St Patrick's Day in the rare ould times

When I was a young fella growing up in the dreary smoked smothered streets of Ireland, St Patrick’s Day was an island in the stormy shark filled seas of Lent. Whatever penance you had imposed on yourself, giving up sweets or sugar in your tea or back chat to your parents, could be relaxed for that single day. This was an allowance given by my Mother so that she could also indulge in a few glasses of wine, having set herself an abstinence target until Easter.

Apart from the chocolate and sugary tea, my only other memories of March 17^th in my youth were dreary parades in the rain, dressed only in a polyester scout uniform. There was nothing particularly Irish about these processions. The army dominated events, so it had the air of a May day parade in a small and impoverished Communist state.

We wore fresh shamrock and school reinforced that it was a religious rather than a Nationalist holiday. Mind you, at that time, flag waving was dominated by Irish Republicans who were blowing people up and generally being a menace.

That seemed to change by the time I left Ireland in 1988. Ireland qualified for Euro 88 and it became normal to feel proud of your country. The World Cup in 1990 accelerated this and the very act of me leaving the country seemed to release it from years of backwardness.

I do remember my first St Patrick’s Day outside Ireland. I was in London and desperate to get into a pub in Covent Garden to celebrate the great man’s day. Luckily the bouncer was from Kerry and let us skip past the English people in the queue. He wasn’t just being patriotic. Experience had thought him that Irish people go out to have a good time and if they get drunk it’s a bonus. For English people, it’s the other way around.

Once I’d moved away, celebrating my Irishness became important to me. I remember festivals in Finsbury Park, all night sessions in the Black Stuff in Luxembourg and cramming into a field in Melbourne with hundreds of back packers.

But I’m older now and less able to keep up with the young ones. This year I went with a more sedate approach. Auckland prides itself in having the first St Patrick’s Day parade in the world, as the rest of the world is still in bed by the time festivities kick off here. They ask for 32 volunteers to carry their counties banner and for the second time, I had the honour of walking down the city’s main thoroughfare with Louth’s name and crest held proudly aloft.

The street was thronged by girls in GAA tops, boys in Irish Rugby tops and people from Asia, Africa and everywhere else, who came along for the colour and craic. It made me think of our little island of 7 million souls. No other country gets to shut down the main street of capital cities across the globe. No other country has a guaranteed annual audience with the American president and no other country is honoured by famous buildings and rivers being decked in their national colour.

Ireland certainly punches above its weight around the world and makes you wonder why it took the Irish government so long to harness this soft power. While many foreign companies set up in Ireland for tax reasons, there is a lot of old time sentimentality involved as well.

St Patrick’s Day fell on a Sunday this year and the bars in Auckland were full of people wearing green hats or jumpers who would happily admit that they have no Irish heritage but love to join in when a party is going on. We are known as a fun bunch of people and most of the best pubs here (and in most of the world) are Irish pubs.

It seems a long way from the 1970s when we saw the world through our narrow internal prism, with the only portal to the wider world being provided through British TV. This regularly portrayed Ireland as stupid or backward. Irish jokes were popular, and every Irish character on British TV was either an idiot or a terrorist. Once I moved to England, I found a warmer reception. I noticed that many English people have Irish relatives and while there was gentle ribbing about my inability to pronounce my ‘th’s’ I was generally treated well and the English envied our easy ability to have fun.

It would be hard to find a country that engenders as much good will as Ireland. I guess the fact that we have never invaded another country or gone to war with one, if you excuse our on-going struggle with perfidious Albion, helps in this regard. So, we’ve never really annoyed anyone and we’ve sent out 70 million ambassadors to the world to spread the good word.

I work for a company where 50% of the staff are kiwi born and the rest of us come from about thirty different companies. Lots of them passed my desk in March and wished me a Happy St Patrick’s Day. I don’t remember that happening for any other country. Not even New Zealand, which treats its national day with a large amount of embarrassment and shame. Celebrating a treaty that essentially stole the land from the people who were here first is not a smart move.

Most New Zealanders just take the day off and try not to think about it too much. Which is pretty much how I felt about St Patrick’s Day when I lived in Ireland. There is a paradox that you become more patriotic the further you live from your homeland. I live as far away as is geographically possible. So, I’ll raise a toast to old St Pat again this year and feel a flutter of pride when do we well at sport or culture. It’s a great wee country except when you have to live in it.

 

Do we actually exist?

I used to go drinking with a friend, who after consuming seven or eight pints, would bring up the same question. Do we actually exist? This was usually his get out of jail card when he was failing in other arguments. He had studied philosophy and could polish his opinions with quotes from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.

I floundered for years, instinctively believing in our existence, but unable to prove it. Then Google came along and I was able to do some interesting research. When we next met for a drink and the subject came up, I puffed out my chest and announced, “I think, therefore I am”. The very fact that we were even having the debate proved that we existed. At least, I think that’s what it meant. I tried to argue from a scientific perspective, which became more difficult with each pint I sank.

I’m not a scientist, it should be said. I’m an Accountant, due to an accident at birth. The accident being that I wasn’t born into a family that could afford to send me to university. I envy those people who dreamed of being a doctor, an actor or a scientist. There is a bullshit idea that can be found in many self help books and motivational videos. “If you follow your dream, one day you’ll find it’.

That might work for people with parents who can fund you during your dream chasing phase, but it doesn’t work for people who have to buy food and pay rent. I went down the path of getting any job and then using the money I earned from that to pursue the interests I have. Most of those interests turned out to be beer and curry related.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve wondered what career I would have ended up in, if my parents could have afforded it. If you look at my bookshelf you’ll see that it is dominated with History tomes. Most of these relate to Ireland. It’s troubled relationship with England and the origins of the Irish race in particular. I’m now in my late fifties, so Second World War books are becoming more prevalent. I’m not sure why men of my age become interested in that topic. Perhaps it’s a throw-back to the comics we read as Children and the games we played in back gardens with imitation machine guns fashioned from tree branches and where everybody inexplicably wanted to be a German.

I’ve gotten to the age now where I want to visit a WW2 re-enactment festival, drink real ale and count the rivets on a replica Sherman tank to assess its authenticity.

But I notice that another subject is slowly worming its way onto my shelves. I chose biology over physics at school on the advice of my older brother. Like most of his advice (how to chat up girls, source underage alcohol etc.), I now wish I’d ignored it. The world, the universe and all that is in it is something I’d like to understand.

If I look at the science books that I have, they lean towards physics rather than biology. One in particular has fascinated me recently and I’d like to explore it further.

Scientists would have you believe that the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle is on a par with the  unearthing of penicillin or the first moon landing, although the God Particle, as it is known, is unlikely to ease the pain of venereal disease or create conspiracy theories about its dark side.

In fact, it’s not a discovery at all, more a confirmation of what scientists already theorised, or perhaps it is just a simple justification for all the money they spent on the large hadron collider at a time when they should have been investing this money in the more honourable adventure of bailing out banks.

Science is the art of studying the behaviour of 15,000 people to discover what you already know or suspected. For example, you will never see a report on research by the University of Arkansas into childhood obesity, which says that to their great surprise, sugar and a lack of exercise is actually good for kids.

The major achievement of Higgs Boson appears to be the proof that mass can be created out of nothing.  Energy shares space in Einstein’s famous little formula with mass, dangling out there on the left, like a hallucinating drug trying to get into a rave party. Energy can also be created out of nothing. Imagine you are tired after a hard week at work. You want to hit the sofa with a takeaway and a brain numbing night in front of Love Island. You feel like you don’t have the energy to make it to the toilet and contemplate fashioning a colostomy bag from the various crisp packets that litter your sitting room.

Then a text message arrives from a friend inviting you the pub. For the formula to work it has to be a particular friend who makes you laugh and encourages you to have one for the road at 3am. You will find that an instant infusion of energy results and before you know where you are, you are skipping down the road like a Duracell battery on acid.

So if mass and energy can be created out of nothing, then the speed of light must also be nothing. This means that the sun doesn’t exist and this is all a dream. If somebody will give me 10 billion Euros and a large round hole in Switzerland, I’m confident I can prove this.

And perhaps it also proves that my old drinking buddie was right. That science can also prove that we don’t exist. But that would also mean that history doesn’t exist and I’ve been wasting my time reading all those books. But if we don’t exist, then this is all a simulation and I’ve been programmed to be a history reading, blog writing Accountant. I pity the guy who wrote that code.

 

My Podcast Life

On the morning of my 40th birthday, I stopped outside an Apple store in London and looked scornfully at the products within.

I've never been fond of their products, and I made this clear to my friends who were with me at the time. One of them held a senior position within Apple and he chuckled conspiratorially. Later that evening I found out why. I opened the tightly wrapped present they had purchased me and inside was a gleaming new iPod, adorned with an inscribed message from my friends.

That device was the one I listened to my first podcast on. After I had copied all my CDs onto iTunes and transitioned from music to the spoken word. When I left Australia all those CDs went to an op shop and I presume somebody in Melbourne is now enjoying that collection of mournful American female country singers and soft rock. The iPod has also gone to God, so all I'm left with is an electronic copy of 25 years of obsessive music purchases. It's on an old laptop and I'm not even sure I can access it.

I can't remember the first podcast I listened to. But one thing I'm pretty sure of is that I'm not listening to that series now. Over the years my tastes have changed and every time I get a new device, I use it as a chance to cull my library and start again.

My current list is an eclectic mix of politics, sport, comedy and history as well as the occasional one-off series such as Serial. I enjoyed these as interlopers in the normal dreary routine of my weekly episodes. “13 minutes to the Moon” remains my favourite.

One thing that troubles me though, is the business model of podcasts. Increasingly they are becoming the main income source for artists. Many of the ones I listen to are free, subsidised by licence payers in Ireland and the UK.

The others are commercial to one extent or another. Some depend on advertising alone. This suits me as a resident of New Zealand who tends to listen to northern hemisphere podcasts. Advertising is local and few Kiwi companies bother advertising on the obscure Irish podcasts I listen to.

As a result, I'm not tempted by these offers of an ad free experience in return for a small monthly stipend.

Neither am I tempted by the offer of additional episodes in return for cash. I already struggled to get through the list I have, not helped by an OCS compulsion to listen to everything I've downloaded.

So, I'm left with the ones who make a shameless plea each week for nothing more than a guilt free listen. Podcasting must be the only product that is initially offered for free before they try to guilt you into paying for it.

I have a problem with paying for something I don't have to. If offered a view over the fence rather than paying at the turnstile, I'll choose the fence every time. I don't think it's because I'm tight, I just don't like the idea that I'm paying for something that others are getting for free. I also wonder about equity. I have about five podcasts that depend on voluntary contribution and if I paid for all of them, it would be more than I used to pay for Sky Sports at the height of my hedonistic TV watching.

Most of the ones who plea for money are comedians. Historians and economists are usually more circumspect. They know that the product they produce would previously have been on radio. They might have been paid for this but it's unlikely it was more than the advertising they manage to attract for their products now.

Comedians never admit it, but they are the ones who benefit most from the development of podcasting. Most of the stuff I listen to is too sweary to have ever made it onto mainstream media. They can find an audience now that was never previously available. In the old days, they earned an income by touring the country and playing in as many venues as possible. This would involve travel costs, hotel costs, venue rental, promotion and all the non-financial hassle of being away from your family for a month.

Now you can sit in your bedroom with a cheap microphone and reach a bigger audience than you could with six months of touring. A couple of thousand subscribers would earn the comedian the same income as they had in the past for a lot less hassle and for a lower cost. And when they do want to tour, they end up with bigger venues as they now have a larger dedicated audience to promote too.

Given my experience with podcasts and particularly the fact that I tend to get bored with them after about six months, I'm reluctant to sign up for a payment schedule. Like gym memberships, I’ll forget to cancel and find myself paying for something in years to come that I no longer listen to.

I think that there needs to be a new economic model. Perhaps, a pay per listen process set at a small notional fee. I would be happy to pay for this. And surely technology is sufficient these days to support this.

Of course, on the music side, I now listen exclusively on Spotify. I'm happy to pay a monthly subscription for this that is roughly equal to the amount that I used to spend on CDs. I do think however, that if CDs still existed, there would reach a point where I would stop buying them and be content with the haul I already had.

As things stand, I'll be paying for Spotify until I stop listening to music, which hopefully will be the day I finally stop listening to anything.

Perhaps 2024 is the time to change and finally pay for something. And I might see if I can access those old CD’s too.