If Forbes magazine is to be believed, Ireland is the perfect country for blogging. Its people are naturally loquacious and in a time of great socio-economic change, they were the ideal nation to narrate their stories in a clash of wit upon wit, unfettered by the threat of invitation to take it outside. It would also, although Forbes did not make this point, give them something to do of a Friday night if the plans to reduce the drink drive limit come to fruition.
If Forbes magazine is to be further believed, Irish blogging is dead. They cite an article from the Irish Sunday Times as evidence. Can there really be any rebuttal to such a compelling line of reasoning?
To be honest, I’ve don’t really understand what position blogging is supposed to hold in the world. The impression I garner from the print media is that bloggers should be an online equivalent of them; blogs should break news, give analysis and opinion as well as producing high quality content on a regular (preferably daily) basis. This is clearly nonsense. The day I start delivering content on a daily basis is the day I have been locked in a room with only word processing software for company.
Also, unless a person is directly involved in an event, they are not going to be able to get a story online more quickly than a news organisation. At best, they will have a few hours head start. Once this head start is lost, they will be competing against specialist analysts who are able to pull their factual information from the wire agencies rather than finding it out themselves. No blogger is going to be able to consistently provide a breaking news service to rival the networks and yet, this is what the print media seems to think they should be doing.
Another complaint levelled at bloggers is their failure to hold politicians to account. Forgive me for being sensible about this, but surely that’s the job of the free press. I know that the British liberation forces spent many, many years suppressing the Irish media so there isn’t quite the print tradition there is in other countries, but it’s been the best part of a century since then. You can’t tell me nobody has managed to get a grip on the idea that they can print what they want to, yet.
Perhaps the print media feel that bloggers have more freedom than they do. After all, a blogger can’t be sacked if the person who owns their blog plays golf with the person they’ve just written an exposé on. A blogger can, if they wish to, retain a degree of anonymity or, if they are particularly tech savvy, create almost total anonymity.
However. A blogger is also denied the protection of a publisher. Anything they write, they are responsible for in the way that print journalist is not.
Let’s say I am a journalist. I drink too much and my wife has left me. When we met she was the greatest broad on the block but she couldn’t take my obsession with Big PJ O’MacDonagh. I knew he had something mean going down in those Waterford back alleys but I needed to find the proof. If I spent enough time in those dark underbellies, I’d find it for sure, but all she wanted was a trip to Ikea Dublin and eventually, she found a man who’d take her there and assemble her flat pack furniture when she got back.
So there’s me, in the pub, with a cigarillo. There’s Big PJ O’MacDonagh in the corner drinking a Cosmopolitan. Sean Og Cumhail is next to him with a Long Island Iced Tea. Both men have a white wine spritzer chaser. I know there’s something going on. I remember what went down in Wexford. Some nights I still wake up screaming with the smell of courgettes in my nostrils.
So, I move closer until I can overhear their conversation perfectly and when I get home, I immediately write down all the nefarious schemes they are planning. I don’t have any proof but my editor publishes it anyway. The following morning, the paper is sued.
By contrast, if our hero were a blogger who wrote something without any proof and published it on the interwebs, they would be the person being sued. It is the publisher who is held responsible for what is printed, not the writer. Is it any wonder then, that bloggers are unwilling to put their necks on the line? Even if they did, what would it be for? A temporary surge in blog traffic?
The other reason there are no investigative bloggers around here is because the Irish have what He Who Knows Everything refers to as a “peasant mentality”. When they come across somebody doing something a bit shady or underhand, they do not immediately away to the Justice mobile and bust the whole thing wide open, they try to work out how they can get in on the act.
Heaven alone knows how many euro are drained from the social welfare network each year by people who live together but pretend not to because single mothers get more welfare than married ones. The amount of people I’ve heard openly boasting about this kind of thing is unreal and that’s just people. Add in all the schemes the Travellers get up to and it must equate to millions. Not so long ago I read a story in the local rag about a traveller family who were caught trying to get their child christened a week after they’d had him christened in a different parish. The only reason they were caught is because the priest performing the service was filling in for the regular priest and just happened to have performed the first service from the week before and recognised them. This is why christening certificates tend not to be accepted as proof of identity.
So, what if blogs are not intended to challenge the status of the traditional print media? What if they are merely a pleasant diversion from whatever important job is awaiting your attention? Well the canny print media has already thought of this one. There is no need for blogs like that because newspapers already have amusing comment sections and in any case, goes the argument, blogs are not as well written, nor as funny as something which somebody gets paid for writing.
There, the print media may have a point. Blogs are not as well written as the print media tends to be. I’m incredibly good looking and clever but I make a heck of a lot of typos, malapropisms and factual inaccuracies. Yes, most of it is to do with the dyslexia but some of it is down to not having a sub-editor who is not me. Unless you are Giles Coren, you need a sub-editor.
It seems to be generally considered that the top Irish humour blog is Twenty Major’s. He has won best Irish blog for two years running and would probably have one it again this year had he not kindly put himself out of the running (or so Wikipedia tells me). He already has one published novel based upon his blog and a second is forthcoming. You would, in that case, expect the blog to be quite good.
It is… sort of. Were I to describe it I would probably go for “nothing particularly wrong with it”. I can appreciate why people like it but I’ve never read anything on there which is funnier than a column written by Charlie Brooker or Tanya Gold. It’s certainly not going to rival some of the genius available around the interwebs (Awkward Family Photo, anybody?). Yet, this is held up as the best blog Ireland has to offer.
To claim that Irish blogging is dead is the kind of vague, badly researched statement that remind us the print media needs just about anything to fill the pages. Irish blogging isn’t dead, but it’s not exactly world class either.
*If You Have Enjoyed This Blog Post, We At A Trivial Blog For Serious People Would Like To Take This Opportunity To Remind You That Nominations For The Irish Blog Awards Are Open Until The 5th of Feb. Should You Know Of Any Irish Blogs or Blogs Based In Ireland You Think Deserve A Nomination, The URL Of The Blog Is www.atrivialblogforseriouspeople.blogspot.com And The Contact Email Is atrivialblog@gmail.com We Thank You For Your Attention On This Matter And Promise Not To Mention It Again. Until Next Year.*
Irish Blog Award Nominations
Fancy Nominating an Irish Blog?
I have just noticed that the nominations are now open over at http://awards.ie/blogawards/nominations/ to nominate the best Irish Blogs of 2010. Should you know of any, ahem, Irish blogs which you think are deserving of a nomination to win massive kudos, the oppurtunity of a trip to Galway and possibly a KitKat, do have a scroll and fill out your nomination in the appropriate area/s.
If you would also like to point people on your own blogs in this direction so they can see how great somebody might be and how deserving of kudos/Galway/Kitkats then, y'know, feel free.
Carry On.
If you would also like to point people on your own blogs in this direction so they can see how great somebody might be and how deserving of kudos/Galway/Kitkats then, y'know, feel free.
Carry On.
A Book, By Theo
It was the ever lovely Sarah who commented that I should write a book. I approve of this suggestion. If there is anything this world could use more of, it is drivel written by me. If it can be delivered in book form for which people are forced to part with currency to acquire, so much the better.
As it happens, like every blogger on the interweb, I harbour secret dreams of being an author. I would like nothing better than to receive quarterly royalty checks and get paid to visit bookshops. I yearn for the days when I can inform people where I get my ideas from and tell them whether or not I base my characters upon real people.
For me though, this remains something of a vague notion which I may or may not do something about some day. Although I write, it is very clear to me that I am not, nor will ever be, a Writer. I simply don’t care enough about it and take rejection with a shrug rather than crumpling to the floor and weeping over my failed MS before opining that the person who did this to me doesn’t know anything about anything and that they’ll be sorry when I win the Nobel prize for literature, as I obviously will, because I’m that great.
To be a Writer is to fail to understand that a commercial fiction agent is never going to represent your epic 18 part science fiction saga even though you’ve managed to use the letter X 432 times in the first chapter alone. To be a Writer you need to have a bag full of excuses and the certainty that anybody who doesn’t like your book must be blind, stupid and a much worse writer than you are. I see a routine rejection letter for what it is, not as a personal attack against my person.
It is no surprise then, that I and Harper Collins’ Authonomy Website do not Get Along.
If you’ve not heard of it, the idea of Authonomy is that writers can upload an amount of their MS onto the site and other users can review and suggest ways to improve it. If a person likes your MS enough, they can place it upon their “bookshelf” which raises its ranking. Whichever book has the highest ranking at the end of the month gets a review by an editor from HC.
In theory, this is a sound idea. Peer review can be the most effective way to improve what you do. Unfortunately, the Authonomy site is basically a popularity contest and the book which makes the top of the pile is not the best or even the most interesting, it is whichever one has an author with a lot of time on their hands.
You see, rather than just looking around the site and seeking out the books which interest them, the vast majority of users do trade reads, usually initiated by a random message asking you to read their novel first. Anybody who is attempting to climb the greasy pole of the rankings chart will place and remove dozens of books to and from their personal bookshelf in a single day in the hope of other users returning the favour.
Of course, the other trouble with this system is that it does not help users to become better writers; all it manages to do is drown them in obligation. How on earth can you give an honest review of somebody’s MS when you are desperate for them to have a look at your own? Or point out flaws when they’ve just given you a glowing appraisal? You can’t, so the result is a website full of reviews suggesting everything is marvellous. In what way does that help anybody?
The other trouble is that if you sit down and work out how many hours you need to spend courting other users and worked out how much you could earn if you worked that time, you’d have enough money to pay for several editor’s appraisals.
When I uploaded a rather ancient MS I have mouldering on my hard disk, it was more in the curiosity of what feedback I would receive because, in all honesty, I have no idea if it is any good or not, let alone publishable (although given the timeframe between my writing it and now, I would say no. I’ve improved a lot since then). The first feedback I received was from somebody who absolutely loved it and thought it was wonderful and who thought, on the basis of what they’d read, that I would be really interested in their novel. What they’d read only seemed to be the synopsis, but never mind, eh?
My second review came from somebody whose work I’d given the once over. They’d very kindly sent me a note asking if I would like to have a look at their book, so I did.
At first, I was a little taken aback. The synopsis was a little jerky and didn’t make a great deal of sense, it began with an author’s introduction containing an anecdote about shooting the wife of the local Labour MP which was meant to be funny but which I thought wasn’t (maybe it’s something to do with all the masked gunmen in my area), and the entire first chapter was written in a vague play script form which I found almost entirely unreadable.
Yet, I persevered. As recommended by the synopsis, I picked out a few chapters to read at random (this being structured as standalone stories) and continued until I had formed my opinion.
To begin with, I was careful to let the user know that anything I said would be of limited use to them as I was not the intended audience for this book (it was aimed at children and I don’t have any) and it was not the sort of book I would be interested in reading. This was my first mistake.
I then compounded this error by suggesting their synopsis could do with some polishing and opining that the opening anecdote fell a little flat. I suggested that they might think of moving the play script chapter to further on in the book as it gave people a false impression of what the book was like and may be putting them off from reading further. I went on to say I felt it was a little contrived and unoriginal in places (the final chapter sees the child hero thwart a terrorist hijacking on an aeroplane by tying the shoelaces of the terrorists together – his mum manages to sleep through the entire drama) and recommended that they have a little more fun with it.
The response was astonishing. I could hardly have done worse if I’d drowned their puppy and spat upon their mother’s grave. The rebuttal boiled down to “Loads of other people say it’s great and find all the bits you’ve cited really funny”. An hour later, they left me a second message to ask me why I’d bothered to read so much of it if I had hated it so much. An hour after that, a third, from which I got the impression they believed I’d taken offence from their original review request because it included the line “I don’t mind that you’re Welsh” and that was the reason for my criticisms. They defended themselves this racist aside by mentioning Anne Robinson. Anne Robinson? Shakespeare made Welsh jokes for heavens sake.
To this, I wrote an eloquent and polite response in which I tried to be encouraging and reiterated that it was only my opinion. Unfortunately, because I wrote it in Word and cut and pasted it across in a hurry, I failed to notice I only managed to post half of my message back to them. Even more unfortunately, this included the half which stressed that, as I mentioned clearly on my profile, I did not give reviews in the expectation that they would be returned and urged them not to trouble themselves with it if they felt disinclined to.
The following day, I realised my cut-and-paste error when I encountered their review of my MS. It was told me that they had really wanted to like my MS(!) but that my style was repetitive and my protagonist boring. They also said they could make no sense of my first line. I can only assume they thought this was going to really hurt but unfortunately, I’m not about to take offense from somebody on the interweb I’ve just managed to upset. That, and I didn’t have any confidence they’d read past the third paragraph.
So, I tried again. I thanked them for their review, said I was sorry they hadn’t liked it and promised to bear their points in mind when I came to do my revisions. I also said I had noticed they had improved their synopsis and agreed it was clearer now.
Yet, that didn’t seem to be the end of it. I was left with the impression that they really wanted me to approve of the changes they’d made and declare that actually, I really liked their book. Why they would be so desperate for my appreciation I have no idea, but there you go.
Clearly, when it comes to seeking opinion on creative work, I am better prepared to handle it than a lot of people. I’ve been to Art School. I’m used to sitting in a room full of people who are discussing what I’ve done wrong and it frustrates me not to have access to a group of people who can honestly discuss and give constructive feedback to me on something like creative writing.
Anyway. While my experience on Authonomy was a brief and perplexing one, it would certainly be remiss of me to suggest that everybody on the site is a jerk. They aren’t. Even my antagonised chum stated that they felt bad to being mean to me when I was so nice and kept trying to help them. They didn’t actually apologise nor have a proper look at my MS, but never mind.
Authonomy sounds a good idea but, in all honesty, anybody who wants to be an author, rather than a Writer, would do far better to spend their time on their MS, synopsis and covering letter. An agent will get you published, Authonomy won’t.
As it happens, like every blogger on the interweb, I harbour secret dreams of being an author. I would like nothing better than to receive quarterly royalty checks and get paid to visit bookshops. I yearn for the days when I can inform people where I get my ideas from and tell them whether or not I base my characters upon real people.
For me though, this remains something of a vague notion which I may or may not do something about some day. Although I write, it is very clear to me that I am not, nor will ever be, a Writer. I simply don’t care enough about it and take rejection with a shrug rather than crumpling to the floor and weeping over my failed MS before opining that the person who did this to me doesn’t know anything about anything and that they’ll be sorry when I win the Nobel prize for literature, as I obviously will, because I’m that great.
To be a Writer is to fail to understand that a commercial fiction agent is never going to represent your epic 18 part science fiction saga even though you’ve managed to use the letter X 432 times in the first chapter alone. To be a Writer you need to have a bag full of excuses and the certainty that anybody who doesn’t like your book must be blind, stupid and a much worse writer than you are. I see a routine rejection letter for what it is, not as a personal attack against my person.
It is no surprise then, that I and Harper Collins’ Authonomy Website do not Get Along.
If you’ve not heard of it, the idea of Authonomy is that writers can upload an amount of their MS onto the site and other users can review and suggest ways to improve it. If a person likes your MS enough, they can place it upon their “bookshelf” which raises its ranking. Whichever book has the highest ranking at the end of the month gets a review by an editor from HC.
In theory, this is a sound idea. Peer review can be the most effective way to improve what you do. Unfortunately, the Authonomy site is basically a popularity contest and the book which makes the top of the pile is not the best or even the most interesting, it is whichever one has an author with a lot of time on their hands.
You see, rather than just looking around the site and seeking out the books which interest them, the vast majority of users do trade reads, usually initiated by a random message asking you to read their novel first. Anybody who is attempting to climb the greasy pole of the rankings chart will place and remove dozens of books to and from their personal bookshelf in a single day in the hope of other users returning the favour.
Of course, the other trouble with this system is that it does not help users to become better writers; all it manages to do is drown them in obligation. How on earth can you give an honest review of somebody’s MS when you are desperate for them to have a look at your own? Or point out flaws when they’ve just given you a glowing appraisal? You can’t, so the result is a website full of reviews suggesting everything is marvellous. In what way does that help anybody?
The other trouble is that if you sit down and work out how many hours you need to spend courting other users and worked out how much you could earn if you worked that time, you’d have enough money to pay for several editor’s appraisals.
When I uploaded a rather ancient MS I have mouldering on my hard disk, it was more in the curiosity of what feedback I would receive because, in all honesty, I have no idea if it is any good or not, let alone publishable (although given the timeframe between my writing it and now, I would say no. I’ve improved a lot since then). The first feedback I received was from somebody who absolutely loved it and thought it was wonderful and who thought, on the basis of what they’d read, that I would be really interested in their novel. What they’d read only seemed to be the synopsis, but never mind, eh?
My second review came from somebody whose work I’d given the once over. They’d very kindly sent me a note asking if I would like to have a look at their book, so I did.
At first, I was a little taken aback. The synopsis was a little jerky and didn’t make a great deal of sense, it began with an author’s introduction containing an anecdote about shooting the wife of the local Labour MP which was meant to be funny but which I thought wasn’t (maybe it’s something to do with all the masked gunmen in my area), and the entire first chapter was written in a vague play script form which I found almost entirely unreadable.
Yet, I persevered. As recommended by the synopsis, I picked out a few chapters to read at random (this being structured as standalone stories) and continued until I had formed my opinion.
To begin with, I was careful to let the user know that anything I said would be of limited use to them as I was not the intended audience for this book (it was aimed at children and I don’t have any) and it was not the sort of book I would be interested in reading. This was my first mistake.
I then compounded this error by suggesting their synopsis could do with some polishing and opining that the opening anecdote fell a little flat. I suggested that they might think of moving the play script chapter to further on in the book as it gave people a false impression of what the book was like and may be putting them off from reading further. I went on to say I felt it was a little contrived and unoriginal in places (the final chapter sees the child hero thwart a terrorist hijacking on an aeroplane by tying the shoelaces of the terrorists together – his mum manages to sleep through the entire drama) and recommended that they have a little more fun with it.
The response was astonishing. I could hardly have done worse if I’d drowned their puppy and spat upon their mother’s grave. The rebuttal boiled down to “Loads of other people say it’s great and find all the bits you’ve cited really funny”. An hour later, they left me a second message to ask me why I’d bothered to read so much of it if I had hated it so much. An hour after that, a third, from which I got the impression they believed I’d taken offence from their original review request because it included the line “I don’t mind that you’re Welsh” and that was the reason for my criticisms. They defended themselves this racist aside by mentioning Anne Robinson. Anne Robinson? Shakespeare made Welsh jokes for heavens sake.
To this, I wrote an eloquent and polite response in which I tried to be encouraging and reiterated that it was only my opinion. Unfortunately, because I wrote it in Word and cut and pasted it across in a hurry, I failed to notice I only managed to post half of my message back to them. Even more unfortunately, this included the half which stressed that, as I mentioned clearly on my profile, I did not give reviews in the expectation that they would be returned and urged them not to trouble themselves with it if they felt disinclined to.
The following day, I realised my cut-and-paste error when I encountered their review of my MS. It was told me that they had really wanted to like my MS(!) but that my style was repetitive and my protagonist boring. They also said they could make no sense of my first line. I can only assume they thought this was going to really hurt but unfortunately, I’m not about to take offense from somebody on the interweb I’ve just managed to upset. That, and I didn’t have any confidence they’d read past the third paragraph.
So, I tried again. I thanked them for their review, said I was sorry they hadn’t liked it and promised to bear their points in mind when I came to do my revisions. I also said I had noticed they had improved their synopsis and agreed it was clearer now.
Yet, that didn’t seem to be the end of it. I was left with the impression that they really wanted me to approve of the changes they’d made and declare that actually, I really liked their book. Why they would be so desperate for my appreciation I have no idea, but there you go.
Clearly, when it comes to seeking opinion on creative work, I am better prepared to handle it than a lot of people. I’ve been to Art School. I’m used to sitting in a room full of people who are discussing what I’ve done wrong and it frustrates me not to have access to a group of people who can honestly discuss and give constructive feedback to me on something like creative writing.
Anyway. While my experience on Authonomy was a brief and perplexing one, it would certainly be remiss of me to suggest that everybody on the site is a jerk. They aren’t. Even my antagonised chum stated that they felt bad to being mean to me when I was so nice and kept trying to help them. They didn’t actually apologise nor have a proper look at my MS, but never mind.
Authonomy sounds a good idea but, in all honesty, anybody who wants to be an author, rather than a Writer, would do far better to spend their time on their MS, synopsis and covering letter. An agent will get you published, Authonomy won’t.
Ice, Ice Baby
As a Brit, I enjoy talking about the weather. It’s what we do. We frown at the sky. We grumble and compare the weather of today to the weather of our youths. We complain about its every aspect. We prophesise worse times to come in the coming days before muttering “Ah well, musn’t grumble” and continuing with our day.
The Irish are also keen on talking about the weather. They prefer to take a more direct approach with no chance of disagreement and state what the weather is doing rather than the more disagreeable British style.
Once you have greeted somebody, the usual line of conversation is to comment on the current climate conditions, state whether it is better or worse than during the previous days, remember a time many years before when it was just like this but something happened to somebody’s livestock as a result of it (which may or may not have happened this time around), state what the forecast is for the coming days and state either relief or concern at that prospect.
At the moment it is very cold. Freakishly cold. In some parts of Ireland it has been dropping to -12C at night. Even here in the Sunny South East it was getting down to -5C. In the 6 and a half years I’ve lived here, I’ve had to defrost the car maybe half a dozen times. In the last fortnight, it’s needed doing every day.
This type of weather is really unusual for here. It hardly ever gets below zero but at the moment, the ground is frozen so even when there is a bit of respite, the thawing frost refreezes and we’re back where we started. This causes something of a problem with the roads.
The Irish are not good drivers. They don’t need to be. Until recently, anybody who was on their second provisional license did not require a qualified driver in the car with them, which rather destroyed the need for people to sit a test at all. Some years ago, the waiting lists for new drivers to sit the test was so long they arbitrarily awarded licences to the people who had been on the list for the longest times. The man who won the Wexford Rally in September is currently one year into a five year ban for causing death by dangerous driving. He has no apparent problems obtaining a racing licence nor any apparent twinges of conscience; he competed in a race mere weeks after managing to drive his 911 into a wall, killing his wife and injuring his mate, but remaining unscathed himself. The Irish Independent referred to him as a “local hero” in their write up of his racing victory.
It is with some trepidation then, that I have been examining the road surfaces. It is gut wrenching enough at times driving over here, so you can appreciate I was not looking forward to driving on ice.
Happily, I am just about old enough to have sat the driving theory test when applying for my own licence and because I am extraordinarily good looking and clever, scored a hundred percent – an achievement which is rarer than I would have expected it to be. It is because of this that I know how to drive on ice, even if I have never done it before. So, when I turned left at the end of the road and found the car was unable to gain enough traction to get up the hill, I did not immediately panic and drive into a hedge as Mammy would have done but instead calmly slipped it into fourth and smugly made my way the two miles up to the main road where driving was better.
Apart from that first worrying five minutes, it was really rather nice. I’ve never managed to drive at anything less than 59mph on the main road without getting overtaken with much gesticulating but on that day, everybody was driving at 50mph. It was great. I’d forgotten how relaxing driving without somebody nudging your rear bumper and flashing manically is.
That was on the first day of the cold snap. After that, it got much worse. He Who Knows Everything and I were driving behind a bus. HWKE braked gently to be greeted with a terrible screeching noise and the worrying prospect of explaining to his wife why there was a wall shaped dent in the front bonnet of her car. As HWKE was required to do an Advanced Driving Course many years ago, he was able to keep control of the car and disaster was averted but it was still a perturbing experience and not one I am keen to repeat.
Much of the problem is caused by the fact that the councils don’t appear to be gritting the roads with the amount of vigilance the conditions would suggest they need to be doing; if at all.
This cold weather has not come out of the blue. It was predicted well in advance and, for once, all of the forecasts have been accurate about the harshness of it. If we had all woken up one morning to a blizzard, then I could appreciate why the councils have been so lax with their gritting. As it is, all they can do is claim they have had a lorry on it every single day but won’t be any more because they’ve run out of salt. If the N25 has been salted every single day since this weather started, I’m a custard filled pudding.
The simply hideous accident in Gorey should have been a wakeup call. It hasn’t been. I know it has been Christmas and I know these are unusual circumstances, but the councils have had plenty of warning and they’ve just crossed over into a shiny new financial year. Get the council check books out and sort it. Please.
This cold weather is set to continue for another week at least and it’s even beginning to cause me some problems. You see, I live in a field. To get to the main road from my field, one has to drive two miles on roads covered in snow and ice which haven’t been gritted at all. I’ve got my fingers crossed a thaw happens before I run out of tea.
Hope all your new years are going well and you are slightly less stranded than I am.
The Irish are also keen on talking about the weather. They prefer to take a more direct approach with no chance of disagreement and state what the weather is doing rather than the more disagreeable British style.
Once you have greeted somebody, the usual line of conversation is to comment on the current climate conditions, state whether it is better or worse than during the previous days, remember a time many years before when it was just like this but something happened to somebody’s livestock as a result of it (which may or may not have happened this time around), state what the forecast is for the coming days and state either relief or concern at that prospect.
At the moment it is very cold. Freakishly cold. In some parts of Ireland it has been dropping to -12C at night. Even here in the Sunny South East it was getting down to -5C. In the 6 and a half years I’ve lived here, I’ve had to defrost the car maybe half a dozen times. In the last fortnight, it’s needed doing every day.
This type of weather is really unusual for here. It hardly ever gets below zero but at the moment, the ground is frozen so even when there is a bit of respite, the thawing frost refreezes and we’re back where we started. This causes something of a problem with the roads.
The Irish are not good drivers. They don’t need to be. Until recently, anybody who was on their second provisional license did not require a qualified driver in the car with them, which rather destroyed the need for people to sit a test at all. Some years ago, the waiting lists for new drivers to sit the test was so long they arbitrarily awarded licences to the people who had been on the list for the longest times. The man who won the Wexford Rally in September is currently one year into a five year ban for causing death by dangerous driving. He has no apparent problems obtaining a racing licence nor any apparent twinges of conscience; he competed in a race mere weeks after managing to drive his 911 into a wall, killing his wife and injuring his mate, but remaining unscathed himself. The Irish Independent referred to him as a “local hero” in their write up of his racing victory.
It is with some trepidation then, that I have been examining the road surfaces. It is gut wrenching enough at times driving over here, so you can appreciate I was not looking forward to driving on ice.
Happily, I am just about old enough to have sat the driving theory test when applying for my own licence and because I am extraordinarily good looking and clever, scored a hundred percent – an achievement which is rarer than I would have expected it to be. It is because of this that I know how to drive on ice, even if I have never done it before. So, when I turned left at the end of the road and found the car was unable to gain enough traction to get up the hill, I did not immediately panic and drive into a hedge as Mammy would have done but instead calmly slipped it into fourth and smugly made my way the two miles up to the main road where driving was better.
Apart from that first worrying five minutes, it was really rather nice. I’ve never managed to drive at anything less than 59mph on the main road without getting overtaken with much gesticulating but on that day, everybody was driving at 50mph. It was great. I’d forgotten how relaxing driving without somebody nudging your rear bumper and flashing manically is.
That was on the first day of the cold snap. After that, it got much worse. He Who Knows Everything and I were driving behind a bus. HWKE braked gently to be greeted with a terrible screeching noise and the worrying prospect of explaining to his wife why there was a wall shaped dent in the front bonnet of her car. As HWKE was required to do an Advanced Driving Course many years ago, he was able to keep control of the car and disaster was averted but it was still a perturbing experience and not one I am keen to repeat.
Much of the problem is caused by the fact that the councils don’t appear to be gritting the roads with the amount of vigilance the conditions would suggest they need to be doing; if at all.
This cold weather has not come out of the blue. It was predicted well in advance and, for once, all of the forecasts have been accurate about the harshness of it. If we had all woken up one morning to a blizzard, then I could appreciate why the councils have been so lax with their gritting. As it is, all they can do is claim they have had a lorry on it every single day but won’t be any more because they’ve run out of salt. If the N25 has been salted every single day since this weather started, I’m a custard filled pudding.
The simply hideous accident in Gorey should have been a wakeup call. It hasn’t been. I know it has been Christmas and I know these are unusual circumstances, but the councils have had plenty of warning and they’ve just crossed over into a shiny new financial year. Get the council check books out and sort it. Please.
This cold weather is set to continue for another week at least and it’s even beginning to cause me some problems. You see, I live in a field. To get to the main road from my field, one has to drive two miles on roads covered in snow and ice which haven’t been gritted at all. I’ve got my fingers crossed a thaw happens before I run out of tea.
Hope all your new years are going well and you are slightly less stranded than I am.
Dear Father Christmas
Dear Father Christmas,
Thankyou very much for all the wonderful gifts you brought me last year. I was particularly delighted to step on the scales in January to find I weighed the same as before I began inhaling festive chocolate. If you could repeat that trick for me this year, I would be most grateful.
I understand that I’m a little late with my letter to you this year. My tardiness, however, will not excuse an absence of glittery gifts beneath my Christmas tree. You are Father Christmas and Father Christmas is magic so none of your excuses about how the elves couldn’t make it in time, ok?
Once again I have been very good this year. I have reached things from high shelves for old people in the supermarket, I did my best to convert the Jehovah’s witnesses and I have only killed one squirrel.
When I have found it difficult to be nice, I have endeavoured to remove myself from the situation rather than tell people what I think. If this means not answering the telephone on a Sunday then so be it. In an extra effort to be nice, I even wrote a thank you letter to Cos when she sent me a necklace for my birthday. She is holding my Christmas present to ransom (or, more likely, she has not got me anything) until she comes over to visit us.
This year I would like Cos to stop buying me any presents at all. They are always cheap and nasty and hideously inappropriate. She didn’t bother to get me anything for the first 27 years of my life, it’s far to late to buy my affections now – although if she is asking you to help her buy my affections let the record show I may consider renting them in return for a 50mm Carl Zeiss Lens.
I would also like Strider to cop on. While I am pleased with all her work undermining the Welsh government from within, it would make Mammy very happy if Strider was able to think of people who are not herself a little more; particularly with regards to the state of her bathroom floor and how other people might feel when they go in there and see it. Let’s just say it’s a good job it’s the room with the toilet in it.
For a long time I have wondered if I want another cat. My old one doesn’t do much these days on account of having been dead for three and a half months. I know I eventually will get another one because otherwise my life plan of dying a crazy old cat lady will go unfulfilled, but every time I think of getting a new one it makes me cry.
With this in mind, I instead request an Alpaca. They are a bit like cats but you shear them and instead of chasing things and killing them, they protect them from all harm. They also do not wake you up in the middle of the night to let you know they still exist. If you bring me an alpaca, I promise to brush it and shine its hoofs and give it vitamin D supplements and name it Genghis. It will also be helpful should Mammy get some chickens.
Please be careful in the icy snow and driving winds. Alpacas get air sick very easily.
Lots of Love
Theo (Age 28)
Thankyou very much for all the wonderful gifts you brought me last year. I was particularly delighted to step on the scales in January to find I weighed the same as before I began inhaling festive chocolate. If you could repeat that trick for me this year, I would be most grateful.
I understand that I’m a little late with my letter to you this year. My tardiness, however, will not excuse an absence of glittery gifts beneath my Christmas tree. You are Father Christmas and Father Christmas is magic so none of your excuses about how the elves couldn’t make it in time, ok?
Once again I have been very good this year. I have reached things from high shelves for old people in the supermarket, I did my best to convert the Jehovah’s witnesses and I have only killed one squirrel.
When I have found it difficult to be nice, I have endeavoured to remove myself from the situation rather than tell people what I think. If this means not answering the telephone on a Sunday then so be it. In an extra effort to be nice, I even wrote a thank you letter to Cos when she sent me a necklace for my birthday. She is holding my Christmas present to ransom (or, more likely, she has not got me anything) until she comes over to visit us.
This year I would like Cos to stop buying me any presents at all. They are always cheap and nasty and hideously inappropriate. She didn’t bother to get me anything for the first 27 years of my life, it’s far to late to buy my affections now – although if she is asking you to help her buy my affections let the record show I may consider renting them in return for a 50mm Carl Zeiss Lens.
I would also like Strider to cop on. While I am pleased with all her work undermining the Welsh government from within, it would make Mammy very happy if Strider was able to think of people who are not herself a little more; particularly with regards to the state of her bathroom floor and how other people might feel when they go in there and see it. Let’s just say it’s a good job it’s the room with the toilet in it.
For a long time I have wondered if I want another cat. My old one doesn’t do much these days on account of having been dead for three and a half months. I know I eventually will get another one because otherwise my life plan of dying a crazy old cat lady will go unfulfilled, but every time I think of getting a new one it makes me cry.
With this in mind, I instead request an Alpaca. They are a bit like cats but you shear them and instead of chasing things and killing them, they protect them from all harm. They also do not wake you up in the middle of the night to let you know they still exist. If you bring me an alpaca, I promise to brush it and shine its hoofs and give it vitamin D supplements and name it Genghis. It will also be helpful should Mammy get some chickens.
Please be careful in the icy snow and driving winds. Alpacas get air sick very easily.
Lots of Love
Theo (Age 28)
Traditions
Ah, Christmas! How you do sneak up on a girl! One minute I am slapping the sun cream on and the next your festive twinkle has overtaken me.
This year, for a change, I am feeling rather organised. The cake managed to get made – this time without He Who Knows Everything braining himself on the garden furniture – and it smells rather lovely. When I say lovely, what I actually mean is Alcoholic. I have yet to perfect the trick of unwrapping it without needing to take a staggered step backwards at the fumes. Naked flames are banned for at least half an hour afterwards to let the vapours dispel.
What is particularly nice about Christmas is the rhythm of it. It pretty much follows the same pattern each year. Of course, nothing stays the same forever, but Christmas seems to assimilate new events into itself so they are swiftly lined up alongside the more traditional occupations of eating biscuits for breakfast and making fun of the Round Robin letters.
The newest tradition to enter into the Christmas pantheon of my household is for the hall ceiling to end up on the hall floor.
Regular readers may remember last years fiasco in which it was decided to decorate the hall, stairs and landing in the weeks preceding Christmas and in which a crowbar was taken to the hall ceiling for complicated reasons involving bureaucracy and which led to a longer than usual To Do list due to the necessity of rebuilding said ceiling before the builders holiday kicked in.
Happily, all the jobs got finished and a mostly merry Christmas was had by mostly everybody and we swore we would never undertake such a foolish enterprise so close to Christmas ever again. Then again, we had said that in previous years following a last minute decision to move house on the 23rd of December. We had found the experience to be a trifle incompatible with a peaceful holiday season.
This year, the hall ceiling has decided it wants to be included in the traditional festivities. Upon our return from Cardiff, we found it had colluded with the hot water tank and was sporting some new watermark tattoos and a pool of liquid beneath it.
Naturally, when He Who Knows Everything told me about this latest development, I sprang instantly into action.
“I shouldn’t worry about it.” I said. “It’s been doing that for the last week in our absence. It will have found equilibrium by morning. If that equilibrium is on the floor then I am good with it.”
HWKE considered my philosophy for a moment before agreeing and retiring to bed.
In more ordinary circumstances, I would doubtless have taken up anxious residence beneath the watery bulge, but these were no ordinary circumstances. Our ferry had been delayed for several hours while the heroic Captain Gerard donned his wetsuit to remove some wire from the propeller. By the time we staggered in through the front door, it was a full twelve hours after we had set out from Cardiff. The gallant captain had arranged a free carvery dinner for us, but all of that meat and gravy served only to make us full and less willing to do some midnight plumbing. If I came down in the morning to find my ceiling on the floor, I would place the blame squarely on the captain and his garlic roast potatoes.
In the end, the ceiling remained where it was. He Who Knows Everything got his spanners out and declared the fault to lie in some loose joints which had begun to leak in earnest after the lack of hot water flowing through them caused them to contract. He spent several days tightening them up and looking with puzzlement at the ceiling which still seemed to be leaking.
Eventually, he found the correct joint. He claims to have tightened it up and is busy with a roller and a spray restoring the ceiling to its original whiteness.
In other news: We have been debating about what size turkey to order for Christmas. Usually I request one as big as my head (because Christmas is the only time of year in which you get the chance to eat something the size of your head) but this year a slightly smaller one is being requested. Partly this is because Strider has declared she will return to Cardiff on the twenty seventh but mainly it is because of the absence of The Cat.
The Cat was always very keen on turkey. So keen in fact that one year, HWKE came into the kitchen to find she had managed to jump a six foot gap onto the kitchen counter top and was sitting next to a fang marked turkey with an innocent expression.
I’m really going to miss that kind of thing this year.
This year, for a change, I am feeling rather organised. The cake managed to get made – this time without He Who Knows Everything braining himself on the garden furniture – and it smells rather lovely. When I say lovely, what I actually mean is Alcoholic. I have yet to perfect the trick of unwrapping it without needing to take a staggered step backwards at the fumes. Naked flames are banned for at least half an hour afterwards to let the vapours dispel.
What is particularly nice about Christmas is the rhythm of it. It pretty much follows the same pattern each year. Of course, nothing stays the same forever, but Christmas seems to assimilate new events into itself so they are swiftly lined up alongside the more traditional occupations of eating biscuits for breakfast and making fun of the Round Robin letters.
The newest tradition to enter into the Christmas pantheon of my household is for the hall ceiling to end up on the hall floor.
Regular readers may remember last years fiasco in which it was decided to decorate the hall, stairs and landing in the weeks preceding Christmas and in which a crowbar was taken to the hall ceiling for complicated reasons involving bureaucracy and which led to a longer than usual To Do list due to the necessity of rebuilding said ceiling before the builders holiday kicked in.
Happily, all the jobs got finished and a mostly merry Christmas was had by mostly everybody and we swore we would never undertake such a foolish enterprise so close to Christmas ever again. Then again, we had said that in previous years following a last minute decision to move house on the 23rd of December. We had found the experience to be a trifle incompatible with a peaceful holiday season.
This year, the hall ceiling has decided it wants to be included in the traditional festivities. Upon our return from Cardiff, we found it had colluded with the hot water tank and was sporting some new watermark tattoos and a pool of liquid beneath it.
Naturally, when He Who Knows Everything told me about this latest development, I sprang instantly into action.
“I shouldn’t worry about it.” I said. “It’s been doing that for the last week in our absence. It will have found equilibrium by morning. If that equilibrium is on the floor then I am good with it.”
HWKE considered my philosophy for a moment before agreeing and retiring to bed.
In more ordinary circumstances, I would doubtless have taken up anxious residence beneath the watery bulge, but these were no ordinary circumstances. Our ferry had been delayed for several hours while the heroic Captain Gerard donned his wetsuit to remove some wire from the propeller. By the time we staggered in through the front door, it was a full twelve hours after we had set out from Cardiff. The gallant captain had arranged a free carvery dinner for us, but all of that meat and gravy served only to make us full and less willing to do some midnight plumbing. If I came down in the morning to find my ceiling on the floor, I would place the blame squarely on the captain and his garlic roast potatoes.
In the end, the ceiling remained where it was. He Who Knows Everything got his spanners out and declared the fault to lie in some loose joints which had begun to leak in earnest after the lack of hot water flowing through them caused them to contract. He spent several days tightening them up and looking with puzzlement at the ceiling which still seemed to be leaking.
Eventually, he found the correct joint. He claims to have tightened it up and is busy with a roller and a spray restoring the ceiling to its original whiteness.
In other news: We have been debating about what size turkey to order for Christmas. Usually I request one as big as my head (because Christmas is the only time of year in which you get the chance to eat something the size of your head) but this year a slightly smaller one is being requested. Partly this is because Strider has declared she will return to Cardiff on the twenty seventh but mainly it is because of the absence of The Cat.
The Cat was always very keen on turkey. So keen in fact that one year, HWKE came into the kitchen to find she had managed to jump a six foot gap onto the kitchen counter top and was sitting next to a fang marked turkey with an innocent expression.
I’m really going to miss that kind of thing this year.
In Which He Who Knows Everything Learns Where Not To Park His Car
Depending on the amount of entertainment your life is filled with, you may not have noticed my recent absence. If you did not then I salute you heartily.
In a pleasant deviation from the usual, there were a number of reasons for the gap in recent blog entries. The first is that I was being quite lazy. I am often lazy. Luckily, my lazyness can be cunningly disguised through doing work and pretending to the world around me that it is the work I am supposed to be working on rather than the other work I have available to me. So it is that I am usually doing something but rarely what it is I am supposed to be doing. The number of blog entries I make are directly proportional to the urgency of the other things I have to get done.
The second is that it had been quite cold. Normally this wouldn’t prove much of an impediment to computer use but when it’s dark and the wind is howling around the chimney, the lure of the stove becomes rather too much of an evening.
The third is that we have all been Away.
As we are exciting folk, Mammy, He Who Knows Everything and I went to visit Strider in Cardiff. She was so thrilled at the prospect of our clogging up her sitting room and using her stuff all day while she was out at work subverting the Welsh Government from within, she even vacuumed. However, as this is Strider we are talking about, she was required to explain that while she had vacuumed, her vacuum seemed to be broken and that the more she vacuumed the dirtier the floor got.
The last time this happened, it was because she had vacuumed up three socks and not noticed. The time before it was because she didn’t know how to empty the dust from the container. She was swift to assure me this was not the cause this time around with, it must be said, more pride than the usual 31 year old displays at knowing how to clear fluff from a filter. After half an hour I’d removed four, three inch blockages from the various tubes of her cleaner and given her strict instructions not to let it happen again.
I have always maintained that Cardiff is one of the most underrated places in the UK. It is large enough to have really good shopping (including the brand new John Lewis which is the largest one outside London) but not so large you spend hours driving in and out of it like Manchester or Birmingham. The Millennium Stadium is one of the finest sporting grounds in the whole of the UK and because it is in the city centre, visitors get a chance to see Cardiff properly rather than being whisked from their park and ride to some outlying suburb.
What is also nice about Cardiff is that, to me at least, it always felt like a very safe city. I lived in Adamstown in a house I painted purple. On the insurance forms this was rated as the most crime ridden place in the city (Along with Roath, Splott and Cathays) but even so, it was only a level three insurance band. Strider studied in Manchester and lived in an area where it was cheaper to replace everything she owned than to buy insurance for it.
When I lived in Cardiff, I never felt afraid to be a lone female walking at night. That said, like any city it is important to keep your wits about you. There are drug problems and plenty of petty crime associated with them. It is also worth ensuring you know when Cardiff are playing Millwall and make a note to stay well away from anywhere any of the fans might end up but other than that (and the Llandaff flasher), I always found it to be really safe.
It is somewhat ironic then that Strider, who lives in a slightly better area than I did, has experienced much crime and annoyance during her time in the city. Since she moved to a first floor flat, she has been less troubled by young people stealing her laptop from through her bedroom window but she is always full of tales of the local kids causing a nuisance.
As we drank our welcoming cup of tea, she filled us in on their recent activities. Among other things, they had recently taken up breaking into cars and she advised us not to leave anything in ours.
About an hour later, a car alarm went off. I turned to HWKE.
“Isn’t that your car alarm?” I asked. I am finely tuned to the nuances of his car alarm. Until he was able to persuade the man at the garage to disconnect it, it had the habit of going off when the temperature on the dashboard reached 25 degrees. This caused much embarrassment in a variety of places, particularly when he couldn’t work out how to turn it off and Mammy and I stood at a distance shouting things which suggested to passers-by that he wasn’t the legal owner of the vehicle.
For a moment he looked uncertain. Then he shrugged and ate the plate of food which had been placed before him. Only when he was full of dinner did he go to check on his car.
Some time later he came back and asked Strider for some duck tape, some bin bags and a phone call to the Rozzers. Yoofs had broken his passenger window. They had also smashed the windows of four other cars parked on the street but not, I noticed, the one belonging to the Mazda coupe.
Strider sighed and rang the old bill. I begged her to ask them if they were going to catch the crims and lock them up in her community, but she failed to understand the reference.
What was so annoying about the whole thing was the wonton destruction of it. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d broken the window to steal something – HWKE certainly wouldn’t have minded if they’d stolen the whole car because bits fall off whenever he drives it further than 30 miles so he’s keen for a new one - breaking the window because they can is just amateurish.
The Rozzers came. They took HWKE’s name. They told us some bloke had seen the gang doing it and chased them in his car. It was all most dull.
So, Cardiff. Great City. Just not for parking your car in.
In a pleasant deviation from the usual, there were a number of reasons for the gap in recent blog entries. The first is that I was being quite lazy. I am often lazy. Luckily, my lazyness can be cunningly disguised through doing work and pretending to the world around me that it is the work I am supposed to be working on rather than the other work I have available to me. So it is that I am usually doing something but rarely what it is I am supposed to be doing. The number of blog entries I make are directly proportional to the urgency of the other things I have to get done.
The second is that it had been quite cold. Normally this wouldn’t prove much of an impediment to computer use but when it’s dark and the wind is howling around the chimney, the lure of the stove becomes rather too much of an evening.
The third is that we have all been Away.
As we are exciting folk, Mammy, He Who Knows Everything and I went to visit Strider in Cardiff. She was so thrilled at the prospect of our clogging up her sitting room and using her stuff all day while she was out at work subverting the Welsh Government from within, she even vacuumed. However, as this is Strider we are talking about, she was required to explain that while she had vacuumed, her vacuum seemed to be broken and that the more she vacuumed the dirtier the floor got.
The last time this happened, it was because she had vacuumed up three socks and not noticed. The time before it was because she didn’t know how to empty the dust from the container. She was swift to assure me this was not the cause this time around with, it must be said, more pride than the usual 31 year old displays at knowing how to clear fluff from a filter. After half an hour I’d removed four, three inch blockages from the various tubes of her cleaner and given her strict instructions not to let it happen again.
I have always maintained that Cardiff is one of the most underrated places in the UK. It is large enough to have really good shopping (including the brand new John Lewis which is the largest one outside London) but not so large you spend hours driving in and out of it like Manchester or Birmingham. The Millennium Stadium is one of the finest sporting grounds in the whole of the UK and because it is in the city centre, visitors get a chance to see Cardiff properly rather than being whisked from their park and ride to some outlying suburb.
What is also nice about Cardiff is that, to me at least, it always felt like a very safe city. I lived in Adamstown in a house I painted purple. On the insurance forms this was rated as the most crime ridden place in the city (Along with Roath, Splott and Cathays) but even so, it was only a level three insurance band. Strider studied in Manchester and lived in an area where it was cheaper to replace everything she owned than to buy insurance for it.
When I lived in Cardiff, I never felt afraid to be a lone female walking at night. That said, like any city it is important to keep your wits about you. There are drug problems and plenty of petty crime associated with them. It is also worth ensuring you know when Cardiff are playing Millwall and make a note to stay well away from anywhere any of the fans might end up but other than that (and the Llandaff flasher), I always found it to be really safe.
It is somewhat ironic then that Strider, who lives in a slightly better area than I did, has experienced much crime and annoyance during her time in the city. Since she moved to a first floor flat, she has been less troubled by young people stealing her laptop from through her bedroom window but she is always full of tales of the local kids causing a nuisance.
As we drank our welcoming cup of tea, she filled us in on their recent activities. Among other things, they had recently taken up breaking into cars and she advised us not to leave anything in ours.
About an hour later, a car alarm went off. I turned to HWKE.
“Isn’t that your car alarm?” I asked. I am finely tuned to the nuances of his car alarm. Until he was able to persuade the man at the garage to disconnect it, it had the habit of going off when the temperature on the dashboard reached 25 degrees. This caused much embarrassment in a variety of places, particularly when he couldn’t work out how to turn it off and Mammy and I stood at a distance shouting things which suggested to passers-by that he wasn’t the legal owner of the vehicle.
For a moment he looked uncertain. Then he shrugged and ate the plate of food which had been placed before him. Only when he was full of dinner did he go to check on his car.
Some time later he came back and asked Strider for some duck tape, some bin bags and a phone call to the Rozzers. Yoofs had broken his passenger window. They had also smashed the windows of four other cars parked on the street but not, I noticed, the one belonging to the Mazda coupe.
Strider sighed and rang the old bill. I begged her to ask them if they were going to catch the crims and lock them up in her community, but she failed to understand the reference.
What was so annoying about the whole thing was the wonton destruction of it. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d broken the window to steal something – HWKE certainly wouldn’t have minded if they’d stolen the whole car because bits fall off whenever he drives it further than 30 miles so he’s keen for a new one - breaking the window because they can is just amateurish.
The Rozzers came. They took HWKE’s name. They told us some bloke had seen the gang doing it and chased them in his car. It was all most dull.
So, Cardiff. Great City. Just not for parking your car in.
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