the already sensational, namely €7.5b of spending cuts swelling to €15b, through a teeny tiny miscalculation by the Government. Who knows how that happened? Well, as long as there is polictics, there will be fiscal mischief. It's a sad fact.

But more than the economic situation, I realised that I had seriously rose-tinted Ireland. The Ireland of my mind was more associated with a time, rather than an actual place. It was the place I left as a fresh-faced 23-year old, when things like 'careers' were distant concepts that I didn't have to think about yet and the housing ladder was something I hadn't yet even pondered climbing.

I don't feel incredibly unpatriotic about reneging on my decision to move back. After all, I left Ireland in the Summer of 2004, during the good times. In fact, it was possibly because things were going so well that I left. Back in those days, it had become no longer good enough to own your own property, you had to also own an investment property. It was simply the done thing, darling. In my neighbourhood, people even started building houses literally in their own backgardens. The combination of non-stop property development programmes on television with Ireland's new found wealth was a deadly one. Everybody had become a speculative developer overnight.

And it wasn't just the property market; there were other ripples throughout the culture also. Breakfast baps were slowly replaced with breakfast paninis, humble coffees were slowly replaced with skinny decaf mochas with wings. If you walked into any restaurant in post-nineties Ireland, alien foods such as sun ripened tomatoes and fennel suddenly had crept onto the menu. And soy milk- where the feck did that come from? And don't get me started on the sudden nationwide necessity for bottled water.

I'm not saying we should be ignorant of other cultures and other foods, but I can't remember a point when we unanimously decided 'hey, this normal bread's getting a bit boring...I think we should jazz it up a bit. What do they eat in Italy? Focaccia? Right, bring it on so.'

And so I came to realise that the constant discussions of mortgage rates and Keeping Up With The Joneses, coupled with my own hurtle towards adulthood, may have been a contributing factor in driving me abroad. I incidentally now call London Never-never land, for it is a place where I never seem to grow up. And to quote Thomas Wolfe, it sadly seems that I can't go home again. Not for a while, anyway.

But that is not to say I have turned my back on Ireland. On the contrary: since the financial crisis worsened, I have kept a constant eye on Irish affairs, where before I might have only delved in periodically. I feel confident that the country will survive the current mess; we have historically proved ourselves to be one of the most resilient peoples in the world. And I think it's safe to say that we have all become more conscious of the factors driving the national economy than we were about ten years ago with a pile of cash that we didn't know how to spend. For example, a mate of mine remarked that he recently saw a junkie on Henry Street banging on about the International Monetary Fund and its various shortcomings. Hey, power to the people.

So I guess there's nothing else to say except that what doesn't financially kill you, will hopefully make you financially stronger. As a great Irishman once said about the 1916 Rising, "all changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born." Let's just hope Mr Yeats' words can apply to the recession too.

A Yule Blog

Christmas. A time for giving, a time for getting. A time for forgiving and for forgetting. A time for Cliff Richard to once again release a saccharine-infused addition to his canon of cheesey listening crapsodies, preferably with a childrens choir warbling annoyingly in the background.

It's also a time for buying each other presents, all due to the valuable lesson (taught us by an impartial retail industry) that plain emotions will no longer cut the mustard when it comes to expressing how we actually feel about each other. After all, nothing says I love more than an iPhone. With built-in 'love' application.

Now bear with me a moment as I clamber upon my festive soap box.

People just seem to have forgotten the true meaning of Christmas. For all my Catholic...er...ness, I'll admit that I'm not completely clear on the original story, but I think it had something to do with Jesus being visited by three wise ghosts: the ghost of Christmas past, present and future. One of the ghosts then turns out to be the Archangel Clarence, who ultimately stops James Stewart from committing suicide. Meanwhile Jesus sees the error of his ways, hitches a ride with John Candy's jazz band all the way to Nazareth and defends Richard Attenborough in a court case, proving that Dickie is in fact the real Santa Claus. Or something like that.

Christmas is essentially about taking a breather at the end of the year, taking of stock of the past twelve months and steeling yourself for those ahead. It is also, more importantly, about obligatorily spending time with your family. And I mean real, actual time, not false imitations like skypery or facebookism.

And yes, this family-time does mean lots of pointless presents and ill fitting jumpers and unwanted socks and so forth. But my point is that presents should remain secondary to the central festive theme of annual togetherness and friendly bickering, not the driving factor.

True, I will inevitably once again buy my dad a book he's forgotten he's read and he'll add it to the dusty pile of last years such books, along with the mobile phone we bought him about two years ago in the vain hope of dragging him into the 21st century (alas for him, technology peaked at smoke signals and carrier pigeons). And to think, he used to be an engineer.

And yes, I will tease my nieces and nephew with some sort of 'moral gift' such as a goat to feed a family of ten in Bangladesh, before giving them some combination of over-sugared confectionery and short-term-novelty toy. Like a chocolate-chip chocolate bar or a Hannah Montana nerfgun.

But let us all remember that Christmas, regardless of the presents that are bandied around, is about family and togetherness. And watching Grandpa Des getting mullered on sherry and soiling himself in the corner. And shelling about a thousand brussel sprouts that will never get eaten. And watching about ten minutes of The Great Escape before switching channels to something with better special effects.

These are the things to remember. So on that note, sit back, throw another carol singer on the fire, and pour yourself a nice glass of mulled vodka. Christmas is here, so let's enjoy it. Together.

Because let's face it- January is shit.