The Mentality of the Sexes is Equal

“The Mentality of the Sexes is Equal” was the name of the last formal debate I ever took part in. That was back in the spring of 1982 and I still remember it because the result proved our debate coach wrong. He explained to us that no matter what the subject was, we could find an argument for or against it. And if we argued skilfully enough we’d win.

We were an all-boys school and had spent two years preparing our attack on the national debating finals in the only sport my school took seriously. We came up against an all-girls school in the regional finals, which we expected to be a small pit stop on our way to national glory.

I know I’m not an objective reporter on this issue, but I’m convinced that we smashed them that night. Unfortunately, we were arguing in favour of the motion and the debate was being judged by an all-male journey. They awarded victory to the girls and their explanation proved that not all arguments are winnable. Middle aged men can’t see beyond the prettiness of seventeen year old girls and the mentality of the sexes is certainly not equal.

But recent events would suggest that my old debating coach may have been right. Take Brexit, Trump or Corona Virus policy. You can take either side of these arguments with righteous passion. I joined Twitter recently because I got really annoyed by something I heard on a podcast and realised that the only way I could tell the guy how wrong he was, was to register for Twitter and tell him what I thought.

We ended up arguing about whether a certain body of water was a fjord or a drowned glaciated valley. That’s the sort of thing that becomes important to you when you’ve been stuck at home for 49 days, like I have been.

Both of us could find Wikipedia articles to back up our claim. And you can do that for pretty much every argument. At the moment twitter is all about Covid 19. It’s hard to find any comment that doesn’t reference it. Everyone now seems to be an expert on epidemiology and virology, words that people couldn’t pronounce, never mind spell three months ago.

You can see this most in comparing death rates or case numbers by country. New Zealand is generally held up as best in class when it comes to dealing with this disease. We went into lockdown earlier in the cycle than other countries, focussed on contact tracing and effectively closed our borders. But you’ll find lots of comment on line that put this down to New Zealand’s remoteness and lack of density. These people don’t seem to realise how many flights a day come into Auckland from China (or used to at least) and how densely packed many parts of Auckland are.

But I don’t engage in these arguments, because what’s the point? Very little in these virus times can be proven to be 100% right or wrong. Every country seems to have a different approach to dealing with Covid. I can have an opinion on which is best but it’s only an opinion. I can’t prove that the New Zealand approach is better than Australia for example. New Zealand has tighter controls, but maybe Australians are more compliant and more relaxed controls would come up with the same result.

But one thing that can be said with certainty is that none of these opinions have arisen in a vacuum. You talk about Covid 19 restrictions based on your personal likes, dislikes and biases. Many Trump fans in American are Libertarians who can think of nothing worse than a centralised government forcing them to stay at home. Brexit fans in the UK didn’t like being told what to do by an unseen and unaccountable government. In both these countries, you’ll see the greatest protests against the lockdowns and I reckon that if you drilled down far enough, you’ll find that Trump voters and Brexit voters make up most of these protests. I also think that climate change deniers make up a large part of this group too. The Venn Diagram between climate change deniers and Brexit and Trump fans is single circle.

I think this comes down to individualism versus collectivism. Some of us believe that we are part of a community; that we can only improve in life if we all improve. We are the ones who are happy to stay at home, to take the government’s advice on social distancing and to be good little compliant citizens. Unfortunately, we’re are also the ones who look snootily down our nose at our less compliant neighbours and write letters to the paper to inform on sun bathers and other people who looked like they were having too much fun.

Those who consider themselves as primarily individuals are less compliant. They see the shadow of totalitarianism over them. They seek out conspiracy at every turn. And if they are healthy they can’t see the sense in a full lockdown. We all know these people, the ones who will make no effort to swerve when they approach you on your daily walk. The ones who sneer at others wearing masks.

The easiest place to spot this is on Twitter. Collectivists will have similar people following them and get mostly positive responses. But the individualists are always waiting to pounce on a slip and bring up half researched facts to back up their case. The place you see this most is when people compare one countries approach to the virus to another’s. No two countries are the same, not just in terms of population, but also demographics and culture.

That doesn’t stop people having an opinion. I’m no different. I have my view on which country is doing better than others. But it’s only an opinion. But despite what I might think, I’ll keep giving it, because what else can we do when we’re all locked in our house with a laptop and nothing to do.

Rumours of my demise were greatly exaggerated

I used to think that Doctors were infallible. They could look into your mouth and tell you that you had strep throat. Tap your knee-cap with a hammer and diagnose rheumatism and most importantly give you a sick note when you need a day on the sofa under a duvet.

I learned recently that they are as fallible as the rest of us. I got a phone call twenty eight days ago to say that a routine scan had noticed something awry on my right lung. It’s four weeks since then and it’s been a rock and roll journey ever since. I’ve had scans, blood tests and a biopsy. Been diagnosed and then un-diagnosed with cancer. Told I might have a lung inflammation, then told I haven’t, then told I have it again.

But if you are going to be mis-diagnosed then it’s better to be told that you have cancer and then told that you don’t. It’s much better than the other way round. I was sent for a biopsy to see what type of cancer was swirling around my lungs. It brought me back to the dark days of 2010 when I was operated on, scanned and filled with chemotherapy drugs. In the midst of all that I remember how kindly you’re treated in the cancer system. The nurses and doctors in that system all seem to have a great sense of humour, which I suppose they need to have because of the work they do.

Despite their best efforts, biopsies are not fun. I had to lie on my stomach and stay perfectly still for twenty minutes while a needle was stuck into my back and sent on a journey through my rib cage and into my lung. They took four samples and the weirdest thing about the whole procedure is that I heard a loud snapping noise each time they did it, as though there was pair of fisherman shears deep within me that was cutting through bailing twine.

Three days later the specialist who had told me that I had cancer called me with good news. She said the biopsy wasn’t showing traces of it. The rest of the call was a bit of a blur to be honest. She mentioned something about getting the opinion of other radiologists. The most important message was that I should cancel the oncologist appointment I’d made.

What she didn’t do was apologise for the original diagnosis and the fact that it put me through two of the darkest weeks of my life. I’ve had cancer before of course and came through it. But that was testicular cancer, the one with the best survival rate. I convinced myself then that it would be the end of Cancer. You can cut out a whole testicle and be sure that you’ve got all the nasty stuff. With other cancers, you have to cut around the tumour and never be certain that you’ve caught everything.

When I got the news two weeks ago that I have a lung tumour, I was devastated. I’d gone from the cancer with the best chance of survival to one with the worst survival rate. In the ten years between the two cancers, I’d gotten married and had a daughter. The thought of telling an eight year that the big C had returned scared me, not least the fear that it would kill me and that she’d be left without a Dad.

It led to several sleepless nights and days filled with dark thoughts. All around me, the world was starting to get to grips with Covid 19. I hardly thought about the virus during those weeks while I lived within my own private hell. I think I handled it by trying to push as much of it out of my head as possible. It was probably not the smartest thing to do from a mental health perspective even if it did help me to get to sleep.

Now I feel like I’m not sure I have processed the fact that I had cancer to be able to process the fact that I don’t. My brain seems to be a month behind the real world.

That world, of course, is obsessed with the Corona Virus. I’m not sure if that has helped or hindered me over the past few weeks. I guess there is only room for so much anxiety inside your head at any time.

It now appears that I have Sarcoidosis, a word I didn’t even know until this week, even though it has been in my medical records since 2010. That’s a lung inflammation that seems to affect Irish people and Africans at a disproportionate level. Nobody knows why. But perhaps it explains why Jimmy Rabbit in the Commitments thought that the Irish were the blacks of Europe.

If you have Sarcoidosis, it can often sit in your lungs for years without you knowing. Expanding and contracting for reasons no one understands and occasionally making you cough or be short of breath. I’ve had both these symptoms over the years. My cough is so regular that I don’t even notice anymore. Others do and before the lockdown, I would often get strange looks in the supermarket when I’d cough in the dairy aisle and spark a Covid 19 panic.

I also get a little short of breath when I climb stairs. To be honest, I always put this down to being a fat bastard. But I’ve been working on getting fit over the last few years. I can do a 5km run and a 70km cycle. But a flight of stairs nearly kills me. So I guess I can put that down to the inflammation as well.

The doc told me not to worry about things. They will keep an eye on it and I might need a few more tests. But otherwise, I’ll clear cancer out of my head and fill it with worrying about Covid 19 like the rest of the world.

The lonely Mariner's return to the Big C

It started with a new and enthusiastic doctor who looked at my file and family history and immediately put me down as a walking heart attack. She signed me up for a scan that checks out the calcium levels on the old ticker.

I went along and got the test done, fully expecting a call two days later to tell me to give up beer and fried food. The call duly came and began with the dreaded sentence “Well the good news is…”

Turned out the good news was that my heart is healthy and the years of abuse I’ve given it have not caused the damage I expected. It was the sentence he followed up with that knocked me back. Although they were looking at my heart, the lungs are in the vicinity and the doctor noticed something nasty on the right one.

I thought I’d beaten cancer, but the truth is that when you think you’ve had the last word in an argument with this disease, you’ve actually just had the first word in the next discussion. Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. You get monitored for a decade afterwards. My tenure was due to end this September and I foolishly thought I could file this chapter away and get on with the rest of my life, only mentioning it when I wanted to court sympathy or when those Christmas conversations turn to “what was the best and worst of times in your life”.

Initially, the doctor thought it might be a latent infection. Coronavirus is the topic de jour at the moment and I was checked for all the symptoms of that. The irony is that I’ve never felt healthier. I had no pain, no swelling, no unexplained blood on the tissue, no hacking cough or other sign that something was amiss.

I was sent for a more detailed scan and that came back with confirmation that it was a tumour. I think I had anticipated this news. The day before my consultation I developed a stiffness in my right arm. It felt like I’d damaged a muscle and I could hardly sleep that night. When the tumour was confirmed the next day, the pain in my arm immediately disappeared. The mind truly works in mysterious ways.

The fact that I’ve been through this before helps. I know a lot of the terminology and I’m not setting off into the unknown. However, the fact that it has now come back indicates that it can come back again. Perhaps every ten years for the rest of my time on this mortal coil, I will be visited by the ghost of the Big C.

Things are different this time though. In 2010, I went to the doctor on a Monday afternoon and by Thursday morning I was on the operating table having my left nut removed.  It all happened in such a whirr I didn’t have time to think, or more importantly to worry about it. Things are moving more slowly this time. It’s two weeks since that first scary call and whatever it is that is squatting rent free on my right lung is still there with no date for when it is going to be evicted.

They had to do an MRI first to see if it was indeed a tumour, then a biopsy to see what type of Cancer it is. The oncologist called today to say that he’d see me in eight days’ time. I guess the thinking is that this thing has probably been in there for a while and it’s not going anywhere soon. Or maybe he’s just on holiday this week.

My doctor reckons that cancer treatment has come on a lot in the last ten years. I’m hoping this means that I just have to take one tablet with a glass of water and it will all go away. But I fear that I’m being optimistic. I think it will mean a lot more tests, surgery and then a course of Chemo or radiation that I will be told is specifically targeted at my genome sequence. One way or the other, it will be shit.

I always assumed that lung cancer was reserved for smokers, for those who puffed on Woodbines behind the bike sheds and progressed to a sixty a day habit. It seems this is not the case. I’ve never smoked a single cigarette in my life, having been put off them by my Mother who was a heavy inhaler and hated herself for it. It seems that your good old genes can also cause havoc in your cell structure. Half of cancers fall into this category, the rest into the “caused by lifestyle” ones. These are the smokers, the heavy drinkers and the ones whose diet causes issues in their stomach and gut.

My doctor explained that these people are filled with remorse when the cancer sentence is imposed on them. I expected her to say that this put me into the lucky group as I have now had two cancers that are caused by my genes and not my nihilistic lifestyle. Our group she said are filled with anger. Crying “why me” into an uncaring black night.

It’s strange for this to happen in what are uncertain times. The rest of the world is worried about Corona Virus while I sit here with my own concerns. The two will interact. I’ll probably need an operation at a time when hospital services are stretched to breaking. If I end up getting Chemotherapy, then my immune system will be shot and it’s not a good time to be like that when a virus is swooping around the world.

At times like this, you just have to hunker down, control the things you can control and try not to think about what everything else. It’s not easy but writing helps me to keep my mind off things. So, expect more random nonsense over the next few weeks.

Brexit. Is it done yet?

A couple years ago I was looking for new Podcasts as I was growing tired of the ones I’d been listening to for years.

I had noticed a trend similar to the bars in Bangkok. They lure you in with innocent promises before demanding money with menaces once you had made yourself comfortable. Advertisements started appearing with increasing regularity, pleas for voluntary donations that would shame charity muggers and teasing you with clips of what was available behind the paywall.

I found myself gravitating towards the comforting shores of the BBC. They maintain a public service principle that applies not only to the British people who pay the BBC licence fee but to those of us in their former colonies. That was how I stumbled upon Brexitcast.

As is obvious from the name, this is a Podcast about Brexit and given that it comes from the BBC it is pretty balanced. It has the rabidly pro Tory Laura Kuenssberg on one side, and the pro-European Katya Adler on the other. I lean towards Katya of course but I enjoy listening to Laura Kuenssberg because she balances up the echo chamber stuff I read in the Guardian and The Irish Times.

It means that although I live as far from the UK as possible, I’m as up to date on Brexit as a resident of Birmingham. I wonder sometimes why I’m so obsessed by it. Is it because I lived in the UK for seven years or because I grew up five kilometres from what has now become the land border between the United Kingdom and the European Community? Actually, I don’t think it’s either of these. I’m just a political nerd who loves watching a country destroy itself.

Brexit is the sort of thing that will be studied by Political Science students in years to come and their reactions will be like Economics students today who study the Dutch Tulip Mania in the 17^th Century. Amazement that people could ever be so stupid and yet strangely fascinated at the same time. It is patronising to tell the people who voted for Brexit that they are idiots. But I’d say the same about the people who voted for Trump or the ones who vote for right wing parties everywhere. And I do this safe in the knowledge that none of them will ever read this.

A British friend once told me that the biggest trick the Tories ever played was to convince the working class that they cared about them. I think Brexit trumps that. There are deep rooted problems in Britain but hardly any of them are caused by the European Union. Take immigration for example. If you scratch below the surface, those British people who don’t like immigrants are usually upset by brown people who come from ex British colonies and not Europeans. The ones who are upset by trade are annoyed because traditional manufacturing that powered the towns of Northern England has vanished. But it has moved to China and not the European Union.

Britain had a lot of problems in 2016. People used the EU referendum as a chance to protest against these issues. But none of them will be resolved by leaving. They are like a miserable teenager who yearned to leave home because they thought that their parents were the root cause of their misery. Only to find themselves in a rat infested squat with the dawning realisation that their spots and bad breadth were a bigger put off to the opposite sex than their Dad’s lame jokes and their Mother’s nagging.

They finally left the European Union on 31^st January 2020. Or at least, they moved into the next transitional stage. Leavers will boast that the sky has not fallen in, as though this was any measure of success. You could equally say that none of the promised land of independence has materialised yet. The truth is that Brexit will be a slow poison. The coal mines and steel works of Northern England will not reappear. There will be no queues of scruffy Englanders waiting to take fruit picking jobs at minimum wage.

Few things are predicable with certainty when it comes to the political and social future. But it’s hard to see how Brexit will turn out positively for the British, at least for the next twenty years or so. They may turn themselves into a Canada, bordering a huge trading empire but having a positive outlook to immigration and the World generally. But it’s more likely they will become like Singapore. Inward looking, hostile to its neighbours and a playground for the wealthy and a prison for the less well off.

I shouldn’t really care to be honest. I live in New Zealand after all. But Brexit will impact my friends and family in Ireland. That border I grew up beside is likely to become a centre of tension and hostility in the coming years.

And then there are my friends in Britain. An Irish journalist once said that the English are fine on an individual level. They only become problematic in groups, like at football matches or on ships on their way to the Falklands.

I tend to agree. Some of my best friends are English and all of them are Remainers. I really feel for them as they must think that they fell asleep on referendum night and then they woke up in a different country. It must be tough to look on half your fellow countrymen and realise that you’ve got nothing in common with them.

Brexitcast continues although they are rebranding it as Newscast as the public are sick and tired off the word Brexit, I’ll continue listening because I love the BBC and I’m a political junky. My next blog will be on New Zealand politics. Nothing as exciting as leaving the world’s largest trading block or inviting the Political wing of a terrorist group into government. But I’ll do my best to come up with something juicy.

Irish Politics for beginners

Last month I did something I swore I’d never do. I joined Facebook. I didn’t do it because I’m interested in fake news or having my personal information harvested and sold to some shady election fixing company. I did it because the drama group to whom I belong only post updates there. Group emails are too complicated it seems.

I felt dirty when I registered, as though I’d just handed over a small piece of my soul. Luckily, I had a spare and rarely used email account available, so I can separate the evil world of Facebook from my normal day to day life. It sits there in the background like an evil troll that I only see if I deliberately go looking for it.

I’m not on Twitter, Instagram or any other social media (apart from the sanitised arena of Linkedin). This is not through contempt for the modern world of communication. It’s more that I’m nervous that I’ll get drunk one night and post something that I’ll later come to regret when I’m famous. I’d hate to be receiving my Nobel Prize for Literature or Oscar for Best Screenplay, only to have the papers splash a headline the next day with my ill-advised comments on the Me-Too movement from five years previously.

Fortunately, this space is anonymous, so good luck tracking down these opinions when I’m accepting the Booker prize.

A friend at work here in New Zealand asked me to explain Irish politics. He’d read something in the Guardian and wanted to know how we ended up with parties with unpronounceable names that have swapped power for one hundred years.

I told him that Fine Gael, the current holders of the keys to power are descendants of the rich farmers who benefited from the distribution of land after the English absentee landlords were forced to give their estates back to the Irish in the late nineteenth century. They didn’t give it back to all the Irish though. Just like when the Soviet Union collapsed, those in the know got their hands on the good stuff first. Not surprisingly, these people are the most pro-British that you’ll find in Ireland which is not surprising considering they benefitted most from the British departure.

A typical big farmer would leave the land to his eldest son. If the second son was smart, he’d be sent to the seminary unless he realised that he was interested in girls before the bishop got his hands on him. Then he’d run off and join the British Civil service and end up in Delhi or some other God forsaken corner of the Empire.

If the second son was too thick to pass his Latin or Civil Service exams, he would join the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). That was the Police force that the British set up to control Ireland and particularly its property. There is a push in Ireland now to commemorate the RIC members who were killed in the Irish War of Independence. And guess what, it’s the Fine Gael party that’s pushing it. Blood it seems is thicker than water.

Those supporting the commemoration are pushing the line that every Irish person is descended from a RIC member. This is rubbish. Most of us are descended from tenant farmers and factory workers. The sort of people the RIC used to harass, not recruit from.

Fianna Fail (the other party with an unpronounceable name to Kiwis) are descendants of these tenant farmers and factory workers. They spent the 19^th century trying their best to cheat the British, so it’s no surprise that Fianna Fail politicians and supporters have problems with paying tax and respecting things like planning permission.

Sinn Fein are the other party I get asked about. They are the party no respectable Irish person would ever support because of their association with the IRA during the ‘Troubles’. If you look at the last one hundred years of Irish history, then you can see where Sinn Fine came from. Sixty per cent of the population accepted the Treaty that the British offered. This was mainly Fine Gael supporters and everyone else tired of years of War. The Civil War erupted shortly afterwards, leaving a stain on Ireland forever. When it finished, the vast majority of rebels buried their arms and became Fianna Fail. Those who still refused to surrender became Sinn Fein. The Irish People’s Front of Judea. They keep splitting of course as more and more of them join the mainstream. Eventually, it will be one man in a tree screaming about 800 years of oppression and holding onto Ireland’s last Armalite rifle.

And that leaves us with the Labour and Green party. These are the parties that most closely represent politics overseas, although the nature of Irish coalition governments is that these parties have traditionally been the junior members of government and sell their soul for a government car and a fancy office. They tend to get none of their policies put into practice but pay the price at the ballot box for all the failings of the right-wing parties they get into bed with.

Sinn Fein has never been in government in Ireland and plays on the virtue of never having made a mistake as a result. They have hoovered up all the left-wing votes in Ireland and decimated Labour and the Green Party. But that will all change when they eventually fall into the same trap and agree to prop up a Fianna Fail or Fine Gael in government. That will be the end of Sinn Fein. They know it but they’ll still decide to consume the golden apple. It is the destiny of all small parties in Ireland. They crave power and are ultimately destroyed by it.

My New Zealand friend looked baffled. New Zealand politics is a lot more straightforward. That is until you try to explain New Zealand First, the junior partner in the current three-party coalition government. But all that will be explained in the last part of my three-part rant on global politics. Next up is Brexit.

To Bee or Not to Bee

I remember the first time I was stung by a bee. I was thirty years old and walking across a lush thick grassed meadow in the Cook Islands in my bare feet. I didn’t see the bee and I guess she didn’t see me. But when I trod on her she did what bees are programmed to do. She launched the ultimate sacrifice and released her sting into the sole of my foot to guarantee that I at least would remember her passing.

I howled like a baby. Partly because I have a comically low pain threshold but also because I was on a remote pacific island and couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t trod on a creature with more fatal consequences. Thankfully my host at the time was able to confirm that it was a simple bee sting and administered a local poultice which relieved the pain in minutes.

I had reached this venerable age without a sting, not through luck, but through avoiding animals in general. I would cross the road if I saw an unleashed dog coming towards me and wave my arms like a manic orchestra conductor if a bee came within twenty metres. It’s not so much that I’m not an animal lover. I passionately hate a lot of species (the entire rodent population for example) and range from dislike to passive disregard for the rest. If truth be told, I’m not that fond of most Homo Sapiens either.

So, you can imagine how I felt when my wife told me that she was in advanced negotiations to procure a fully stocked beehive. Love conquered fear in this case and I acquiesced, although she was getting it from her Dad and it was in the back of our car before I noticed. Her Dad lives 144km from our house, so we had a scary two hour drive back with 20,000 bees on the back seat. They say the best way to expose your fears is to confront them and maybe they are right. That was probably the longest car trip of my life and every movement of hair on my head caused a momentary panic as I assumed the insect hoard had escaped their bondage and where heading my way.

When we got home, I helped carry the box of bees up to their new home with no more protection than a tee shirt and a pair of shorts. It was one of those situations when no alternative was available. The bees couldn’t stay in the car and 20,000 bees in a hive is actually quite heavy and not a job for one person.

Since then, I’ve left them to their own devices. They are far enough from the house not to bother me and they more or less look after themselves. That all changed last Sunday. I got a text from the missus to say that the bees had swarmed. She followed up with a few photos. Swarming is a process that happens when they get fed up of their digs and set off for pastures new. Most often it’s caused by a new Queen who tries to take over the existing hive, gets her ass kicked and heads off in a huff with half the colony.

The biggest fear in this scenario is that the swarm will land in a neighbour’s garden, particularly in the garden of one of those neighbours who weren’t all that happy about having bees in the area in the first place. The other fear is that they land in an inaccessible place, like the roof or near another bee keeper’s property. The salvage rules in the bee world are similar to those on the open sea. If a hive is found in a public place, it’s finders keepers.

Thankfully, in our case the swarm landed in our back yard and attached themselves to a wall above our flower beds. It’s handy being close to your food supply I guess.

But my wife was in a panic. She was on her own and had no protective gear. I had a dilemma. I had bought her a bee keepers outfit for Christmas and didn’t want to ruin the surprise. But needs must and I explained where I’d hidden it in the house. By the time I got home, she had managed to shovel them all into a box. And there they remain to this day, about two metres from the back door.

Bees are a fascinating species. They have an internal GPS system that allows them to find and return to the best feeding places and to find their way home after a 5km daily forage. That’s why you can’t move them more than 30cm at a time. Otherwise they act like tired holiday makers returning to the long term car park and wondering where they left their car.

You will notice from this missive that I seem to have built up some knowledge and interest in this particular species. I have to admit that I’m a little smitten. I find nothing more peaceful than sitting on the deck of an evening and watching all the little fellas come back from their days work and fight to get into the hive. When it gets hot many of them like to cling to the outside of the hive in a process known as bearding. When they cover the entire hive, it’s actually quite beautiful but also an indication that the hive is over extending itself. That’s one of the problems of bees. When they are healthy they keep expanding and then you need to find a friend or neighbour who will take half your colony off your hands.

I think the reason these have become the first animal I like is because you never have to touch them, feed them or pick up their pooh. But I know how long this love affair will last. The first time I get stung, that hive is going straight back to my father in law.

The Rugby World Cup is Class

I’ve always had an interesting relationship with rugby. The earliest game I remember watching on TV was an Ireland v Wales game in what was then the Five Nations. I was about fourteen and working in a pub in my home town labouring away one Saturday afternoon, cleaning ashtrays and the other general detritus left behind by the previous night’s revellers. I had the upstairs lounge to myself and while I cleaned tables I turned the television on for company.

I can’t remember the result or anything else about the game, but for some reason it has lodged in my memory. I think it’s there because it throws up the contradictions that rugby causes me. The very fact that I was working in a pub at the age of fourteen is a give away. I come from a firmly working class background where the only way I could procure a bike to get me to school was to get a job and pay for it myself.

Rugby, then as now, was played by the sort of middle class toff in Ireland that I generally despised and would have harboured dreams of putting up against the wall come the great revolution. As a child, we played soccer on the streets, Gaelic Football at school and at the local club and aped the sports we periodically saw on television, be it Wimbledon or athletics. We never played rugby. I don’t even know anyone in my town that had an oval shaped ball.

And yet, I remember being fascinated by that game. I think the technical rules appealed to my intellect and I’ll admit that the sight of eight burly men driving eight others down the pitch while the crowd howled “heave” appealed to my animal sentiments too.

As I got older, I continued to battle with class sensitivity while my friendships and amorous intentions pulled me towards the middle class. My favourite social destination in my late teens was the rugby club disco on a Saturday night, where you could meet the Doctor’s daughters who lived on the hill that overlooked the terraced house that I grew up in. 

I balanced precariously on the dividing line between my working class past and my middle class future, often falling on one side or other depending on the company I held. I was a social chameleon, comfortable singing off-colour songs at Arsenal matches, while discussing the merits of playing a forwards based game in wet weather at Twickenham with my professional actuarial colleagues.

However, it took me a long time to build up the required social capital to be a true rugby devotee. I had contacts in the soccer world to secure tickets for international matches. But getting access to rugby tickets was a different matter. They were the preserve of people who were members of clubs that would never have me as a member.

I solved this by finding a girlfriend who had social capital I could only dream of. So, it turned out that the first live game of rugby I attended was the World Cup Final in 1991. I followed this up with another visit to Twickenham the following spring to see Ireland lose 38-9 to the old enemy, England (I have to thank Wikipedia for that score as my memory is weaker than Ireland’s defence that day).

I do remember being in the toilets under the West Stand in the immediate aftermath of the match. A rotund English gent in a sheepskin jacket with a large red rosette ambled up beside me.

“Bad luck, old Chap”, he bellowed when he noticed my Ireland scarf.

My most recent direct encounter with England fans was at a soccer international and my old self kicked in.

“Thanks, but you know where you can stick your fuckin’ chariot”, I replied.

After that girl dumped me, I lost my easy access to rugby tickets but maintained my love for the game. I’ve been to most of the great stadiums of the world to see the oval ball game played and it has provided me with some of my best days out.

And now I find myself living in New Zealand, a country supposedly obsessed with rugby. I thought I would become immersed with the game in the way I was with AFL when I moved to Melbourne. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

To start with New Zealand is not quite as fascinated with rugby as people overseas think.  The Maori and Pacific communities are into rugby league. The Chinese and Indians are into basketball and on-line gaming and many white parents are keen on their kids playing soccer.

The country only really gets into rugby when the All Blacks are playing and even then, the expectations that it will be an easy win takes away some of the excitement.

I’ve also noticed that I’m only really interested in international rugby. The Super 15 is the primary club competition in this part of the world, but I wouldn’t watch one of those games if it was played in my backyard.

Then the World Cup came along. This is the first one I’ve witnessed in New Zealand and the first one that Ireland went into as number one in the world. It was all looking good until the country of my birth and the country I live in came face to face in the quarter finals. The Auckland papers were full of references to Leprechauns and ginger haired Guinness drinkers in the week before the game. Ireland was patronised and written off before the game in a way that no other team would be. I had my reply all ready for posting if and when we won the match. It wasn’t to be, but sport is a fickle mistress as the Kiwis found out when England beat them in the semi-finals.

I’ll watch the final with a weathered eye, more interested in tactics than results. And may the best team win, as long it’s not England.