Day 17

No, gentle reader, you are not hallucinating due to lack of human contact: the blog is not missing a day. It is missing another member of the Executive Team behind bringing you these daily peregrinations through the increasingly labyrinthine mind of a man who is spending too much time doing other people’s work. After yesterday’s sacking of the second Marketing Manager, today sees the departure of the Finance Director, for reasons that will become abundantly clear … soon. I feel no emotion (generally) as the silver-haired, sprightly octogenarian clears his desk flanked by two of the security staff, and is escorted to the front door of the hacienda where he is thrown forcibly, face-down, onto the wet tarmac of the front street, solely for the purposes of referencing a previous post down there in which I explained the term ‘street’ as used in the countryside. As he gingerly picks himself up, extracts a cotton hankie from the breast pocket of his Italian-designed suit to stem the bleeding from his nose and totters up the slight hill of the driveway to where it meets the lane (see previous post down the page there as well for an explanation of ‘lane’) and thence off to fend for himself among the great unwashed, I look back over all the great times we had together and realise that there weren’t any. It will probably take him about two days to reach the city on foot from here as I doubt there is any public transport running in this area at the minute – it was never what you might call a regular service, even in times PC. Good enough for him, I say, and if any other small or medium enterprise is kind enough to take him in off the street when he gets there, a word of warning, if you don’t mind: caveat emptor.

But his ignominious exit has brought the somewhat more than slight hill on the front driveway to my attention again, and jogged my memory that I must remember to finish off the detailed arrangements for my own funeral. I am recording them for posterity in the form of a short story which has started well – and the end is a complete blaster; it’s just the tricky middle bit I have been avoiding. I could, of course, just draw up a list of my requirements for my own burial, but where’s the crack in that? Much better to have a cloud of funeral directors and a gaggle of literary critics hunched over the manuscript on the kitchen table trying to work out exactly what I meant by some line or other. Was I being symbolic, or literal? Is that just pathetic fallacy, or do we actually have to wait for a tornado to strike the locale before we can take the coffin out of the house? That sort of thing, you know. It will lend a much-needed air of gravitas to the atmosphere of the wake, and give the jubilant part-time wife something to do when she is called in for a definitive judgement on some dispute or other between the critics and the undertakers, whether a structuralist or a Marxist interpretation is more appropriate for the passage about the stone wall building, for example.

I will not be budged on one detail, though. Despite it being an ancient and unalienable tradition (any word on when Boris is coming back for his nightly stand-up gig?) down my way for the closest next-of-kin to carry the coffin out of the house and over the threshold, there’ll be none of that going on at my funeral. There is a tricky turn in the front vestibule where it meets the protruding porch, and the last thing I want on the day of my burial is an undignified ‘to me, to you’ hiatus, or for one of the two sons to rip (R.I.P. geddit? Me and James Joyce both) the shoulder of his good suit on the stone wall as they try to manoeuvre the simple, black ebony, gold-plaited coffin round the bend. No, leave it to the professionals is my definitive instruction. And if the literary critics can’t manage the turn either, the funeral directors can always take over. (Did you see what I did there? You see, you assumed I meant the undertakers when I mentioned ‘professionals’, but as literary critics are also paid for their work, and as both groups were mentioned together up there a bit, I did a subtle sleight of pen to produce a comic effect. If you were under the impression that this comedy stuff writes itself, you should try it sometime.)

And whichever group gets the nod for the removal of the coffin, they will not be attempting to shoulder the thing out of the house either. No, a dignified push on a trolley from this very study where I will have been (is that an actual tense? if so, what is it called? the future perfect?) lying in state waiting for more inclement weather, down the stone-tiled front hall, a neat, three-point turn using the doorway to the country kitchen and out the door and onto the street (careful of the front step there!). That is what is required. And, because of that hill on the driveway, there will be no attempt either at carrying the coffin at a precarious angle on four shoulders of men of differing heights. (Having only two sons, there are two available positions in the first lift: applications welcome.) No, stick the thing straight into the back of the hearse parked on the horizontal area of the street, and then let the mourners follow it on foot at a dignified pace up the hill of the driveway and down the lane to where all their cars are parked in the more extensive front street of the brother-in-law. That’s what I call dignity, and you can shove your tradition. There will be time enough for first lifts when they get to the chapel.

So anyway. Yes, smart boy, this blog has ‘jumped’ from Day 15 to Day 17, but there is no missing day. The internal audit team pointed out that there are in fact two Day 11s down the page there a bit, hence the sacking of the Finance Director. Numbers were never really his strong point, anyway. I could correct the egregious error by editing, but I prefer to keep it there as evidence in case some would-be employer contacts me for a reference in a couple of days’ time. Of course I accept, dear readers, that you yourselves have too much manners and fine breeding to have pointed out the mistake in the comments section. But please feel free to leave any other comments you might have: they keep some of the staff occupied for a minute or two.

[In case you are wondering where yer man is, and if he has been sacked as well, he actually gets Saturdays off for good behaviour. Don’t tell him I am borrowing his square brackets!]

Day 14

There’s nothing like neighbours in the countryside. (OK, smart boy in the class, you are correct: that sentence is ambiguous. Now for pointing that out and spoiling everybody else’s fun, as punishment off you go and write a post taking the other line from the one I am going to take, and hand it in before I have finished this article – if it’s any good, I may even publish it here as a guest post.) Good, that’s him out of the way for a while engaged in an impossible task for the non-compulsory coursework element of this virtual learning course. Did I not mention before that this was actually a virtual learning course to see you through the Kerfuffle in the absence of formal, traditional teaching? Ah well, too late now: youse are all signed up for Lateral Thinking 101, and the course fees are already resting in my bank account and are, of course, non-refundable.

From the south-facing bay window in the country-kitchen-style country kitchen of the hacienda, as far as the eye can see in that direction, there are no human habitats. As to how far the eye can actually see in that direction, on the one sunny day we get here per Spring, it can see as far as the Sun, and on most non-cloudy nights it can see past the Moon and on through the licks and puddles of the Milky Way to deep, inner space. So quite far, really, and not a human house about the place. There is a fairy ring in the Far Field, and a leprechaun colony just off the Upper Lane, but no humans to be seen for miles and miles. In the other direction, the one with the lane in it, I can just about, with the aid of binoculars, make out two houses, but I am related by marriage to both of them. To the occupants, I mean, not to the houses, although, mind you, it has been said that I have granite-like features and all the empathy of a brick. So, no neighbours as such in that direction either, just relatives. As an aside [from what? – Ed.], when the female teenager was a human child, she came home from primary school one day and announced that she wanted to change her surname from mine to her mother’s. She had cousins at the school, you see, as did all of the rest of the inbred families who attended, but nobody knew they were her cousins because they had a different surname from her, being the children of brothers-in-law of mine. When I quizzed her as to her motives for requesting the change (a request I denied, obviously, as it is good parenting to say ‘no’ to children 87.3% of the time, as well as financially more sustainable), she explained that she was really related to them and wanted that to be plain for the world to see. And then the stinger. ‘I’m only related to you by marriage!’ You see what I am up against, dear reader? This from a child who was six years old at the time.

If I mentally pass the related house at the foot of the hill, cross the wee bridge over the nameless stream that flows into my private lough and continue down the lane through the over-arching trees, I will eventually come to a house that does not contain people related to me, by marriage. But even then, because of the distance involved, I would hesitate to call them neighbours, and they are, in fact, related to my brother-in-law’s wife, so that maybe rules them out as well. My brother-in-law’s wife is not my sister-in-law, by the way, and neither is she yours: look it up.

In fact, in the country, there are only two categories for the inhabitants of houses within a beagle’s gowl of your own: relatives and rivals. And not ‘neighbourly’ as in friendly rivalry either: this is deadly serious stuff, and they all have shotguns. The rivalry has its roots in the curse that is land (did you see what I did there?) and can be traced back to the ancestral fear of eviction coursing through Irish blood since the Famine. So, yes, it is the Brits’ fault ultimately, but it plays itself out day to day in blocking a right of way here, spreading a bit too much slurry there, building a pig-shed right under the kitchen window of the other guy’s house, while all the while smiling and laughing and greeting each other with overt bonhomie and rustic charm any time they meet (usually when one of them has blocked the lane to do non-urgent work with his tractor and the other has to wait behind in his tractor on his way to block the other lane for his non-urgent work). These carefully-calibrated, minor acts of daily malevolence are carried out with the ultimate aim of getting on the other guy’s wick to such an extent that he eventually cracks, decides to give up mickey-mouse farming for a game of darts and sticks the ancestral fields up for sale. The rival then bides his time and eventually buys them for a knockdown price having put any other outside buyers off with his obstruction of ancient rights of way and his false planning permission for a 10,000 pig pig farm in the direction of the prevailing wind. He then sits in his house surveying his new enlarged estate of watery fields and laughs quietly to himself for about two years, before starting off on the next land-grabbing campaign. Salt of the earth, country people, but I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could throw their Massey Fergusons which used to block and delay each and every one of my journeys off the reservation, when I used to make journeys off the reservation. It’s as well most of them cannot read.

[Please note, the above post is the one handed in as non-compulsory coursework by the smart boy in the class. I wonder what I would have written about?]

Day 12

Quite by accident one time, or was it Fate? [bollocks! – Ed.] I came across a line in a text in Irish that completely changed my attitude to sleeping patterns. If I could find the original source, sure we’d all be laughing, but, unless Darzán can dig it up for me, you’ll just have to take my word on it. The throwaway line concerned some visitor turning up at a house in Winter at an importunate hour, namely after sunset but before the first sleep. (And no, Cambridge Dictionary, it is not that meaning of importune I have in mind – the cheek of you!) This apparently innocuous phrase was a revelation to me: it confirmed that my own sleeping pattern had not, in fact, just fallen off a tree but was, undeniably, backed by secure tradition and therefore an inevitable, albeit minor, expression of my intrinsic Ibero-Irishness. Maybe it was even one of my ‘inalienable and ancient rights’? For an insight into how going to the pub is one of these for British people who happen not be slaves, see previous post about Bluster Boris.

Do you get it yet? My thinking went along these lines: if there is a first sleep, there must then be, ipso facto, a second sleep, and maybe even a third and fourth one if you find out you have not had enough Zs when someone smacks you about the face and tells you it is time to go to work. How would they know whether I feel like working at that hour of the morning anyway? And what are they even doing in my master bedroom with walk-in wardrobe but no en-suite for hygiene reasons? Did I leave the front door open all night again? But I digress [seriously? – Ed.]. And sorry about the Latin up there, but, like that other classic language Old Irish, sometimes the tongue of the Italians is just more succinct than the mongrel English that my father delighted in calling ‘a bastard language’. He wasn’t usually allowed to curse, you see, but had heard the term used in some documentary or other he was watching. When he was alive.

So here I was, getting up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and me thinking this was due to my Type 2 diabetes when really, and obviously, it was a case of briseann an dúchas trí shúile an chait, my underlying ancestral trends re-asserting themselves as some sort of counter-balance to the madness of the modern world and the tyranny of wristwatch and clock. I know, Rebel without a Clue, as my big brother aptly nick-named me one time. But still, my general idea once I was up to siphon the python anyway was that it would be remiss of me, while awake, to squander the opportunity to have a smoke and thus help me to reach my daily target of nicotine intake. So I would light up one of my selection of Benson & Hedges’ finest and, maybe, have a quick read of an article or two from the weekend’s newspaper still patiently waiting for my editing skills. Maybe have a sneaky chocolate biscuit or ten too, because nobody was looking at that hour of the morning, and accompany them with a cup of coffee if the newspaper article happened to be free of the phrasal blight that is ‘existential crisis’. Generally just messing around for an hour or so, letting the cat in or out depending on her whims, maybe even doing a drop of real work to facilitate the further consumption of nicotine. And thence to bed to enjoy the ineffable delight of falling asleep for the second time without having officially woken up yet.

Darzán informs me that this is exactly what the Irish used to do too: sleep for a bit just after nightfall (cos they had no electricity in those days, and no 24-hour TV either, for some reason), get up in the middle of the night, do a drop of work and then go back to sleep again until their circadian rhythm told them it was time to get out of the scratcher and head off for a day’s foraging for potatoes. Darzán, by the way, is one of the team of researchers who help to provide the facts that illumine this daily blog about the Kerfuffle [what facts? – Ed.]. Out of the kindness of my heart, I took them on after their respective universities had kicked them out and locked their ivory towers on them. We all have to do our bit. I pay them a pittance, of course, but they seem happy enough, beavering away there in the cellar in poor light, poring over the dusty volumes I have amassed over the years (mostly from libraries that are now closed, so no fines due) and, very occasionally, coming up with a nugget of information I can crowbar into the blog. They are also a handy receptacle for leftover food. Especially since the binmen did not come yesterday, the lazy bistros. Or maybe their second or third sleep just went on that bit too long? Who am I to judge?

So, if I happen to work for you, and if you were ever somewhat confused at receiving an email or a report from me at 3.17am, now you know why. Better that than trying to do it half-asleep during the prescribed 9-5 working pattern beloved of society PC.

Day 11

Monday Morning Mark II, Captain’s Starlog, 11PC. So, for the second time this month, although it is the start of the working week (more of that anon), I will not be approaching the Hill Section of the M2 with something approaching the dread of Sisyphus approaching his boulder each morning, I will not be getting snarled up in traffic on the Sandyknowles Roundabout and I will not be experiencing despair at the inability of the human race to learn the simplest of lessons from experience. These, my friends, were only a few of the delights of my daily commute to work in the PC days. An extra treat on a Monday was the absence of the part-time wife from the passenger seat: she never fully embraced the role of passenger as indicated in the name of her seat (carrying, as it does, the first syllable of ‘passive’ in it), and would constantly cross the invisible line I had clearly marked not quite down the middle of the cockpit. On my side of the line were all the controls for operating the car – steering wheel, foot pedals, fully-operational indicator lights – but also, and crucially, the controls for adjusting the atmosphere of the interior – heating, air conditioning, in-car entertainment. As balance, there was a glove compartment on her side over which I had no control at all. Despite these clearly-defined and delineated duties and responsibilities, time after time, part-time wife would reach over the line to the not-quite central control panel in an attempt to adjust the heat, or change the radio station to Radio Four or, I dunno, generally to just fuck things up. But none of that unconscionable rebellion on Monday mornings, and on one other blissful morning per week. I should add that it was the physical atmosphere of the car I was in control of. Control of the emotional atmosphere was firmly on the other side of the invisible line, and part-time wife could change a frosty morning into the brightest of new dawns merely by answering one of my questions rather than sitting in a huff in the perfectly calibrated air on her side of the car.

[Yer man, the wee query boy, has sent in another request for clarification. The rest of youse should feel free to do the same by leaving a comment in the comments section. I guarantee to read them; whether or not I respond to them is anyone’s guess, and will have more to do with whatever subject is on the top of my head queuing to get off when I start typing than the nature or urgency of the query. The reason pernickety-head’s question is being addressed today will soon become apparent, maybe.]

So, apart from closing it to traffic and turning the dreaded Hill Section into a roller-park for disaffected teenagers [redundant: akin to ‘pretentious Frenchman’, there is no other kind – ed.], way down there somewhere in a previous post I had mentioned in passing that I used to regularly regale my passenger with various ingenuous solutions to the morning rush-hour. This was in the days, dear reader, when there was a morning rush-hour. For the past eleven days, the closest thing I get to a morning rush-hour is a sprint along the balcony of the mezzanine from the master bedroom in the West Wing to the rainforest shower in the bathroom in the East Wing in an attempt to get in there before one of the resident teenagers takes up temporary residence. Why do teenagers take so long in the bathroom? Don’t answer that, I already know the answer; well one answer, for teenaged boys, anyway. I can hear one of them stirring now, and better finish this off soon or I will be turning up for work having had only the full Andytown shower.

Back to traffic and query boy’s request that I elucidate. In the days before the Kerfuffle, shed-loads of cars would attempt the pointless and pathetic attempt to deliver their occupants to various offices and shops in the city centre for exactly the same, apparently engraved-in-stone time of nine o’clock. There was never any reason for this stupidity: we did not work on production lines which entailed that each of us had to be at his post contemporaneously or else the whole system would break down. The solution to the twice-daily traffic jams then? Staggered start and finish times, by alphabetical order. Thus, if your surname begins with any of the letters A-D, on week one you start at 7.00 am, the E-Hs start at 7.30 am, the I-Ls rock up at 8.00 am … you get the picture. In week two, everyone moves up one place in the schedule and the A-Ds start at 7.30 am, their early-morning slot being taken up by the W-Zs (mostly Polish workers in that group) from the other end of the system. Going home times follow a similar pattern starting from 4.00 pm when (yes, you’ve got it, by Jove you’ve got it!) the A-Ds bomb home up a relatively free-flowing Hill Section back to their country residences. Do you like it?

I once wrote to the Irish Government suggesting they should bring in bunk beds to wards to solve waiting times in hospitals. Like CERN, they have yet to reply. But I live in hope. When I am not in despair – see shopping list above.

Day 11

Among my essentials yesterday was the weekend edition of The Irish Times. A quick perusal thereof (I will not actually be finished with the whole paper until about Thursday, leaving me with one day off before I buy the next edition) confirms my darkest fears: there is a dangerous, insidious disease spreading rapidly, the causes of which are, at best, less than clear and for which there seems to be no known cure. It passes from person to person with something approaching the speed of a rumour, which, incidentally, scientists have recently declared to be – and I quote – ‘a whiskereen’ faster than the speed of light. (Still no response from CERN, by the way, to my query as to how they were getting on coming up with an estimate for the speed of darkness, but I realise that these advancements in science take time, especially in what is – for CERN, not for me – a relatively new field of research; the wait for an answer feels like light years, though.)

Having just stuck up that interwobble link there for your delectation, I will now have to digress from the matter at hand [which is? – Ed.] to comment on two of the headlines on the site that should not go commentless. A sort of ‘What it says in the papers’ with a panel of one. The first is a straightforward question seeking a yes or no answer, and the answer is yes and no. Here is the headline: Is it a good idea to move in with my partner now, or am I mad? Granted this is from the Dear Abbey section of the newspaper on relationship advice, not the only other section of the newspaper today which is taken up with Kerfuffle advice, but still, no, not a good time, and yes, you are mad. The second headline is more controversial, and will have historians scrabbling about in their archives for a while: Ireland suffers highest daily death toll. Famine, anyone? Oh, on that subject, and in case you haven’t heard this one yet, I will record it here for posterity, or for whatever replaces posterity PC because, according to everyone else, things will never be the same again. But they never were. The joke? How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None.

So back to yon highly contagious disease. Not Covid-19, ya eejit, sure everyone writes about that! No, the one I mentioned up there is maybe even more annoying than boreohnovirus, and, while equally contagious, thankfully and mercifully affects only journalists. It concerns their relatively recent [that’s the second time you’ve done that Einstein joke – Ed.] penchant for a particular phrase, and their apparent compulsion to then apply it to all known areas of life, from nearly bankrupt soccer clubs to precarious governments in rogue states, the UK, for example. The phrase in question is (cover any children’s eyes at this point) ‘existential crisis’. Now to me, a child of the sixties who studied A Level French in the early eighties of the previous century, an existential crisis means only one thing and conjures up only images of earnest, French groupies of Jean-Paul Sartre, drooping around Parisien boulevards and fretting over whether or not their berries are set at a revolutionary enough angle, or if their acrylic polo neck jumpers are, in fact, a dark enough shade of black. So, any time any of the afflicted journalists crowbars the phrase into whatever article of theirs I am editing (I do not really ‘read’ as such anymore; because of one of my hobbies that people have started paying me money for, my inner stickler is always on full alert as the words are moving from right to left before my eyes) and that’s it, the game’s up for that article, the mental red pen comes out and I draw a diagonal line through the whole thing and move on to the next one. Where, no doubt, some buckwit in the increasingly small Sports Section (decreasingly small?) will try to inform me about Accrington Stanley’s financial woes and the consequent ‘existential crisis’ facing the club. I severely doubt whether the directors of said club would know an existential crisis if one came up and slapped them in the face with a wet fish. Equally, their ability to even spell mauvaise-foi never mind break out of it in a moment of choice and go on to establish their own moral and ethical rules in a meaningless universe is less than certain. They would probably go bankrupt in the attempt.

Now I am aware that the word ‘existential’ has a more general meaning pertaining to the basic fact of existence, but not for me it doesn’t. Having survived my own existential crisis brought on by the, frankly, unwise decision of the Christian Brothers to permit the study of Camus and Sartre in the upper echelons of their school [too obscure a reference to be funny, even with the addition of a capital F – Ed.], existential refers to one thing and to one thing only for me, and that is to the self-contradictory cul-de-sac that is the philosophy of existentialism beloved of teenagers everywhere and pretentious French people in France [is there any other kind? – Ed]. Essential, on the other hand, continues to amass meanings, and the contents of the part-time wife’s bag after the daily forage for food are a constant source of surprise and bewilderment to me. I have not crunched the actual numbers yet – the weekly family financial report is published on a Monday evening when the teenagers are liable to be out of their caves and gathered in a sulk round the boardroom table – but I have a strong suspicion that, now that we are buying essentials only and not whatever else it is that we used to buy PC, we are actually spending more of my money. Riddle me that, Chancellor of the Exchequer, unless Boris the Brave passed on the virus to you as well in his new laudable policy that government ministers should actually feel the people’s pain. The part-time wife, by the way, strictly keeps her money in her purse, and in various pockets of the various coats she has, so none of that is ever spent. I would suspect that she is building up some sort of an emergency fund for when she leaves me, if I had that kind of suspicious mind.

In an act of rebellion, therefore, against prevalent, bourgeois social mores, I am off to the shop on my daily non-essential journey, but unaccompanied this time, and I shall purchase, exclusively and uniquely, existential products. So, cigarettes and red wine then. Obviously I shall be wearing black, as black is the only viable response to the absurdity of man’s position in a meaningless universe, apparently. And all my other clothes are in the wash.