Tuesday 24 November 2009

The Frog that croaked "Rob it, Rob it"

Where were you when France stole our World Cup Dream? I reckon it is our JFK moment and in years to come it will be remembered by Irish people in the same way that Mr Kennedy’s untimely death is. Millions will claim to have to been in Paris on the night Henry handled the ball and the story will be embellished with each telling to the point where the incident will have happened deep into injury time after six of the Irish players had been knocked out by a mysterious gas secreted by the French secret service.

Oliver Stone will make a conspiracy movie on the issue with Will Smith in the part of Thierry Henry and Lloyd Bridges in the role of Trappatoni.

I was in a cafe on Melbourne’s South Bank when the game went to extra time. I had a meeting arranged for 9am in an Accountant’s office. I watched the first half at home and gambled that the biggest Irish pub in Melbourne would be showing the game which would allow me to catch the last twenty minutes.

Alas, PJ O’Briens is an Irish bar in name only. I have railed on here in the past about themed Irish bars and my experience last Thursday did nothing to change my mind. PJ’s doors were firmly locked with nothing to show that they actually realised that the biggest game in Ireland’s sporting history since 2002 was taking place.

So I was condemned to buying a latte and trying to follow the game on my Blackberry. Electronic devices are getting smaller and more sophisticated. But I seem to have a contraption that is based on a 1980’s 56k modem. It is slower than the Victorian postal system (I mean the 19th Century one and not the State I currently live in by the way, although locals tell me the 19th Century postal system was better) and presents internet data in eye boggling squashed format.

However, it did somewhat add to the tension of the occasion as every time I’d press update I’d have to wait five minutes for a response. I bit what’s left of my nails and rocked nervously in my chair to the bemusement of all the other customers who were normal Australians on their way to work, ignorant of the great events unfolding at the other side of the world.

In the end I had to go to the meeting and my opportunities to check out my blackberry were limited. At 9.30am, I snuck one last look and saw the disappointing result. At that stage however, I was oblivious to the media storm that was kicking off around the world which would become so fierce that by the weekend the Australian media was doing something unprecedented. Commenting on a football match that Australia wasn’t involved in.

I followed the game on RTE’s match-tracker and they included emails they were receiving from around the world. Jim was in Buenos Aires in an internet cafe. Patrick and Lisa were in Helsinki and couldn’t find a pub showing the game. Frank was doing the Inca Trail and amazed that he could pick up the RTE website on his Iphone. Barry was in a packed pub in Boston with about 500 other guys who had sneaked out of work early. I felt a small piece of pride as I read those messages. I was part of a Diaspora spread across the globe who felt enough connection to our home country to try our best to follow the game back home, whatever our time zone or circumstance.

It’s hard to measure how many of we overseas Irish watched the match, or spent anxious minute’s texting friends back home for updates. But I’m guessing lots did. For all our success in Rugby and passion for our native games, nothing excites the Irish public more than soccer.

I brought this issue up with Yuri my barber on Saturday. He’s from the Ukraine and they had their own pain last week. But he was pretty sanguine about that. He was more interested in our dilemma. “You should invade” he said. “Those French normally surrender after two or three days. You do what the Germans did to the Austrians in 1938. Take their best players, change the country’s name to Ireland and take their place in the World Cup”.

We had a bit of a laugh about that. But actually I don’t want to do anything about it. It’s sickening, frustrating and depressing. But its football and we should just leave it at that. I don’t agree with video replays, retrospective reviews or even extra referees. For the beauty of football is in the great injustice of these moments. Why is it the sport most talked about in pubs? Why do friends not argue passionately about Golf or Tennis? Why are the Germans still talking about whether a ball was over the line 43 years ago? Why are the English still moaning about their own “Hand of God” in 1986?

The fact is that the best team doesn’t always win. Players cheat, referees make mistakes or show deliberate bias and Administrators fix things so that big teams prosper. As a result, France are in the World Cup and Manchester United win more Championships than they should. Putting up with this sort of injustice makes the good times when they come feel all the sweeter.

If it happens all the time, you have to wonder why this incident made such a furore. Is it because Thierry Henry was previously considered to be the most honourable footballer around? Was it because France was the big team and we were humble minnows? Or was it because we actually outplayed the French in a way nobody expected and this took so many people by surprise, including it must be said, most Irish fans.

As it is, we will just have to dine out for the next 20 years on the pain and hope that in that Oliver Stone movie, there is a more favourable alternative ending.

Thursday 19 November 2009

A Walk in the Woods

I used to belong to a group that could best be described as a drinking club with a small hill walking problem. We never got around to writing a constitution for our little company, but if we did, the first rule would certainly be “that all walks must terminate at a pub that offers overnight accommodation or public transport back to the City.”

We would generally leave Dublin early on Saturday mornings and head south towards Wicklow where the hills are sleepy and bathed in heather. We would then tramp for 15km or so in usually toxic weather, warmed only by the prospect of a bowl of Chowder and a pint of Guinness at the end of our ordeal.

Walking in Australia is a different stroll in the park. Everything is bigger here, from Chicken schnitzels to station wagons and walks are no exception. Once you get out of the city, you could walk for 15km and still be in the same field that you started in. To get from one logical starting point to another requires a walk of much greater distance and alas, there is rarely a pub at the end of it.

We’ve been toying with the Great Ocean Walk for the past six months. This runs parallel to the famous Great Ocean Road and hugs the coastline, offering a view of places rarely seen by tourists. We’ve had a few scary moments on these walks, not least getting trapped by the incoming tide and having to scramble unceremoniously through thick bush to get back to something resembling civilisation.

But nothing we’ve done there compares to the walk we did last weekend. We headed down to Wilson’s Prom on Thursday night after work and rested up before our big adventure. The prom sits as an odd shaped peninsula hanging off the south of Australia, like the testicles of a bull in heat. Its tip represents the most Southern point in Australia and next to this stands a lighthouse as remote as any beacon on earth.

Our plan was to stay at the lighthouse, which meant a 32km walk in and an 18km walk out. The route in follows the coastline along the sort of twisting, hilly paths that would trouble a wild goat. We set off at 8.45am, full of enthusiasm and pancakes and knocked off the first 10km in jig time. This was pretty much a downhill run to the first beach but it burdened us with false confidence. We climbed the hill at the end of the beach and had our first taste of the challenge the day would present. Hands fumbled in back packs to find water bottles which had worked their way to the bottom. Jackets were discarded and the straps on our three day packs were tightened. The early morning mist had fainted away with our confidence and the sun started its inexorable rise.

We reached the summit of the hill and the majesty of Refuge Bay lay out before us. A loan yacht bobbed on the azure coloured sea which gave the scene the air of a cast away island. When we reached the beach, we were ready for a swim and simply dropped our packs and dived in. Many Australians are reluctant to dip their toe into the ocean before the Christmas dinner has been consumed, but I have no such reservations. I’ve swam in the sea around Ireland for example, and compared to that the southern ocean is like a sauna.

After we had cooled ourselves sufficiently, we unwrapped the sandwiches that I had kindly prepared for the group. They were hurriedly consumed and followed up with some scroggin (a word I first heard in Australia and is so rare it’s hasn’t made its way to Dictionary.com yet).

We refilled our water bottles and set course for the next peak. This proved even tougher than the previous hill, partly because of the sandwiches swirling around our bellies. We finally made it across the top and down the other side towards Waterloo Beach. By now it was almost 6pm and we still had 10km to cover and although we didn’t say anything to each other, a sense of unease had settled on the group. None of us had any experience of walking through the bush at night and sundown happens pretty quickly here, so we knew that at least the last part of the walk would be done in darkness.

When night came, we found ourselves in the deepest part of the forest and it soon dawned on me that most wild animals in Australia are nocturnal. We slouched along nervously, piecing our way between the rocks and crevices by the dim glow of our torches. Every now and again a crashing sound would come from the deep bush around us and we would cower expecting a Kangaroo to come bounding across our path. At one stage, a large Wombat appeared and surveyed us nervously before sticking his head between two rocks and offering his large derriere to us in an act of defiance.

After two hours night walking that resembled Frodo’s journey in “Lord of The Rings” we finally sighted the lighthouse and thought we were home and dry. The walk however, had one more trick up its sleeve.

Like many lighthouses around the world, Wilson’s Prom sits atop an imposing cliff. We had made our way down to sea level and so the last 800 metres of our tramp was pretty much vertical. I’m reading Anthony Beever’s “D-Day” at the moment and he has a gripping chapter covering the attempts of the American Rangers to scale the cliff tops at Omaha Beach. All I can say is that our endeavour could not have been more difficult if we’d had a bunch of Germans firing at us from the top.

We finally made it and were embraced by our fellow walkers who had taken the easy way in but were in the process of sending out a search party.

We were too tired to consume any of the alcohol we had diligently carried in and we made our way to bed, to rest weary limbs and to try and banish the thought from our minds that the only way to get home was by helicopter or to walk back on Sunday. I dreamed of rotating blades and fell into a deep sleep.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

The Ghosts of Halloween Past

The Drunken Poet was busy on October 31st. Irish backpackers mixed amicably with the locals, who comprised longer term emigrants huddled over the best attempt that the Southern Hemisphere can make at a pint of Guinness.

Siobhan worked the counter like Peigin Mike in ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ with a “welcome kind stranger” for every new face that crossed her threshold. It was Halloween, but that wasn’t why the Irish had gathered. An all girl Dixie Band were knocking out the hits of Dolly Parton and that was keeping the attention of those who hadn’t come to sample Arthur’s finest.

The Irish Diaspora are big on their festivals and traditions. St Patrick’s Day gets celebrated with the drunken abandon of a sailor on shore leave and Christmas is often marked by sweating paddies cooking Turkey and Ham in tropical conditions.

Thankfully, Halloween is not something we emigrants are proud of. It is a largely Irish festival, derived from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, but like most good things in life, the Yanks have ruined it. To the rest of the world, it is now an American holiday, with oversized pumpkins and sugared up kids in superman outfits.

Australians seem to ignore it, partly because they are smart enough to see a Disney themed festival coming and also because the sun kind of gets in the way. Daylight savings arrived here in October, providing an extra hour of sunlight each evening just as the locals took the winter covers off their BBQs. The simple truth is, kids don’t look scary enough dressed as Dracula when the sun is blazing down.

It wasn’t like that when I was a nipper of course. The clocks in Ireland went back at that time of year with a ghostly suddenness, pitching the country into a seemingly endless winter. Halloween offered an eerie introduction to winter and with nothing else to do until Christmas, we embraced it with the abandon of death row prisoners.

My happiest memories from back then are from the days before I was let out of the house after dark. My mother would buy citrus fruit (as rare in Ireland in the 70’s as in Berlin in May 1945) and nuts that only seemed to be sold at that time of year. We’d crack our teeth on the plastic ring hidden in the Barnbrack and be half drowned by my older brother when playing ‘bob the apple’. He was adept at convincing you to dip your head into a bucket of water, before holding it down once it was in. Many years later my brother emulated this trick with a young lad called McNally and a regularly flushed toilet. My brother spent a lot of time in the Middle East in the early eighties and sometimes I wonder if he was there to teach the CIA how to ‘waterboard’ suspects. He was certainly a master of it at the age of ten.

My scary memories of Halloween (attempted drowning apart) came when I was old enough to wander the streets of town after dark in the company of other young renegades looking for cheap thrills. My problem was that I was desperate to be one of the gang, but had the toughness of Elton John. And I was afraid of fire and that’s what Halloween mostly involved.

Each street would compete to build the biggest bonfire, although how this was judged I never knew as nobody travelled outside their own street on bonfire night for fear of becoming fuel to the neighbour’s flames. Stories of small boys being hurled into infernos were widespread round our way and we stayed close to our lunatics as a result. For weeks beforehand, those lunatics would raid garages for old tyres, dismantle entire buildings just for the wood and gather anything that was combustible and not padlocked.

I always stood far enough back to avoid the exploding gas canisters and horizontally projected fireworks, but still went home smelling like a chimney sweep.

When I came back to Ireland as a responsible adult, I noticed that Halloween was in the early stages of being americanised. But we still maintained an element of the madness that had been a part of my childhood. The British celebrate Guy Fawkes Night on the 5th November. We Irish were never so keen on this festival, as a Catholic trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament was seen in Ireland as a sort of career ambition rather than cause to burn an effigy atop a bonfire.

However, the Brits love their fireworks at that time of year and that provides a ready supply to the Irish to celebrate Halloween five days previously. Fireworks are illegal in Ireland, but not in Northern Ireland. So enterprising businessmen set up warehouses along the border to tempt the would be pyrotechnic wizards from the South.

Alas, very few of these fireworks made it as far as Halloween, patience not being a virtue among the brain dead idiots who buy them. The first one would be let off around mid June, no doubt as a test missile and timed to coincide with that point when normal people like me are about to sink into peaceful sleep. From then until October, we would be treated to a nightly attack of random explosions notable more for their sound than colour, as Dublin became a benign version of Baghdad.

A last minute trip North would be planned on Halloween Eve, to replace the prematurely ejaculated stock. And that meant the night itself was an occasion for dogs and other easily frightened animals like me to don earmuffs and bury ourselves beneath duvets.

Many people ask me what I miss about Ireland and I have a well rehearsed list. Less often, I am asked what I don’t miss. After the weather and the obsession with property, I’d safely put Halloween third. Spend next years at the Drunken Poet and you won’t want to hear a cheap firework again.

Tuesday 3 November 2009

Working for the Yankee Dollar- Part 5

The fund managers, as is their want, turned up fashionably late. They sauntered through the door in a blur of cashmere and Italian leather and settled at the top of the table, unpacking their super trim laptops with the smugness of orchestra conductors. When it was their turn to speak, Alex, who was clearly the senior of the two by virtue of having yawned most during the previous discussions, rose languidly to speak. He carried the bored expression of a man who was being forced to tell everyone how brilliant he was when he expected that they already knew.

‘If I can refer you to slide one in your pack’, he droned while simultaneously pointing to a garish PowerPoint presentation he had just brought up on screen. ‘You'll see that the fund grew by 27% in the year under review, which was entirely in line with our predictions. Any questions?’ As none were forthcoming, he proceeded through slides two to nine which contained a colourful array of graphs and formulas.

Frank considered himself an intelligent chap but he didn't understand a word of it. But he was mindful of Eimear's earlier warning and kept quiet.

Geoffrey on the other hand hadn't spoken for while and was clearly worried that he might forget how. ‘Maybe you chaps could give us a brief oversight into your investment strategy. Lay man's terms, that sort of thing’.

Alex smiled at his colleague like the smart guy in class who was being asked to explain Einstein's Theory of Relativity. ‘Well our strategy is quite unique, we think. We buy stocks when they are going up in value and sell them when they are coming down’.

Eimear sat between Frank and Alex and Frank noticed that she seemed captivated by everything the flash fund manager was saying. She leaned forward and Alex’s gaze was drawn to her ample cleavage. Frank felt like a young buck deer being challenged by a multi-horned interloper and momentarily forgot his vow of silence.
‘Isn't that what everybody tries to do?’ Frank asked before catching a dark glare from Eimear. Alex hesitated, wondering if he would lower himself to answering a mere bean counter. ‘The science is in knowing when stocks are going to go up in value and when they are going to come down’.

Frank could feel the heat coming from Eimear but he didn't care. The non invitation to lunch and the patronising response of the smug git in the cashmere jacket was too much for him.

‘But you just borrow money from your parent company and lend it out to poor people at a higher interest rate. That's not a science. Credit Unions have been doing that for years but without charging the millions that you guys do’.

Geoffrey coughed, ‘In the interest of time, gentlemen, maybe we should move on’. He was concerned about making his lunch appointment but not nearly as much as he was about the fund from which they all made extortionate amounts being simplified in this manner.

‘The next item on the agenda is directors' fees. We agreed at our last meeting that Rupert here would be best suited to come up with a quote for next year. Rupert sits on the most boards and would have the broadest knowledge of the fees paid in the hedge fund industry’.

Rupert shuffled his papers and cleared his public school educated throat. ‘Well I can only speak for the boards I sit on. The fees range from ten grand to one hundred and twenty, depending on the complexity of the fund’.

‘And how would you see this fund in that range?’ Geoffrey asked, although his smile betrayed the fact that he already knew the answer.

Rupert played along with the charade for a moment before answering ‘Oh, somewhere in the middle. So I'd suggest that the fee should be about, hmm, seventy grand’.

Frank looked at Eimear and thought about how he'd be looking for a pay increase as soon as he got back. Seventy grand was more than he earned in a year and even by the extravagant standards of the business he worked in, it seemed a lot for turning up to four meetings.

The directors on the other hand were as pleased as punch with Rupert's suggestion. ‘That seems like a capital idea’. Geoffrey said. ‘I'll let the promoters know about our decision and we can implement from January 1. Now that seems as good a point as any to break for lunch’.

In the end, the discussion on the accounts was uneventful. The expensive wine at La Rochelle had clearly had a soporific effect and the board were happy to coast for the afternoon. As Frank finished his presentation, he looked at Eimear and caught her smiling at him. He knew his morning indiscretion had been forgiven and that his evening flirting prospects had improved.

The meeting was coming to an end. Expensive pens were carefully placed back in inside pockets, laptop power cables were folded and packed and Frank's stomach muscles relaxed for the first time in two days.

Geoffrey had just one more item to cover on the agenda. ‘The next board meeting is due in March. We had a chat over lunch and we think it would be a capital idea to have the meeting in Dublin. Rupert sits on a couple of boards that do that. Apparently it’s OK as long as you don't hold meetings on the mainland. We were thinking about Friday 24th if that fits into your diaries. Eimear, I presume we can hold the meeting in your office? And maybe afterwards you could take us to one of those wild Irish pubs?’

Eimear was just happy that the day was nearly over. ‘Of course Geoffrey, and if there is anything else we can do for you, then let us know’.

Geoffrey threw a conspiratorial look at Rupert and his tongue danced devilishly around his mouth. ‘Well there is the small matter of a rugger match at your Croke Park the next day. England are playing your lot and Rupert is able to swindle a couple of tickets out of his old school. But if you could get three more tickets for the directors then the board would be happy to put in a positive word for you with the promoter’.

Frank could only smile and wonder how they would explain this to their boss back in Dublin. The meeting broke up with hand shakes and lingering cheek kisses for Eimear. The fund managers departed as rudely as they had arrived. The directors were more polite but their golf game was imminent and soon Eimear and Frank found themselves alone with only shuffled board papers for company.

Eimear stood up and ran her hands slowly along the creases of her ruby red skirt. ‘Well that was a roller-coaster’. She said. ‘I could really do with a drink and to get out of these clothes’.

Frank didn't say anything. But he was enthusiastic about both suggestions.