Come on the Town

The 23^rd April 1995 is a day I’ll never forget, even if I did have to look up the Internet to find that date. There was no internet back then of course, at least not to the unwashed masses like me and smartphones were ones with push buttons rather than a dial.
 

So it was the lack of instant communication that made that day memorable. I was in the middle of my last year in Luxembourg, recovering from a breakup the previous year and living on my own in a lonely apartment on Rue De Vianden. I was starting to think about moving back to Ireland as I’d been living abroad for eight years at that point. There was a vibrant Irish community in Luxembourg in which I was immersed, playing football every Tuesday night and acting with the Round Tower Players. I also frequented “The Black Stuff” pub on more occasions than my liver would like. This probably explains how I came away from three years in Luxembourg with an inability to speak French or German but with a stronger Irish accent than the one I arrived with.

In the course of this interaction I discovered that it was possible to source “The Irish Times” every Monday for a modest fee (which was actually greater than the cost of the paper). I subscribed and suddenly found that I had access to all the weekend’s sports results. I now get these on Score.ie or numerous other websites, but back then you had to wait until Monday lunchtime and the arrival of that week’s papers. I can’t help feeling that kids today are missing out on that thrill. Anticipation is often better than gratification.

Throughout the winter of 1994/1995 I followed one story with particular interest. My hometown team of Dundalk were making a charge for the League of Ireland title. That in itself wasn’t unusual. We were regular visitors to the top table in the two decades before 1995 but I had been there for all those wins. I wouldn’t be able to make it in 1995 if we made it to the last day so I needed a way to stay in touch.

As it turned out we were rank outsiders. We sat in third place and needed to win and to see the two teams above us screw up. I contacted a mate in the lead up to the last game and arranged for him to call me from the phone box outside the ground after the game was over. That’s how we did things back in 1995. You had to be organised and plan ahead.

I waited silently by my phone in Luxembourg on that faithful Sunday. Unbeknownst to me, the last game of the season turned out to be more exciting than anyone could have predicted. My team accounted for their opposition early and the crowd turned their attention to the two games going on elsewhere in the country.

News came through that one of the challengers had lost and that meant that our league win depended on Derry City failing to win their match. Due to a long injury break, their match still had seven minutes to play when our game finished. My friends were part of a large crowd waiting in Oriel Park for the result. The club sensibly tuned the tannoy system into the national radio station so the crowd (who had gathered on the pitch) could listen to the commentary. The Derry match was tied going into extra time, which would mean that we would leap frog them to the league title. Then word came across the tannoy that Derry had been awarded a penalty. The crowd in Dundalk groaned and held their breath until “It’s saved” was shouted across the tannoy. People hugged strangers, kids were thrown in the air and a rousing chorus of “Come on you lilywhites’” was struck up. The final whistle in the Derry game followed shortly afterwards and the real celebration began.

And of course, I knew none of this, marooned as I was in a distant land where the result of a football match in Ireland was of insignificant importance.

I waited and waited for my phone call until I started to believe it would never come. Then a sharp ring woke me from my slumber. My mate was at the other end trying to shout at me through a cacophony of sound. The phone outside the ground had a massive queue he said. 1995 was pre Celtic Tiger Ireland and pretty much everyone at that game would have had a friend or relative living abroad who they would want to contact with the good news.

So my mates made it to the local pub where they imbibed several celebration beers before they remembered that they were supposed to call me. “We’ve only bloody won the league” he said before recounting the highlights of the day. I left him to a night of merriment and returned to my silent living room. I was determined to party, to find somebody in that God forsaken land in middle Europe who could share my joy.

I headed out to “The Black Stuff” which was quiet, it being a Sunday. “What brings you out tonight”, Joe the Belfast barman asked. “Dundalk won the League today” I said. “What League is that?” he replied.

I finished my beer and returned to my hermitic lifestyle. I moved back to Ireland the following year and lived there for twelve years, most of which Dundalk spent in the second division and were rubbish.

It’s now 18 years since that faithful day in 1995 and for the first time since, Dundalk have a chance of grabbing the title. These days I can listen to commentary live on the internet and text my friends during the game. I may even be able to stream live video. But if we win, I’ll still feel that emigrant’s pang that I’d not there to share the joy with my friends. That and many other things are the price you pay for starting a new life.

Come on the Town!

Music in a cynical age

I read an article in today’s Guardian newspaper that suggested that Cynicism kicks in when you turn 44. I was cynical about the article to be honest because I don’t believe that everyone is the same. The world would be an even more boring place if they were. But I did start to get cynical myself around that age. I stopped watching reality TV as I recognised that it was an evil attack on my self-esteem by making me doubt my ability to cook or decorate a house. I cut back on watching sport as it became clear to me that results were decided by corrupt referees who always seemed to be in the pay of teams that my teams were playing against.

But the biggest change came about in my appreciation of music. I don’t buy much music these days, mainly because it’s actually hard to find a physical music store in the modern world. Itunes has taken over and I’m cynical about that too. When I started buying music, part of the enjoyment was the look, feel and smell of the packaging. My first purchases were back in the vinyl days, when records would come in gloriously decorated covers. Meat Loaf’s “Bat out of Hell” is one fond example and if truth be known, my only access to artwork in my teenage years came through this medium. Those record covers had a smooth feel to them and the smell was unique and made you think of happy times. You also had to pay special care to the vinyl when placing it on your turntable. This made you appreciate the music more. Nobody ever put a vinyl record on a turntable and then instantly forgot about it as we do in this multi-media disposable age.

I was disappointed when music changed to a digital format. The quality was better, but static was part of my childhood and I’m somewhat hardwired to believe that music is supposed to be played with a faint crackling sound in the background. And as with many developments in the technology space, the promise rarely lives up to reality. I was hoodwinked into replacing all my vinyl recordings with CDs on the grounds that the digital format was indestructible. I now see ‘disk error” more often than I ever had a record that skipped.

But at least CD’s came with the same artwork, albeit on a smaller scale and they included a handy booklet with lyrics and details of writers and backing singers. I’ve always been a nerd when it came to music and the first thing I’d do when I bought a new CD was to pull out the lyrics booklet and marvel at the rhyming couplets within. I was also tickled when I’d find one of my favourite singers doing backing vocals on another album, as though this had validated my choice.

Music downloaded from Itunes gives you none of this look, feel or smell. It is a sensory desert, with allowance given only to sound. Even this is not as good as it was in the old days. Back then people would pay more for their speakers than they would for the turntable. Woofers and surround sound were the buzz phrases in the 1980’s music loving fraternity. The modern music world has made a lot of noise about the improved quality of digital music, but most of it is played through tinny speakers at the back of laptops or on low quality headphones attached to smart phones. Kids today will never experience the pleasure of turning the volume button up to 11 and having the two metre tall speakers shake the foundations of their house.

I still like to buy real music in a package that I can feel and smell. The only problem is I’ve become like my Dad and think that all modern music is rubbish. I don’t think I’ve bought any new music since 2003. My only purchases in the past ten years have been of old music, originally recorded in the 1960s or 1970s. I’m ashamed to say that I frequent a shop called “Dirt Cheap CDs” in Melbourne that specialises in ten dollar specials, most of which are compilations.

There was a time when I’d sneer at compilations. My friends and I would put the characters in “High Fidelity” to shame with our devotion to concept albums and the early works of English folk artists. I remember one night in the pub when we were asked to name our top three albums. We tried to out-do each other with the obscureness of our choices, apart from one mate who declared that his favourite albums were “Queen’s Greatest Hits” and “Now That’s What I Call Music volume 37 and 38”. We scoffed at his lack of sophistication.

Now “Queen’s Greatest Hits” is exactly the sort of thing I look for in Dirt Cheap CDs. But I wonder how long that emporium of bargain music will be around because record stores are becoming as rare as hen’s teeth.

When I was back in Ireland in June, I went searching for some diddly eye Irish sounds.

I was unable to buy anything however as my go to record shop has gone out of business. Without realising it, I was a HMV devotee and bought all my music and DVD box sets from their shops in Dundalk and on Grafton St in Dublin. They have fallen victim to the global financial crisis and the growth of online purchasing. This has left my home town without a record shop at all, as HMV voraciously gobbled up all the independent players years ago. And while there must be other places in Dublin to buy music, it was beyond my investigative skills to find one.

This in hindsight is a good thing because I’d probably be listening to Phil Collins now or some other attack on good taste.

But in fairness to Phil, maybe I’m just being cynical.

Racism in Australia

I was in a pub in Dublin a few years ago with a work colleague and some of his friends. They were all well- educated middle class guys from the posh suburbs and we spent most of the night talking about football and politics. But I only really remember one thing about that night. One of them mentioned an absent friend who was a big hit with the ladies. An element of envy in their voices was clear until the subject of their friend’s latest sexual conquest came up. He had picked up a girl at a nightclub and brought her back to his flat in the well to do suburb of Blackrock. A night of passion ensued and they went for breakfast the next morning when the prospect of a second date was a strong possibility.

Then she mentioned that she was a member of the Traveller community. At this point in the story the group erupted into howls of laughter interspersed with comments such as “Are you serious, he shagged a knacker” and facial expressions that made them look like they had just swallowed a wasp soaked in castor oil.

I remained stony face and eventually this made them uncomfortable. One of them asked me what I was thinking and I said that I suddenly realised what it must have felt like to be in bar in Mississippi in 1954 when the locals found out that one of their friends had slept with a black woman.
The group were horrified. Nobody likes being called a racist because most people don’t think they are one even when they start sentences with “I’m not racist but…..”. They honestly couldn’t see the connection between how people in the South of the USA thought about coloured people and the way many Irish people think about Travellers.

I mention this because the conversation in Australia this week is all about racism and to preface what I’m going to say by pointing out that no country in the world holds the high ground on this subject, not least the Irish. You only have to watch “Gangs of New York” to see our ancestors exploits in American or to note how many O’Briens and Murphys there were in the Police Force of apartheid South Africa.

It’s ironic then that the controversy in Australia this week surrounds the Collingwood Football Club, a team that has its roots among the working class Irish community in inner city Melbourne. 

 

Australian Rules football was a sectarian battleground in the late 19^th Century and Collingwood gave a chance to struggling Irish immigrants to band together as one voice and get a start in life. And once they had that start they did what their cousins did in London and Boston. They abused and vilified the next community which was on the bottom rung and trying to climb up.

Last weekend the AFL celebrated the indigenous round, an annual event when each game of footy is supposed to be a tribute to the aboriginal players who have graced the game. In Melbourne in particular, it’s a chance for fans to think about their relationship with indigenous people, because if truth be known, the only place most football fans see indigenous people is on the sporting field.

The first match of the weekend was Collingwood versus Sydney at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The star player on the night was Adam Goodes, who as well as being a gun footballer is also one of the most articulate and well respected aboriginals in Australia. Towards the end of the game, he went to retrieve the ball from beside the boundary fence when a 13 year old female Collingwood supporter called him an Ape. He called over the stewards and she was escorted out of the ground, leaving her embarrassed grandmother behind to face the glare of 80,000 spectators who were watching the incident unfold on the big screen.

The incident had all but died down by Wednesday when the Collingwood President fanned the weakening embers. As well as being a footy man, Eddie Maguire (Irish name and it would have to be) is also host of one of those jokey morning radio shows that are as common as ragworth in Australia. The formula usually involves two blokes with a sporty woman occasionally thrown in. On Eddie’s show, they were talking about King Kong which is about to open in Melbourne.  What Eddie meant to say about it remains unclear, but what he actually uttered was one of the greatest Freudian slips since Sigmund meant to ask his wife what was for tea but actually told her she ruined
his life.

Maguire basically said that Adam Goodes should be employed to advertise King Kong. Eddie has spent the days since with a shovel, fruitlessly trying to dig himself out of the hole he has dug.
It has at least kicked off a conversation about racism which has been badly needed. I have stood in the social club at football matches surrounded by Carlton fans and heard dogs abuse being hurled at Carlton’s own indigenous players. When it comes to abusing players on the opposing team, the abuse is more subtle. Many AFL players have blemishes in their past, mainly due to earning too much money at a young age, or coming from a poor background and doing the sort of thing that is endemic in that community and would generally go unreported at a national level if it wasn’t for the fact that you were on telly every week.

To remind every opposition player of their past indiscretions would be exhausting for even the most beer fuelled football fan. But if you are aboriginal and did something dodgy when you were young then you will be reminded of it whenever you play.

This is a country that still hasn’t come to terms with it past but maybe this week and the fact that people are finally talking about this issue, suggests that a better future lies ahead.

Bruce is still the Boss

The first record I bought was “The Green Fields of France”. It was a single recorded by The Furey Brothers and Davey Arthur and I bought it sometime in the 1970’s, when I held down a pub job for pocket money. Most of my mates were into punk, ska or the other weird forms of music that were knocking around at the time. But for reasons unknown to me, I was a fan of traditional Irish music.

I didn’t pick this up from my parents. They seemed to be into the sort of country music were everybody mentioned in the song was dead by the end of the song and most of them horribly mutilated into the bargain. Our house was full of vinyl records by women who only appeared to have first names and men with large cowboy hats. My older brother, who might also have influenced me, was into a strange combination of psychedelic and heavy metal music. So if my friends and family weren’t to blame, who was? It’s not as though Trad music was cool. Its practitioners were shaggy haired drunks in thick woollen sweaters and generally the only place you could hear the music was in smoky pubs (although not the one I worked in). So I don’t know where I developed a taste for it. Perhaps it was the first awakening of my national pride.

Over the years I have drifted more towards country folk. But every now and again I wander into Youtube and bathe in some nostalgia. That led me to the guy who wrote the “Green Fields of France”; a Scottish gentleman by the name of Eric Bogle. To my immense surprise Mr Bogle and the lead singer from the Furey Brothers were booked to play at this year’s Port Fairy Folk Festival and for old time’s sake, I thought I’d better go.

Port Fairy is a lovely little seaside town in Western Victoria that hosts a dinky little festival each March that attracts folkies and aging hippies from all over Australia. All the food is authentically ethnic and people actually talk to each other in the queue for the toilet. Most people bring little chairs to sit on and many can be seen doing the cryptic crossword in The Age in between and sometimes during shows. I think it’s fair to say that everyone who goes to Port Fairy does the cryptic rather than the ordinary crossword.

So all in all, it’s the perfect music festival for people who don’t like music festivals.

We had planned to camp, but the forecast was for 35c and as we had a 15 month old baby with us, we made a late decision to book into a motel. We found a place in Warrnambool that I suspect was last used as the set for Psycho and spent two days listening to great music (my favourites were Chris Smither and Xavier Rudd if you fancy a bit of Youtube surfing). Eric Bogle and Finbarr Fury were both fantastic, although sadly neither sang The Fields.

But Port Fairy wasn’t my only musical outing in March. Last week I had to pleasure of seeing Bruce Springsteen for the 5^th time. My previous visits to The Boss had been in Ireland and Britain and were all outdoor, including his legendary gig at Slane in 1985. My only memory of that day (apart from the realisation that all his songs mentioned cars) was that my then girlfriend wanted to go up the front to join in the mosh pit. I was a timid lad even then and offered to look after her bag while she ventured forward. She returned about an hour later, covered in mud and missing her jeans. The relationship didn’t last long enough to get an explanation for that.

Bruce played at two venues in Melbourne. The iconic Hanging Rock, made famous by the Peter Weir movie and the less iconic but highly functional Rod Laver arena, home of the Australian Open tennis. Because I’m old and crabbity, I decided that Hanging Rock, being 100km from Melbourne, would be too hard to get home from late at night, so I opted for the indoor charms of Rod Lever.

The first thing I noticed was the average age of the crowd. Bruce is 63 these days and it looked like most of the audience had been to school with him. In Ireland, the profile would have been a lot younger. Irish people don’t mind following acts that their parents were into and if it’s good old fashioned rock and roll like Springsteen, then they’d love to be up the front sporting inflatable guitars as a tribute to Steve Van Zant.

The other thing I noticed is that Australian crowds at stadium concerts like to pretend that they are in Idaho or Colorado. Maybe they were just trying to make Bruce feel at home, but holding pieces of coloured card with handwritten messages is a cringingly American habit. Most were requests for particular songs, some of which he picked at random and performed, as though the concert was a late night radio phone in request show. Some were expressions of love or longing, or plaintive requests for a hug. And some were just funny, like the one that said “The Guy behind me can’t see”.

But I was willing to put up with all of that, just to wallow in three hours of majestic music. Bruce Springsteen has been a part of my life since I was sixteen when I first heard “The River”. I bought “Tunnel of Love” on cassette in 1988 and played it endlessly in my first car and I think it’s fair to say that the acoustic version of “Thunder Road” is probably my favourite piece of music.

I’m feeling older these days, but when the opening chords of “Born to Run” play like they did during the encore last week, I felt like I was transported back to 1985 and age doesn’t matter.

Home thoughts from abroad

I've been reading Browning, Keats and William Wordsworth
And they all seem to be saying the same thing for me
Well I like the words they use, and I like the way they use them
You know, Home Thoughts From Abroad is such a beautiful poem

A couple of weeks ago we went to the “Leaving Dublin” exhibition at the Melbourne Immigration Museum. This was a collection of photographs taken of people who were about to emigrate from Ireland. The accompanying stories were sad and despairing, telling of families ripped apart, economic necessity and the safety valve that emigration offers whenever Ireland gets into trouble.

I noticed that most of my fellow visitors at the exhibition were also Irish, not only from the accents but from their facial appearance. Most Australians don’t believe me, but it’s possible to spot an Irish person at 50 meters here. Sometimes it’s the ridiculous red faces from inappropriate exposure to the sun that gives them away. Sometimes it’s the GAA and Glasgow Celtic jerseys they wear (you never see anyone from Glasgow wearing a Celtic shirt, but that’s a discussion for another day).

But more often than not, it’s the freckles, frizzy hair and deep blue or green eyes that tells me that these people are Friends of Seamus. I obviously share these looks (although my hair lost its frizziness years ago) because I’ll often pass a similar looking person on the streets of Melbourne and we’ll raise an eyebrow to each other or mutter “How’s it goin’” as we pass.

We moved around the exhibition slowly and quietly. Most of us it seems, were pondering our own reasons for leaving Ireland. By their ages, many could have arrived here in the 1980s during the last deluge from Ireland’s shores. Some, no doubt, came for adventure and stayed. And some, like me, left for a number of reasons. Because we could see Ireland was going down the toilet in an orgy of consumerism and right wing politics. Because Ireland is a small and suffocating place and because there is a light beyond these woods and we should go and see what makes it shine.

That last aspect probably drove me onto the plane more than any. I’ve always felt like a citizen of the world and not tied down to a particular place. It’s a big and varied place and those of us who come from rich western countries have the opportunity to travel around it and live in many different places. Most of the world doesn’t have this luxury which makes me wonder why more people who can don’t try it. I do love my home country but I love the world too and if I could afford it, I’d live in Ireland for 6 months each year and somewhere else in the world for the rest of the time. Many people do this already, including the great and good of the racing scene and those property developers who got their cash out before the market went belly up. These guys spend one day short of six months in Ireland so that they can avoid paying any taxes there.

But unless I win the lottery, that’s not really an option. So I’ll have to make do with reading Irish papers on the web, listening to Irish radio on my digital radio or watching Irish television on DVD or on a live stream. The Internet has changed an emigrant’s life, that’s for sure. When I lived in London in the late 1980s my only connection to Ireland was through a weekly mad hatter phone call with my Mother when I would be read a list of the recently deceased on our street with a hushed summary of their past indiscretions. Occasionally, if I found myself in a certain part of the City after crashing on somebody’s floor, I’d be able to pick up a copy of the Sunday Press, which was a paper I’d never dream of buying when I lived in Ireland.

Now I can spend any free time I have indulging in Irish media or consuming goods bought from the Taste of Ireland website. Close your eyes and you could imagine you were in Connemara, if it wasn’t for the lack of rain banging on the roof or the need to wear a sleeping bag in doors.

In that respect, you have the best of everything here. The good weather, the exotic and multi-cultural food, clean streets, beaches, bicycle paths, efficient trams and trains and a health system that prioritises patients on the size of their ailments and not their wallets.

At the same time you can access a lot of the good things about Ireland from the comfort of your sofa in Melbourne. The humour that is unique to us Gaels, the story telling and intelligent writing. And curry Chips and Guinness if you look hard enough. The only thing that’s missing is the spontaneous fun you get from meeting friends and the tactile comfort you can feel from your family that is not available through Skype.

A friend here said to me that it’s actually harder to be an emigrant now because the Internet (and Skype in particular), make you feel close to home but not close enough. There is something very tantalising about a nephew’s hand reaching for a screen 17,000km away and trying to touch you.

The picture that will stay with me from the Leaving Dublin exhibition was of a young woman standing by the Royal Canal in Dublin. She was wearing a pair of vibrant red shoes. In the caption beside the picture, she said that she was bringing the shoes with her to her new life in Australia. “If I get very sad”, she said, “maybe I could just click my heels and I’ll be back in Ireland.” If only it was that simple.

Swings and a roundabout way of talking about them

Swimming Pools were a constant source of conversation in my youth.  Or the lack of them to be more precise. I grew up in a town of 25,000 people with no body of water bigger than a family bath. Ireland was a poor place back then to be fair but as we lived beside the sea; the council probably thought it was an indulgence to build a pool when God had already provided swimming facilities.

That sea was just 120km from the Nuclear reprocessing plant at Windscale on the English coast however, which polluted the water but did nothing to raise its ambient temperature from the icy levels it maintained all year round. As a result, only mad dogs and gents in wet suits ventured into it. We grew up as a town of non swimmers where the sea was as alien as deep space and we only ventured into the water when we went on holidays. Then we would flap about like drowning men (which wasn’t far from the truth) before giving up and retiring to the nearest bar. Unlike swimming pools, there were 168 pubs in the town I grew up in. So that was an area we had lots of experience in.

On the two or three occasions in my younger years when we found it desirable to visit a swimming pool (which was around the time that we became interested in girls in swim suits) we would venture over the border to Northern Ireland which was well endowed with facilities provided by the British taxpayer to placate the locals. We would then bob around for an hour or so like pasta shells in a pot of boiling water. There were no lanes in that pool because the users were mainly Southern day trippers who were unable to swim in a straight line if they could swim at all.

I’ve been thinking about this recently as my one year old daughter has started swimming and we are spoiled for choice in Melbourne. Every school here seems to have a pool and the local councils compete to have the best facilities.

But it wasn’t only swimming pools that our town lacked when I was growing up. There were no playgrounds either. Kids had to make their own fun in half built housing estates and on railway tracks. It didn’t bother us to be honest. If you’re inventive, there are lots of things to slide down or swing from and they are more enjoyable when done outside of the sanitised confines of officially constructed facilities.

Yet again, Northern Ireland was different. My grandfather died when I was five and he spent the last couple of years of his life in a nursing home in Warranpoint, a sleepy town just across the border from us. We would be piled into the car each Sunday to go and visit grandpa and while my Mother spent an hour or so with her Father, my Dad would bring me and my siblings for a walk along Warrenpoint’s foreshore.

Just across from the hospital was a well appointed park with a brightly painted playground. To my disgust each Sunday I would find the gates to the playground locked. My Dad did his best to explain. At the time, most councils in Northern Ireland were run by Protestants who had gerrymandered the boundaries to ensure that they were in power even in strongly Catholic areas such as Warranpoint.  And Protestants, he explained, wanted to respect God on Sundays by banning fun. As a result, playgrounds were shut, shops were closed and God forbid you’d try and get a drink anywhere.

This caused confusion in my five year old mind. To me, Sunday was the most appropriate day to do fun things like sliding and swinging and this inculcated my earliest understanding of the differences between Catholics and Protestants. When God said he rested on the seventh day, we took this to mean that he relaxed and what better way is there to do that than to go to a playground, watch a football match or have a beer with Friends. Protestants, or at least the fundamentalist type who lived in Northern Ireland, believed that rest involved pulling the curtains and huddling around a King James Bible.

My daughter doesn’t have to worry about any of this. There are ten playgrounds within walking distance of our house and none of them even has a gate that can be locked. She shows off her daring skills by climbing onto frames that petrify her Father and shows particular artistry in sliding backwards down slides with scant regard for what might be waiting at the bottom.

My hometown now has an Olympic sized pool, courtesy of the Celtic Tiger which also gifted almost every kid dwelling house with a backyard trampoline and assorted climbing and sliding paraphernalia. But outdoor pursuits require suitable weather and Melbourne provides more of that than Ireland.

So I can’t help thinking that my daughter is better off spending her formative years here where she can go to the park and meet kids of all colours and nationalities and play in a community environment. She might even bump into the occasional Northern Ireland Protestant and can introduce them to the concept of fun.

She loves other kids and finds them a welcome relief from her nervous and fidgety parents. Being a child is such a wonderful period time of your life. It should be spent in exploration and in the pursuit of joy. And every kid should have the opportunity to pursue these seven days a week and thankfully even in Warranpoint, you are now able to do that.

I’d like to think that on the seventh day God rested in a park, watching little children play and thinking to himself that for all its cynicism, this isn’t a bad old world that he created.

We'll keep the Red flag flying here

My Dad worked in a brewery, which was a great benefit to me when I started drinking. There is nothing like free alcohol around the house to excite the taste buds of a teenager. Just before Christmas 1981 he was working the nightshift when negotiations between his union and his employer collapsed. A picket was put on the factory gate at 6am stopping the morning shift from getting in but trapping my poor old Dad inside. When he finally left he had to put up with some abuse from the strikers who assumed that he had broken the picket. This upset my Dad greatly. He wasn’t militant in any way but he understood the power of Trade Unionism and the protection that it gave to their members.

As a result of the union’s efforts, he was paid for every hour he worked, including double and treble time when he worked nights or weekend. Which is more than can be said in my industry where people are paid “a salary” and then are expected to be on call 24 hours a day and to work bank holidays for nothing. My Dad got all that because he was a member of a union. They ensured that the brewery had a Christmas Party every year and not just the years when the company is making lots of money.

I’ve always had a soft spot for unions to be honest. Capitalism is a battle between the workers and the bosses. The bosses have the Police and the military to ensure that their interests are respected. Workers on their own will be picked off one by one by the whims of the system, through redundancy or wage reduction. Unless they are in a collective body which will stand up for them.

Saying you like unions these days however, is like saying that you like pictures of 3 year old Indonesians smoking cigarettes. It’s very 1950’s. I’m not helped, I must admit, by the behaviour of some Australian unions, who have been taken over by individuals and run as personal fiefdoms. The Health Services Union in Australia for example, is run by a family that would make the Sopranos look like a clan of Amish farmers.

Australia does seem to be particularly militant when it comes to the interaction of workers and bosses. I work near the Victorian Parliament and hardly a day goes by without the streets being filled with red shirted placard holders demanding better conditions for teachers, nurses or sheep inseminators (members of the Ancient Order of Mutton Botherers, with branches in Australia and New Zealand).

The teachers were the latest group to take to the streets. They want a 30% pay increase which sounds a lot when it’s reported like that (which is how the right wing media here went about things). But that’s over three years, so when broken down; it’s ... well, still a lot.

This didn’t elicit a lot of sympathy from parents who had to deal with their kids been off school for a day at short notice. The kids presumably were happier. These days, parents treat school as an unofficial child minder and get annoyed when the baby sitter is unavailable.

The nurses were up before that. They generated a lot more sympathy from the public but most of their complaints centred on their objection to plans to bring in untrained assistants to do clerical work. Nurses are pushing to do work normally done by doctors (presumably because it pays more) but object to assistants being employed to do tasks normally done by nurses. Presumably if they had cake, they would want to eat it as well.

It’s a shame really that unions have allowed themselves to be wrapped up in protectionism and a culture of jobs for the boys. Because Victoria has a proud record of labour support. The eureka stockade saw the formation of the first union in Australia and a statue on my way home commemorates the 8-8-8 movement which campaigned for an eight hour day. Victoria was the first place in the world to bring in the policy of eight hours work, eight hours rest and eight hours sleep. Although nobody seems to have told the banking industry or people with one year old children.

Banks used to open at 10am and close at 3pm. That was when they only serviced people within walking distance of the branch. Now banks are global, with clients in far flung countries who don’t even realise they are clients. As a result, you could work for 24 hours a day and find emails flying into your inbox demanding an instant response and phone calls from overseas at all hours of the night. Hardly anyone works an eight hour day in this environment, although it must be said that this is unlikely to garner much sympathy in the wider community. Banking is a pejorative term these days.

But I wonder what the men who fought for an eight hour day would think of this if they were able to gaze into the glass walled skyscrapers of the central business district? They would see an army of open shirted automatons toiling away to keep the wheels of capitalism greased. They would see lights on at 8pm and stressed out drones slouching towards miserably lit train stations.

The money is good it must be said, but it seems as though you sign a Faustian pact that negates all your other rights to rest and sleep. My Dad’s union would never have stood for it. If someone in my Dad’s brewery had been asked to work on Christmas Day for no extra pay, there would have been a picket placed immediately. But these days unions are considered to be a dinosaur, existing only to enrich their full time officials. It’s every man for himself now and the system will pick us off one by one. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and it’s no fun being a poodle.