Distant Blood Sports

“I doubt I’ve killed the Red Comyn.”

Also sprach Zarathustra. No, actually, it wasn’t him. It was Spiderman, aka Robert the Bruce, after the spineless wee Scot had betrayed one of my ancestors – inside a chapel, no less! One of his sycophantic hangers-on then went back into the chapel to finish off the job. I have never liked the Bruces since then, and they would need to look out for themselves. As me Ma used to say about Protestant discrimination against Catholics in Norn Iron and British Government atrocities in the same blighted place, “We can forgive, but we’ll never forget.” So, watch yourself, Bruces! That is fair warning, I feel.

I see now the pack of hounds (news and real) are baying for similar blood-letting concerning a distant relative of mine. (We are all distant relatives of each other, ultimately, but you know what I mean.) Now I have to state up front that I have a dog in this fight: a most important wager. Part-Time Wife, bless her, thinks the man with two surnames will have to resign; I reckon he is so covered in Teflon that he will survive. The prize for winning the bet for me is a bj: for the Part-Time Wife it is me not getting a bj, presumably, as she didnot specify. It is not altogether certain that she accepted the bet, or the forfeit, but hope springs eternal, don’t you know, so I shall be watching this morning’s news with mounting (Oh er, Missus!) excitement. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I’ll keep my legs crossed until the appropriate time.

As it happens, I have recently asked the secretary to rush off a letter to The Irish Times concerning sexual matters too. Should they not publish it, I will stick it up here to illustrate the errors of their judgement. The letter was not about the potential bj, but you will just have to wait to see what it was about. Oh, the antici … pation.

Sex is similar to eating out in a restaurant in that you should never order anything you can get at home. So, on my rare visits to brothels in various countries, I invariably shun the obvious Full Irish and opt for one of the more exotic items further down the menu. This tactic keeps both me and Part-Time Wife happy and satisfied, as I presume she is ordering something similarly unavailable at home on our visits to houses of ill-repute. Chicken ranches, as they are delightfully called in Donegal. Apparently, and unknown to us at the time, the daughters of one of the houses we stayed in at the Summer college to learn Irish had the exclusive franchise to provide visiting chicken ranch rights to Tory Island. Nobody told us! That would have saved us a lot of time wasted in dancing and chatting up and walking girls home in the pouring rain.

The whole manufactured news scandal about Mr Cummings and lockdown is not only manufactured, it is not even news to anyone with a titter of wit (completely different to a twitter of twat). In our saner moments, we all know that there is one rule for plebs and another one for our ruling elite. I mean, there have to be some perks available for the poor bastards who rule us or why else would they put themselves in that invidious position? And if they didn’t volunteer to rule us, we would, as we also recognise in our saner moments, be much worse off than we are now. So all this pretence today, the tearing of robes and the false outrage, is merely a temporary sideshow, more bread and circuses for the masses. (If they ever do bring back Masses, by the way, they should consider incorporating a bit more of the circus in the performance – they already have the Bread.) None of those currently screaming that everyone should obey the same rules really expects Mrs Windsor, for example, to get a bus to the airport and take her turn grabbing a seat on an Easy Jet flight the next time she decides she needs to go on a state visit to what used to be her country’s empire. And it is patently obvious that the higher echelons of the Catholic Church do not consider that rules of celibacy outside of marriage actually apply to them, while confirming to the great unwashed that they will burn in Hell if they ignore the same regulations. Twas ever thus, and ever thus will be. And you can quote me on that, or whoever actually said it first.

Because all this talk about how the World will be changed utterly after the Kerfuffle is mad-dog bullshite as well. The basic truths of the World do not change, and attempting to change them is about as useful an undertaking as swimming up a waterfall, or trying to teach a teenager something.