freeirishpoems

Day 10

Social Distancing

Fair dues to the Pope, though: out he went into a wet, Italian night, all dressed-up in his best – and whitest – gear, to perform an act of public faith as some sort of counter-argument to the criticism of his organisation’s approach to Lent that he read here yesterday morning and which, obviously, stung him into action. He picked a very handy day for it too; St Peter’s Square in the Vatican is usually bunged with people, but he had the place almost to himself last night. Probably because of the unseasonable rain.

If you happened to see the ceremony on the television, you have, apparently, received the possibility of receiving a plenary indulgence along with a riveting hour’s viewing. Only the possibility, mind you; as always with the Catholic Church, there are terms and conditions attached (one of these is ridiculously easy, though: “… and have recited a few prayers during their lifetime”). For the spiritually-afflicted among you (non-Catholics, that is), a plenary indulgence is a class of IOU signed by the Church which you can cash in after death to get some time off the period you have to spend in Purgatory. Not much use to you, granted, if you are a non-Catholic who does not believe in Purgatory, but it may have some residual value on the spiritual stock market. Indulgences, of course, had a role to play in that whole falling-out-of-close-friends business with Martin Luther that has not yet been successfully resolved – both sides are still bickering over the actual facts of the matter, a bit like the less than gruntled participants in the Norn Iron contretemps – and the great unwashed (it is Saturday; remember the lessons about ‘clean’ dirt) among you may be surprised that they are still around. But, to quote St Gerry on another matter, “They haven’t gone away, you know!”

Naturally, with so much time on my hands these days, I have thought this matter thoroughly through and would like to expound here today from my isolation shed (see above) on what I judge to be a fatal flaw in the whole indulgence pyramid scheme. But don’t worry, Francis, I am not going to fall out with you about it, or nail any declarations to anything à la Martin Luther (fake news, according to the Vatican, by the way). Apart from anything else, if the part-time wife caught me on nailing anything other than the pictures that have been waiting to be hung since we moved in here about 13 years ago, so would I be. Or hanged, actually, to be grammatically correct, but to spoil the joke: these are the trade-offs one has to make in the name of entertainment.

What was I on about? Ach now, c’mon off it, lads! At least one of us has to be listening to this daily diatribe or the whole communicatio ab isolatio thing will not work. Sorry about that, I lapsed into made-up Latin there because of the emphasis on things Vatican this morning. Yes, indulgences, thank you, smart boy at the back of the class. Plenary indulgences apparently reduce the time you spend in Purgatory doing penance for sins that have already been forgiven. Not much of a forgiveness there, if you ask me, if you still have to do the time for the crime. But, and here is the big but I have with the whole business, surely be to God there is no Time in the afterlife? To be honest, that has been one of its major attractions for me, the release from the tyranny of hours and minutes and the entering into an eternity of late nights not followed by importune early mornings that would allow me to indulge my penchant for Spanish sleeping patterns to the full. Given that a) Purgatory is in the afterlife, if it is anywhere; b) there is no time in the afterlife; c) both a) and b) are Church teaching, it therefore follows, as clearly as night follows day or as day follows night, that the time you get off Purgatory by cashing in your indulgence is not worth the paper it is (no longer) written on. The emperor has no clothes.

I, on the other hand, am attired as you see in the picture. I wonder are there any nails in that shed behind me?

freeirishpoems

Day 9

Social Distancing

Essential oils? Obviously not; I mean they aren’t even necessary never mind essential, and they leave a funny taste on the chips, or on whatever else you are cooking in them. Actually this Kerfuffle is proving the point that no oils are essential, from the crude, unmannerly types we used to pour into our cars, and thence into our skies, all the way down to the refined types that had little or no sexual experience. Fair enough, smart boy at the back of the class, pouring things upwards is a bit of a stretch, I’ll grant you that, but it all depends on perspectives, and those are changing daily.

I mean even here, on the outskirts of deepest, darkest, mid-Ulster, things are changing out of all proportion. Normally, country people would not walk the length of themselves. In PC times, they would hop into the aul Massey or Deere for even the shortest of journeys, especially, or deliberately, if their trip to the shop for more hay or chicken-feed or blue, plastic hollow pipes for whipping cows with could coincide with one of the twice-daily rush-hours and thus irritate those country-dwellers who (used to) do their earning in the city. But now, because blustering Boris told them to, they can be spotted out walking up the middle of the pavementless roads – in family groups sometimes – behaving for all the world like they are actually enjoying all the fresh air and free landscape that enfolds them, and taking some leisure time away from their usual hobby of destroying the same by relentlessly coating it in slurry every day. What next? If Boris turns up on TV tonight and decrees that the use of indicator lights on cars is mandatory in the fight against Covid-19, will they all start using them and thus take a lot of the guesswork, and risk, out of making a right turn onto a road in the country? The traditional reason for not using indicators in the country is the maxim, poured into them (sideways) with their mother’s milk, that you should never let the other fella know what you are planning on doing.

(Oh, by the way, a query flooded in the other day about my use of a minus sign in front of PC to designate the number of days before the plague came, -5PC, for example. The poor wee soul who penned the query pointed out that such a practice was not usual for dates BC and was therefore not necessary either in my system. But, God bless his ignorance, he did not realise the sophistry of the system he – and it was a he, not a they – was criticising. PC in my system can mean either Pre-Covid or Post-Covid, hence the need for the minus sign. QED.)

Speaking of things changing, have you heard the one about the multi-national, faith-based organisation that gave up religion for Lent? This would appear to be the only rational explanation for what the Catholic Church is up to these days, or the Church of the Roman Rite to give it its proper misnomer now that its rite is rarely performed in the tongue of the Romans. It started with emptying the holy water fonts at the entrances (and exits) of chapels in case infected people stuck their hands in them and passed the virus on to non-infected people in the queue behind. C’mon, lads, the hint is in the name! It’s holy water, for Christ’s sake! So have a bit of faith in your own magic and declare that the next guy in the queue will be simultaneously infected and cured of the virus in one swift sign of the cross. Following on from this success (?), the hierarchy soon decreed that the sign of peace during Mass was to be cancelled. They have done this before, though, and it is actually a move us traditionalists favour. I thought this time they might go the whole hog and replace it with a sign of hate, or ask us to flick a quick 666 sign at each other. Despite this anti-climax, the Irish Bishops stormed ahead with their next step by declaring that the compulsion to attend Sunday Mass was suspended. This had little or no effect chez moi where the locals mainly attend to see who else is attending; only a slight change in mindset was required for them to continue to attend but to see who was not attending. So the Church leaders moved swiftly to counter this and advance their aim of removing the practice of religion from Church activities (I think it is called diversification in the business world, where most of the Church leaders seem to spend their time) by then banning audience participation of any kind at Mass. The Mass itself would go ahead, but to an empty chapel, so we have only their word for it that it is actually going ahead. Don’t believe everything you see on those ‘live’ feeds: those could easily be repeats of great Masses of the past, akin to the re-runs of Top of the Pops I occasionally stumble across on BBC4 when I’m not looking where I’m going with a doofer in my hand. Not content with this, the bishops (i bhfad uainn an drochrud) have now locked the chapel doors to any passing trade. Now claiming that this measure is to comply with the new rules about social distancing is a patent lie: aside from the annual gathering of the Marty Morrissey appreciation society (the game is up, Marty: we are not laughing with you, we are laughing at you), a Catholic chapel outside of Mass times was actually one of the best places to practise said social isolation.

The latest – and slightly shocking – move in this attempt to give up religion for Lent comes from my local Bish., who has just announced that he is cutting out the middle man, banning funeral Masses altogether and taking the bodies straight to the cemetery. So that he has more time for playing golf, probably. Let the dead bury the dead, indeed. This is some preparation for Easter, I can tell you. And I doubt if there will be any general or particular resurrection of a moribund Church after this malarkey, innovative and all as the tactic may be. The only real hope of reviving interest in the Catholic Church in Ireland would be to bring back the Penal Laws. Irish people do not take kindly to being told that something is illegal – or did not used to – and will go out of their way to do it if they are banned from so doing. What do you think the other traditional rustic hobby of poaching is all about? Which is why the last thing the Irish-speaking lobby should have been campaigning for was an Irish Language Act. Make the thing illegal and you will have more fluent speakers than you can shake a stick at within a year.

Nihil Obstat. Go dtaga mo racht.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 8

Today, I did my second non-essential trip out to the shop for essentials. The trip was non-essential as part-time wife currently has no room left in the cupboards or fridge or freezer (please note, not fridge-freezer, and I will have a bone to pick with that about her – or with her about that – in a future post) for any essentials; any time she gets to a shop, she acts like she is in supermarket sweep and buys rings round herself with my money, just in case. Just in case I spend it all on cigarettes, I should add. Interestingly, even though the house is now creaking with food, this has had no effect whatsoever on the phrase most used by the resident teenagers when they cannot avoid social interaction with their parents – the part-time wife is a full-time mother by the way; I am not totally sure how these things work. The phrase in question is only used as a last resort after they have emerged from their respective caves, come downstairs and started angrily prowling around the kitchen wing of the house, opening and shutting various cupboards, sighing and displaying admirably poor foraging skills for primates. They will then stand – empty-handed – in the middle of the stone floor of the galley area of the kitchen complex, look vaguely in the direction of one or other of us, and plead, ‘Is there anything to eat?’

For a while, I was at a complete loss as to how to answer this question. Particularly when, as it often did, it made its appearance about 22.3 minutes after their three-course lunch, or within a beagle’s gowl (an imprecise measure of distance or, at a stretch, time used in Ireland) of the nightly, sumptuous, 14 plate tasting menu provided by yer woman. It was only after years of observing which substances actually satisfied their plea, booty which was then stored under their arms and carried back to their lairs for private consumption, that I was able to translate it fully from teenage-speak to human-talk. What the phrase actually means is, ‘Is there any sugar?’ Not your standard bag of Tate & Lyle or McKinney’s, though; what they are after on their raids on adult territory is sugar that has been processed and packaged and coated and dipped and encased and rolled and submerged in chocolate (best-case scenario) or (worst-case scenario) in some vaguely healthy-looking cereal or grain. As for actual food, they will (mostly) eat that when forced to, but their basic fuel is the white gold of Western Society. Hence the pimples, which sort of serves them right, I feel. They will also eat fruit, but that is just sugar in a different packaging basically. While marketed as healthy to the rest of the world, it is anything but for us diabetics, and has wrecked my blood-sugar records on many an occasion. I should point out that this foraging for white powder is standard behaviour for the teenagers previously known as my children; it is not as a result of the lockdown.

How are you getting on with the lockdown in whatever country you are in? I presume, unless the country is Antarctica [not actually a country, Phil; it’s a continent – Ed.], that you are in lockdown, and restricted, like me, to one non-essential trip per day for essentials. I no more needed to go out to the shop this morning than the man in the moon, but out I went anyway because I wanted to get more fegs and cash to pay the wee boy down the lane for the plumbing work (see previous post) so that he can’t spend it on his non-essential trip to the shop for essentials – some shops do not want cash now in case we hand over Covid-19 to them on our notes, in case that had you confused. Yer woman caught me going out the door, though, and interrogated me as to what I thought I was up to, me being an at-risk group of one and all. She is an Irish Mammy, after all, and worse than RTÉ sometimes with its dire warnings about not going out because it’s going to be a bit windy. I didn’t mention the fegs – have I mentioned yet that one can never, ever, have enough emergency packets of cigarettes stashed about the house in unusual places in preparation for that three o’clock in the morning emergency nicotine hit when the all-night garage in Antrim is just too much of a drive away? She bought the line about the cash for the wee lad, and then burdened me with a list of three further essential items that, apparently, are not already breaking the shelves in my cupboards. To wit, potatoes (check), mature cheese (pushing it) and white wine (ah, come off it!).

Tomorrow I shall expound on the flexible and ever-expanding nature of the meaning of the word ‘essential’. For now, it appears to be lunchtime: I wonder is there anything to eat?

freeirishpoems

Day 7

Social Distancing

I have always felt half-Spanish. The left half, to be precise. Of me, ya tool, not of Spain! The left half of Spain is basically Portugal, apart from that wee bit up in the corner that nobody goes to. Although I am right-handed, it is my left hand that, generally, does all the Spanish work like smoking and drinking coffee and making ambiguous gestures; the right hand usually being occupied with writing or mousing or making unambiguous gestures. Speaking of mouses (yeah, I think so; ‘mouses’ for the plural of the computer asset, ‘mice’ for the animal), in what can only be interpreted as a blatant act of rebellion against the increasing herd of wireless mouses roaming the house, the cat brought a live one in the other day for our delectation. She is too well fed to actually eat the things; she either leaves them dead outside the back door to prove what a great guard cat she is, or brings them in alive in her mouth and then releases them. She is a teenager now, so this is either an attempt to illustrate her growing independence by demonstrating that she can source her own entertainment and is not reliant on the various wee soft balls and bits of string we sometimes throw in her general direction (if only the resident teenagers would take the hint; they still rely on me and part-time wife to throw metaphorical balls of string at them – c’mon lads, learn to entertain yourselves and leave your parents alone to fully concentrate on their daily argument), or something altogether more mysterious and sinister.

Although the cat sometimes thinks she is human, and should therefore have access all areas, even – or especially – when a human is using those private rooms in the house, I suspect that she sometimes also thinks that we are cats. And the releasing of live mice is classic cat mother training behaviour: she is trying to teach us how to hunt, because she just releases the wee, timorous beastie, gives it a desultory tap with her paw to get it moving and then slinks away from the scene, leaving us to catch it. She keeps an eye on how we are doing from a distance, though, and will deign to intervene if the mouse happens to get into an interesting nook or cranny where we cannot reach it. (The hacienda is full of interesting nooks and crannies: we had them specially designed in at enormous cost.) This particular hunt was a quare handling, with monk seats by the front door having to be lifted up, revealing various mounds of dust (see previous post about ‘clean dirt’ and not taking pictures off walls in country houses) and the odd final electricity reminder. On the bright side, I did find that glove that has been missing for two years – I wonder where the other one is now? I even had to get the part-time wife involved on guard duty for the stairs while I cornered the wee bastard, lifted it up and chucked it out into the ‘street’. (For an explanation of the meaning of ‘street’ in the country, where there are no streets, just lanes and roads, contact this site’s marketing manager in the messages section.) The cat strolled over to it, ascertained that it was dead and therefore of no further use as a play thing, and then shimmied away as nonchalantly as an IRA man after a knee-capping. I think we passed the test.

But, anyway, back to Spain and siestas, and how best to incorporate one into my new working routine forced upon me by my employers due to the Kerfuffle. I think the tactics should be as follows.  Get up early before the rest of them start (I do this anyway) and create a burst of activity through emails, Skype, Yammer, whatever you’re having yourself to create the impression that I am doing shed-loads of work. Once that is done, the rest of the time up to lunch will be filled replying to the replies to the emails, Skype messages, Yammer posts and what have you. Then, after lunch, siesta, obviously. Back down to the East Wing then to the workstation around the time everyone else is feeling the three o’clock slump and filling themselves with chocolate (not available to me as I am a diabetic, but note to Boris: is chocolate an ‘essential’ for the others not lucky enough to be diabetic?) to hit them with another blast of ‘activity’ just when they are not expecting it, then sit back and relax and wait for the replies to seep, not flood, in; while waiting I can catch up on my research work on various internet sites. The trick then is not to start replying to the replies until about 4.53 approximately, and to keep on replying to them – intermittently – until around 6.24, or whatever imaginary number I am going to put on my flexi-time sheet today. (Previously, when I turned up in an office, I was supremely delighted to avail of the superbly malleable flexi-time system; but my current system, while based on it, needs a new moniker: bendy time is my best attempt so far.) This way, all concerned will be of the (correct) opinion that I have done a full day’s work, and they do not need to know the details of my Spanish siesta after my Irish lunch.

So, then, lunch. And no need to get undressed after it today. (Too much information?)

freeirishpoems

Day 6

Social Distancing

One of the advantages of the Kerfuffle is that I do not have to give up smoking. Which is really handy as, because I am working from home, I am smoking sheds more than usual during office hours: I just do not really have the personal discipline needed to force myself up from the comfy, leather armchair in the study in the East Wing and make my way to the designated smoking area just outside the mutility room in the annex (or in the mutility room if it is raining). So I sit here with a laptop on my … lap, actually … a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. As I frequently say, if that diet is good enough for French women, it is good enough for me. Vaping, you say? Or electronic cigarettes, as we early-adapters still call them. Yeah I smoke them too, but, as my man Woody pointed out, even were I not a smoker, I would have taken them up anyway just to annoy people in the office. (This was in the days when they were still permitted in offices, pubs and restaurants before the Gandalf gang started using those massive, cloud-creating devices with their weird flavours: even I would agree that that sort of behaviour is better done out in the cold where all hipsters should be kept by law.)

I better talk you through the economics of this whole not-giving-up-smoking-because-of-the-corona-virus scenario. Like I said, since starting the social distancing, working from home malarkey, my tobacco consumption has increased to admirable proportions. And I can’t really afford it. But, wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, I crunched the numbers last night and the amount of money I am saving on diesel by not driving to work five days a week is almost exactly equivalent to the cost of my weekly addiction. One of my weekly addictions, but more about that anon. So, result! No need to give up the weeds, and, as an added bonus, I reduce my carbon footprint while increasing my carbon lungprint. What’s not to like about that?

I have already made my one essentials journey to the supermarket today. Cigarettes, Private Eye (the toilet paper edition), crisps for the resident teenagers, two batons (the French bread, not the personal protection equipment) and another wireless mouse. If I buy any more wireless mice (?mouses?), the cat might decide to leave home. But with three resident teenagers (two according to English-language rules) also working from home, a part-time wife working part-time in the kitchen and me hogging the study with the laptop and the Mac, nobody could be arsed using a mouse that has to plug in somewhere, so we all need one each, hence the mouse infestation chez moi. On this point, while ‘working from home’ and ‘doing housework’ are in the same semantic region, someone needs to point out to the part-time wife that they are not exact synonyms. So, no dear, I cannot put a coloureds wash on or get those shelves put up just because I happen to be in the house. Sure I have to move this memo from one folder to another folder on Sharepoint, and then there is the update to the update to update, and after that I need to put aside a good half an hour to delete emails from my employer giving me advice about how to make the most efficient use of my time while working from home. And, after all that, I’ll have to make myself look presentable for the weekly video call on Teams. And then I still have to figure out the optimum time for incorporating a Spanish siesta in my new working routine. I’ll need a coffee break after all that, obviously. So the shelves and the dirty clothes will just have to wait. Or, here’s a thought, since the idea behind the part-time wife working part-time was that she would then have time for looking after the house and the resident teenagers while I work all the hours God gives me to keep the family in cigarettes, maybe she should put on the coloureds wash? And shelves are over-rated anyway: the floor is a much safer storage space.

One other advantage of the Kerfuffle (thank you for your patience) is, of course, this: we no longer have to visit relatives, particularly not the older ones. They were always the most tricky anyway. I am slightly concerned, however, that Boris has decreed that the five-week-old child of my nephew has to be a Pagan for the foreseeable future. I am not even sure what Pagans believe, and I wouldn’t want him getting hold of the wrong end of the stick (sticks are involved, as far as I remember) at the start of his spiritual education. You didn’t think that one through, Boris. Stick up a government website there outlining the major beliefs and practices of Paganism so that my nephew can be sure he is doing it right.

Oh, clothes: a fedora hat and a duvet. That’s it, not even any pyjamas under the duvet.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 5

On the 7.2 seconds commute to work this morning from my bedroom in the West Wing overlooking the lough to my study in the East Wing sheltered by the wood, a thought struck me. I know, I know, leave the thinking to the wee, small hours of the late afternoon, Philip; you are much better at it then. But the commute to work was much longer than usual today – there was a bit of a snarl-up on the stairs – and, in my defence, I was not actually thinking; as I said, the thought struck me. (Don’t worry, the whiplash claim is already in, and there is also a distinct contusion on the lower, left temple where the actual striking occurred, and this blemish on my otherwise perfect appearance may well cause me severe psychological anxiety which the court will be asked to take into consideration when it is deciding on the level of compensation to be awarded.)

The thought was this: now that the Trustees have released the lunatics from the asylum, they might find it rather difficult to get us back in again once Covid-19 has blown away to haunt some other planet. The whole nine-to-five, everyone must be seen to be at a desk in a central location illusion has surely been knocked completely on the head by this … this … (I am searching for a word here; amuse yourselves in the meantime, it won’t take long) this … Kerfuffle. That’ll do it, kerfuffle: I would have used Emergency but that is ©Irish Government as its term for World War II. When I used to do an actual 30 mile commute to work, I would say to the part-time wife who would, two and a half days per week, be in the passenger seat beside me (hence her part-time status; not only can I not get a full week’s work out of her, she is sometimes less than thorough in the execution of some other wifely duties), ‘Here, part-time wife,’ I would say, using her formal title as we would be in a pre-work situation, ‘here we are again, stuck in a traffic jam on the Hill Section because of this continuing madness that decrees that everyone has to start work at nine o’clock in the same central location.’ Generally, having a bit of sense, she would not reply as, from years of experience, she knows that all I need for one of my rants is a captive audience; actual audience participation is an added extra. I would then go on to expound on the stupidity of it all, and progress to outlining some of my innovative plans to solve the problem. (I will leave those for another post, as the problem no longer exists except in the past, which itself does not exist.)

So the thing is, as Boris keeps on saying because my second cousin (once-removed) tells him to keep on saying, we’re all in this together. Those of us who are now not part of the daily charade of driving to an office at the same time as all the other worker ants, and killing the planet with the emissions from our car exhausts as we do so, have an important, civic duty to demonstrate clearly that working from home not only works, it is much more efficient than the previous model. If we succeed in this – and there is no earthly reason why we shouldn’t given that we will not be distracted from our actual work by Julie from Human Resources asking us to fill in a survey on how satisfied we are with the new colour-scheme of the workstation partitions – we will then have empirical evidence to present to the Trustees when they try to stuff us back into our asylums when the kerfuffle is over. ‘Here, Trustees,’ we can say, using their formal titles as we are in a work situation and foregoing the more informal, derogatory soubriquets we use for them at coffee break with our fellow drones, ‘have a look at how much more work I did when working from home. Do you really want me to turn up at headquarters again and waste most of my time in meetings that never come to any conclusions, or decisions, and faff around talking to colleagues and letting people know on the staff intranet what work I would be doing if I was not spending time writing on the staff intranet about what work I am doing? Is that what you really want, Trustees?’

Or we could just refuse to go back to barracks when they call us in. Pretend that we never got the memo sort of thing, but continue to do the work. Whatever, and as the other guy said the other day in the daily stand-up comedy show hosted by Boris, it’s on us. So, if you are working from home today while reading this (on your break, I might add), remember you are not on your own. If you do not get that spreadsheet completed in half the time it would normally take you to in the office, you are letting the rest of us lunatics down for the Post-Kerfuffle scenario in which working from home is the new black, and the Hill Section of the M2 is a roller-skate park for teenagers. (That was one of the solutions I mentioned earlier, but the part-time wife never thought that was a goer.) So, c’mon drones, get the finger out and do a bit of work work! There will be plenty of time in the late afternoon for staring out the window at the squirrels frolicking in the high branches of the trees in the wood, acting the eejits and delighting in their secret knowledge that they are already immune from this disease. Squirrels have always worked from home.

I note that the new term for working from home is now ‘remote working’. I would suggest that this is because those who were previously granted the privilege of availing of it did nothing remotely like work while so doing. (On edit, I realise now that I have already done this joke, but I feel it bears repeating. I promise not to do repeats in future.)

What am I wearing today? A Hawaiian shirt, beach shorts, flip-flops and dark glasses, which makes it hard to see the screen so please excuse any tpyos. And I have just read medical advice advising me – and everyone else, presumably – to sunbathe as a preventative measure to fight the beast. Sunbathe? In Ireland? In March? But at least I am wearing the appropriate gear.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 4

As this is becoming somewhat of a sartorial advice blog (which was not my intention when I started it – when I find out what my intention was when I started it, I will let you know), I’ll kick off by letting you know that today I am wearing full Sunday best. That is, a three-piece suit (non-matching waistcoat to hint at how ‘radical’ I am), white shirt and formal brogues. As the suit is light blue (aren’t they all nowadays?), the shoes are brown – I cannot stand that brown shoes with dark suit crack: who thought that was a good look? The shirt, while formal, is collarless so that no one can demand I wear a tie with the outfit. Ties are so 20th century. Interviews and funerals, those are the only two occasions appropriate for ties anymore. One more point; the suit actually fits me. Whoever is advising the young men I see walking about in suits obviously two sizes too small for them is either having a laugh or was born blind. But are there no full-length mirrors in these young men’s houses where they do the final check before they go out the door, simultaneously tapping two pockets to check they have keys and wallet on them? Obviously not, or they would be as appalled as I am at the sight of a simian-type creature dressed in ill-fitting human clothes with bulges showing in all the wrong places.

The concept of Sunday best will probably soon join those other aspects of life like record players and film for cameras that I have to explain to my children in their weekly social history lessons. When we used to be allowed to go to Mass (-7PC), I would note the diminishing number of old men decked out in the full whistle and flute garb, straggling hair plastered down over the bald spot on the back of their heads, bright red neck bulging out over a collar starched to within an inch of its life. Mind you, having seen the state of their clothes during the week, their suit was probably the only clean thing they had left in the wardrobe come Sunday. But, for those men, after their weekly wash on a Saturday night (whether they needed it or not), Sunday Mass was an occasion marked by pulling on the fresh set of underwear that would do them for the week and clobbering up in the full suit and tie attire. Like the pint after Mass and before lunch, this band of dapper pensioners will soon go the way of all flesh, and join wrist watches, tape recorders and washing dishes by hand in the history bin. I will miss them. The men, not the dishes.

So here I am, all dressed up and – increasingly – nowhere to go. Why the suit? Well, why not? It will confuse the resident teenagers and break the monotony a bit. (An interesting – to me, anyway – linguistic side note: for Irish speakers, the teenage years begin at the age of 11 and not the 13 prescribed for the monoglot English speakers amongst us; whether or not this means that Irish-speaking 11-year-olds display those annoying traits of teenagers two years before their linguistically-challenged contemporaries is the subject of my up-coming PhD thesis, to be jointly supervised by the schools of Celtic Studies and Sociology at QUB, if it ever opens again.)

Also, and wouldn’t you know it, the plumber turned up yesterday! And me wearing a dressing-gown so tatty that Arthur Dent would have been proud of it. Yip, after six months of waiting to get the downstairs shower fixed (see references to ‘bathroom permitting’ in previous posts), we gave up on the ‘real’ plumber and asked the wee lad down the lane to do it; I am not even sure if he is fully-qualified yet, but I do not care as I now have a working downstairs shower in a room off my study and, as yet, the resident teenagers do not know it is operational again, so I can skip the queue for the upstairs one and wash myself whenever I feel like it – except on Saturdays, of course. As men are allowed to pee in the shower as well, this means my en-suite study is – nearly – fully set up for when my family ramp up the social distancing and stick me into a cocoon because of my diabetes. They can also leave food out for me on one of the windowsills if they want, so that is that sorted. As for the other thing … maybe, to be delicate about it, I can retrain my bowels to operate during the wee hours of the morning, meaning I can sneak out of my cocoon study to the toilet half a metre away along the corridor in the east wing of the hacienda and not risk catching anything off the other residents, who are not in an at-risk group. Oh the joys of this brave, new world.

So the suit covers me (do you see what I did there?) in case the electrician turns up today. But there is as much chance of that happening as there was of the real plumber turning up yesterday. If anyone is looking for career advice for their children after Armageddon, send them to one of the trades: they will never be short of work, and, with the amount of moolah they will earn, they will probably be able to afford a private tutor to teach them all they ever wanted to know about the nuclear physics/soap opera studies/comparative linguistics they thought they wanted to study at university.

The suit is also an indication that, despite it being the weekend, I am actually going to do some work work today. I have figured out that, as I know what the boss will be asking me to do, if I have it done in advance but do not tell her that, when she asks me to do it on Monday I can agree wholeheartedly and negotiate a deadline of early Tuesday morning for it, thus leaving me free to implement my next social experiment: incorporating a Spanish siesta in my working-from-home day. I’ll let you know how I get on with that.

I have just noticed that my organisation has ditched the term ‘working from home’ in favour of the new ‘remote working’. The cynic in me insists that this is because those senior managers who previously availed of the opportunity denied to us plebs did nothing remotely like work while they were working from home.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 3

It is Saturday, apparently: it is already getting hard to tell the days apart. Maybe, hopefully, we get spared the daily Boris bluster on Saturdays? Although he can be quite amusing. Yesterday he defined going to the pub as ‘an ancient, unalienable right of free-born British people’. Funny, I do not recall seeing that right in any of the international statements of human rights, nor even in the Magna Carta. And what about those British people still apparently labouring under the yoke of slavery? Are they not allowed a swift one or a drop of the cratur to temper their miserable existence?

Saturday, so. That does away with both the shower conundrum and the dressing gown enigma. Since moving to the country, I have been introduced to the refreshing concept of ‘clean dirt’. Maybe because they are surrounded by so much real – and dangerous – dirt (slurry, slurry and slurry, in that order), the natives have a fairly relaxed attitude to things like cobwebs and dust that send some city-dwellers into a frenzy of cleaning. Never take a picture off a wall in a country house: while the amorphous, grey mass sticking to the wall behind it could, at a stretch, be a class of abstract art, the bean an tí does actually get a bit embarrassed if you expose it, especially if she is your mother-in-law and already wary of your sophisticated, city-slicker ways and notions.

This notion of ‘clean dirt’ extends too to the human person. Apparently, you can ‘wash yourself too much’, and, especially if you have not been playing in enough ‘clean dirt’ during your childhood, further deplete your body’s natural resistance and immune system. I am more than game to go along with these notions as they mean I have no hoovering duties to speak of, and dusting is becoming a quaint tradition practised in that different country called The Past. In an attempt to integrate myself with the locals, therefore, a Saturday shower would be an act of rebellion and make me stand out, and for the sake of community relations, I am willing to forego the daily ablution.

As for getting dressed, you can only find my house if you get lost, so there is no real point in putting on any other attire than the tatty bathrobe as I am 99.7% certain there will be no visitors to deal with today. Sure I would only be taking the clothes off again in about 15.2 hours, so what’s the point? And, as there are no shops or pubs or gyms to go out to, clothes would seem to be an extravagance too far.

I will wash my hands though.

freeirishpoems

Social Distancing

Day 2

To shower, or not to shower? That would appear to be the question. Normally – bathroom permitting – not an issue at all, but given that for the first time I will be moving a total of four metres (mostly vertically) to get from my bed to my work station, is it really worth the hassle? And then, with all this social distancing going on, personal hygiene is not the priority it once was, surely?

I say ‘for the first time’ because, although this is Day 2 of distancing myself socially, emotionally and spiritually so far from my workplace that I do not plan to go near it for the next three months, embarrassingly I had to show up there yesterday, having forgotten on the last working day PC (Pre-Covid) to take the charger for my laptop home with me.

When I was there, I went into town to get a few essentials – cigarettes, cat food, a wireless mouse – and did my civic duty by not attempting to buy any toilet roll. There wasn’t any anyway. Belfast was a bit of a ghost town, a smattering of pedestrians about the place (maybe the rest of them are still at work passing the virus on to each other?) and any shop or business I went into had weird new rules about queuing a metre behind each other and only approaching the till when summoned. As a practised eavesdropper, I can report that 99.2% of the conversations concerned bore-oh no-virus: not much material there for the novel.

Even if I do – bathroom permitting – have a shower, another quandary then presents itself: to bathrobe, or not to bathrobe? Do I really need to go to the bother of getting dressed to sit in my own study in the middle of the countryside with a laptop on my knee? But the boss might decide to do one of those video-conference calls, and the bathrobe is a bit tatty. I could probably get away with it by making sure the camera only shows me from the neck up.

I am beginning to appreciate how much Covid-19 has affected our lives. Normally I do not do any thinking at all in the mornings – late afternoon is much better for that kind of stuff, I find. It’s usually just wake up, cigarette, coffee, second cigarette, diabetic drugs, shower, second coffee, third cigarette and into the car and off to work. Oh, I usually get dressed at some point in the routine too; generally after the shower. But here I am this morning stuck in the whole shower/no shower, bathrobe/no bathrobe conundrum. As they say, life will never be the same.

Mind you, it is only 6.26am, so maybe I should just go back to bed for an hour or two? The laptop isn’t going anywhere (now that it’s fully charged) and will still be waiting for me when I re-wake up at a more respectable hour. Problem solved! See you tomorrow.