The Book Club

“I wouldn’t read that book if I was stuck in the dunny with a bad case of the squirts and I only had that and the back of the aerosol can to read”.

That was my introduction to the first meeting of the book club I recently joined. In fairness, I expected better, given that the meeting was in the kitchen of the Presbytery of my local Catholic church.

I’ve been looking for a little intellectual company since my kid was born. Reading Charlie and Lola books is all very well but it doesn’t exactly stimulate the mind. I knew something was up when we borrowed a “Little Red Train” book from the library and my daughter lost interest half way through the first reading. I forced her to sit through it until the end so that I could see if the train made it back to the station.

My wife and I used to be regulars at “Spirituality in the pub” which is aimed at Catholics who have stopped going to weekly mass but still have a need for an intellectual debate. They bring along guest speakers who are usually challenging in some way and it’s appropriately held in a pub with an al a carte menu as most of the people there are al a carte Catholics.

It was there that I learned of a Men’s Book Group connected to the local Parish. Since the dawn of the Internet, I found that I’ve stopped reading books, apart from large tomes on Military History. And I found that I only bought those because I liked the pictures in the middle.

So I was keen to get back on the reading wagon and the discipline of a book a month seemed to fit my limited time availability. 

Nevertheless, I approached my first meeting with some trepidation. The guys I’d met in the pub where all older and struck me as the sort who would look after the collection at mass and criticise the Priest for being too liberal.

So it was somewhat of a relief to be met by Gerry and his potty mouth. He is a retired developer and likes to stress his working class roots. The rest of the members are lawyers or doctors, with a retired judge thrown in for extra gravitas. Most of them are too polite to criticise the book we’re reviewing or to challenge the opinions of the other members. Apart from Gerry that is. It surprises me that he even turns up because he clearly dislikes books. I’ve been to four meetings so far and he has yet to finish any of the works we’re studying. It doesn’t stop him giving his opinions however, which are liberally peppered with more F and C bombs than you would get at a Richard Prior concert.

My first meeting reviewed “Caleb’s Crossing” by Geraldine Brooks. Most of us saw it as a harmless read. But Gerry’s take on it was that it was an effin potboiler that Barbara Cartland would have been proud of. I’ve never read any of Miss Catlland’s books, but I suspect that she rarely deals with the early interaction of white settlers in Massachusetts with the local Indian population. 

 Gerry’s Effing and blinding was too much for one of the more conservative members. He expressed the commonly held view that Gerry could make his point without so many references to carnal acts or female body parts.

Gerry response was instantaneous. “If you don’t like the effin heat, then eff off back to New Zealand and take all the other effin sheep shaggers with you”.

I was waiting for fists to fly which wasn’t my expectation when I signed up. Thankfully the chairman calmed things down by tabling the next book for review and moving the conversation to less controversial matters such as whether tea or wine would be more suitable for our gatherings.

Gerry muttered under his breath that he would need to be pretty pissed to read some of the shite that was on our upcoming list. 

I haven’t spent much time in the kitchen of a Priest’s house before. My mother was a woman ahead of her times and she brought us up with a healthy suspicion of Priests and their living quarters in particular. But I had imagined that it would be a spiritual and serene place. In truth, the kitchen is much like any other kitchen, apart from the fridge which contains more alcohol than a sailor on shore leave.

At the Christmas meeting, Gerry was more thoughtful, having been given a dressing down by the chairman. He still hated the book mind you and didn’t mind telling us that.

I thought he was a changed character, but the last meeting showed that he was back to his old self. This month’s book was “The Streetsweeper” by Elliot Perlman. He’s a Jewish writer from Melbourne and the book is a dark and troubling comparison of black civil rights in the US with the Holocaust. I wasn’t a big fan to be honest but kept my opinions on the right side of politeness.

Gerry, however, let go with both barrels. He hadn’t made it past the half-way point of the book, but that wasn’t going to stop him. He told us about the Jewish people he’d worked with in the building trade and his less than favourable opinions of their work practices. He ranted on for another ten minutes or so with opinions that Hitler would have left out of Mein Kampft for fear of offending people.

The Kiwi, who he had offended at our earlier meeting, was growing more apoplectic by the minute and had to excuse himself before he exploded. 

I stuck it out until the end when they had calmed Gerry down with glass of passable red. As I was leaving, he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a Banker.

His eyes lit up and he said “Do you know the difference between a Banker and a Wanker? Nothing they both……..”.  Luckily I was already at the door thinking intellectual conversation is not what it used to be.

The strange incident of the creature in the night

Sometimes I forget that I live in a country filled with wild and exotic (and sometimes dangerous) animals. I’ve lived here for nearly seven years now and have never seen a snake or shark outside of at zoo or aquarium. I have bumped into the occasional spider but not the scary kind popular in stories about outhouse toilets.

 Contrary to popular belief, kangaroos do not bound down the streets of Australia’s major cities and wombats avoid people if at all possible. So it’s always a surprise when one comes face to face with a creature that isn’t a cat or a dog (and as I’ve said recently, I could quite happily spend the rest of my life avoiding contact with them too).

So I thought I’d share a rather strange experience I had last night.

It has been unnaturally hot here recently. Anyone who watched the first week of the Australian Open would have seen highly fit athletes hallucinating and fainting as they battled with 44 degree temperatures. So you can imagine how a lowly fit accountant like me felt just walking from the station to my house. We had five days in the mid-forties and as the old Harp ad used to say, “You could fry an egg on a car bonnet, if you had an egg”.

Thankfully the house I’m now walking to has air-conditioning. So at least I can sit comfortably each evening as long as I can block out the guilt I feel about destroying the planet.

We moved into a new place recently and it’s a modern structure with amenities like the aforementioned aircon, a whizzer thing in the sink for mushing up all the gunk you’re too lazy to put into the bin and a central control panel that allows you to turn off all the lights in the house.

But the thing we like best are the sky lights in the upstairs bedroom. These can be opened or closed using a remote control and they are sensitive enough to close themselves when it gets windy or starts to rain.

It was another hot day yesterday with the sort of conditions that makes the moisture on your eyeballs evaporate and your lungs suck frantically for air. Thankfully at 7.30pm, the unique climatic conditions in Southern Victoria paid us a welcome visit. The winds changed direction and in thirty minutes the temperatures had dropped by twenty degrees. It’s called the cool change and believe me, it’s as cool as Fonzie.

The house still needed to cool down however, so we opened the skylight windows to let some air in. I retired to bed early as sleep comes at a premium when you are the parent of a two year old who likes to get up at 5.30am so that she can make a good start at the day.

I was in the land of nod at midnight, dreaming of lie ins and Arsenal winning another trophy in my two year olds lifetime. Then a whirring sound awoke me. The skylights were doing their automatic closing thing. While annoying, this wasn’t surprising. Cool changes by their nature are accompanied by strong winds. I was about to roll over and try to recatch the sleep bus when I heard a strange noise coming from one of the windows. It was as though the venetian blinds that are part of the window set up had got caught in the mechanism as the window was trying to close.

I arose from the bed grumpy and half asleep to try and find the remote control. I turned on a bed light but the room was dim and my eyelids were heavy and half closed. As I approached the skylight I looked up and saw a dark shape. My first instinct was that it was a bird that had somehow got itself trapped. But as I got closer I found myself looking at a large rat like creature that appeared to be hanging from the venetian blind directly above my bed and about to fall at any second.

A number of shadowy thoughts raced through my mind. I don’t like sharing the planet with rats, I certainly don’t want to share a house with one. How we would trap it in a house that has few doors? And were there any hotels nearby that would provide me and my family a refuge for the night?

I’m not ashamed to say that I screamed like a twelve year girl at a One Direction concert and sought sanctuary in a downstairs room that had the luxury of a door I could hide behind. My wife grew up on a farm and she’s far calmer than me when it comes to dealing with the ugly cousins of God’s animal kingdom.

She armed herself with a sweeping brush and took off to investigate. The first thing she noted was that it wasn’t a rat but an adolescent possum. I’ve no idea how she knew it was adolescent. Perhaps it was acting moody and wearing dark clothes. She also pointed out that the windows have fly screens to stop creatures from climbing in. So the possum wasn’t hanging from the venetian blinds. It was sitting on the fly screen and had been greatly disturbed by a large window trying to squash it.

My wife pressed the button to reopen the window and poked the possum with her broomstick. The furry creature took off like Usain Bolt to return to his tree home to update all his friends on his adventure in the manner in which I am now telling this tale.

I didn’t actually see the possum disappear. I was still huddled under a downstairs blanket breathing deeply to avoid the onset of hyper-ventilation. I am what Australians would call a “wuss” and to be honest I’m comfortable with that depiction. To quote a lyric from a song I heard in my teens, “I’m not afraid of the dark. But I am afraid of what some things do with it”.

It's a dog's life hating dogs

This is a big weekend in Melbourne and not just because it’s the start of the spring racing season. This is the weekend when the by-laws change and the new summer rules come in. The main one as far as I’m concerned is the one that stops dogs being off leash on beaches. I’ll be honest, I don’t like dogs and if my daughter ever asks for one, I can only hope it’s the stuffed or porcelain variety she’s after.

I reached a ripe old age not realising that people like to take dogs onto beaches early in the day with one of those silly plastic things that flings a ball a great distance. But my daughter is 22 months old now and over Spring she developed an engineering skill that has led to towers being built out of bricks at home and sandcastles at the beach.

So on the few occasions when the mercury rose above 20c these past few months, we’ve headed down to the beaches around St Kilda to see if we could recreate Dublin Castle. As my daughter has not yet realised that Saturday mornings are for sleeping, we’ve tended to arrive at the beach at the same time as those early morning dog walkers. We would just get ourselves settled and have the first sand based construction ready when a leashless fido would come bounding over, tongue dangling and tail wagging and make a bee-line for the castle or my daughter. Seconds later, our hard work would be demolished under a torrent of hooves while a nonchalant owner would watch from 20 meters away, telling us that “Samson is very friendly and loves kids”. It never seems to occur to them that the kid may not like Samson.

My daughter likes dogs but even she doesn’t enjoy being bailed over by an Alsatian running at full pelt. Once, a dog stopped and had a pee on top of our sandcastle while his middle aged, well dressed owner chuckled and told us what a frisky little thing her mutt was.

Incidents like this happened every time we went to the beach over winter. None of the owners ever apologised and some even got irate if I was a little two vigorous is shoeing their canine away. One even mentioned that we should stay away from beaches if we didn’t want untrained dogs bounding up to toddlers.

Thankfully that all changes this weekend when summer regulations come into force and dogs aren’t allowed on beaches. Mind you it will be interesting to see how it’s enforced. Dogs aren’t supposed to be within 50 metres of a playground but that doesn’t seem to stop them. Playgrounds tend to be in parks and that’s the other favourite haunt of dog owners keen to show off the athletic prowess of their pets.

I’m not generally a fan of Frankie Boyle but when he says that dog owners are people who have failed to find love within their own species, I have to say I agree to some extent. This will upset many of my friends who are fans of four legged fanged animals and I’m sorry about that but I have to come clean. I’ve hated dogs for as long as I can remember. It started out as raw fear but as the years went on and I realised that I wasn’t going to be bitten by every mutt I came across, I developed a dislike for the smell of dogs and the drool that seems to permanently seep from their puss filled mouths. And on the few occasions when I’ve been eager to impress someone and have been forced to pet one of their pets the feeling of their rib cage expanding gives me the hibbee geebies.

I trace all this back to a little spaniel called Penny that I had the misfortune to bump into at the age of four. I was four I should point out. I’m not very good with dog ages. I grew up on a rough street where the favourite pastime for anyone under the age of ten was to tease the pets belonging to the posh people who lived around the corner. Penny was allowed to run around their garden which was ringed by a small wall. She was an angry dog who would run towards any passer-by and yap incessantly. Each time she did this, she would leap up on the wall in a vain attempt to get at the imposter. But she was never able to breach the barrier.

That of course was a source of great amusement to us kids. So when we weren’t playing dare on the railway line we’d head down to Penny’s house and tease the hell out of her. We’d line up at the wall to her garden and shout at her until she came charging over. Each time we’d retreat in a gale of nervous laughter until we realised she had failed to leap the wall again.

We would return each time and increase the intensity of our teasing. This of course made the little mutt very angry and on one fateful summer day she found energy she didn’t know she had. Suddenly she was on our side of the wall and heading for us at a rapid rate.

We turned and ran and it was then that I had a terrible realisation. I’d spent my short life until then trying to be cool and the best way to do this was to hang around with older kids. And so I found myself as the youngest person in that fleeing possie and by a long way the slowest. Even as I type this I’m having flashbacks to those fangs sinking in to my backside.

Since that day, I’ve avoided dogs like the plague. I’ll let my kid make up her own mind while reminding her that teasing angry animals is generally not a good idea.

I’m glad I got that off my chest. But don’t get me started on cats.

The Tyranny of Liberty

Gerd was a postman in Berlin in the early eighties with a small gambling problem. The discovery of this led to his recruitment into the Stasi, or at least its unpaid snooping wing. His job was to steam open any letters coming from the West and to read the contents. His conscience, in so much as a habitual gambler can have one, was soothed by the thought that he was exposing illegal activity, such as discussions about escape attempts or propaganda.

Pretty soon however, he found that his handlers were more interested in gossip than they were in crime. They wanted to know if the letters suggested a secret lover, a drug addiction or even a mild fetish. Anything that could be used to embarrass the recipient and thus give the Stasi another recruitment opportunity. Gerd realised quite quickly that his own recruitment had come about after he wrote to a cousin in the West looking for a loan to pay off some gambling debts.

All of this seems spooky and unnecessarily over the top. But is there any difference between this and the activities of the American spy agencies? Electronic messaging (E-Mails and text messages) have replaced handwritten letters as the means by which the general public communicate. The Americans don’t need a giant kettle to steam open the contents of these missals. The co-operation of Telecom companies and the likes of Google and Apple do all the work for them.

Gerd could only get through a couple of hundred letters a week. A computer program can scan millions of emails in a second. The purpose is the same however. If reading peoples letters or emails uncover a criminal activity than that is a bonus. Criminals are generally too smart to communicate through these channels as anyone who has watched “The Wire” can testify. The real purpose is to find a hook to somebodies embarrassment. Infidelity and homosexuality are probably the most common means to this end. The spy agencies realise that the best way to get at terrorists is through a vast network of informants living in the communities in which the terrorists live. And the best way to recruit this network is to threaten to expose that which they will do anything to keep secret.

So we live in a society where our government are intent on finding out as many secrets about us as they can, so as to potentially use this against us in the future. If people believe that you have nothing to worry about if you’re not doing anything illegal, then they should ask the former citizens of East Germany. What better way to keep an eye on a suspected Islamic terrorist for example than to find out something embarrassing about the person who sits next to him at work or the lady who cleans his house and to recruit them as unpaid spies?

This may seem like Orwellian conspiracy theory but it’s been used in every society since biblical times. Judas after all was paid to spy on his mates when they were out having supper and a few beers. Why people think that we live in benevolent times now and that “those sort of things couldn’t happen” is beyond me, particularly when technology affords our current masters the opportunity to do things that previous tyrants would have only dreamed about.

So when Edward Snowden disclosed that every email and text message in the world was being recorded on a giant database in the US, I wasn’t surprised. I’d always assumed they did this sort of thing anyway. I was actually surprised that it took so long to become public. I’ve always kept my name out of this blog but assumed that anyone with a modicum of technology skills could figure out my Google account or IP address. So the mention of “Islamic terrorist” and “conspiracy” in the same posting has probably triggered off an automatic search and the robotic descendent of Gerd is currently trawling through my Gmail. He’ll be sorely disappointed as it mainly consists of marketing spam from websites I have been foolish enough to put an email address into.

I did find it funny though that the recent news coverage of secret spying systems has centred on people passing through airports. Snowden was holed up in the transit area of Moscow airport for weeks. Dante would have mentioned airport transit areas in his circles of hell, had they existed at the time. The journalist who broke Snowden’s story (Glenn Greenwald) was also caught up in airport shenanigans when his partner was intercepted in Heathrow and detained for nine hours. It’s taken me nine hours to navigate the tunnels beneath Heathrow in the past, so I think he should count himself lucky that he had a chair for most of this time.

Airports have also spooked me, particularly since 9/11. If you want to see the full reach of the tentacles of state snooping, then visit your local terminal. I’ve had my iris photographed, my body scanned to the amusement of the queue behind me who got to see an outline of my Michelin man shape on the adjacent screen and my body patted down more intimately than an Amsterdam hooker.

As a result, I’ve always felt uncomfortable passing though airports, even though I’ve never so much as smuggled an apple into New Zealand (a capital offense it must be pointed out). But I still get nervous every time I pass through immigration or security. Which is probably why I always get stopped by the random explosives check just after security scanning.

George Orwell said “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt”. That might explain why the powers that be are intent on finding as much ‘dirt’ about us as possible and to maintain us in a world of fear and anxiety. If it is, then I think it is too high a price to pay. Gerd lived to see the wall come down. Will we ever experience the same release from tyranny?

Arsenal in rare of old times

I have a confession to make. I’m an Arsenal fan. I make this confession because I’ve been in denial about this fact since 2005 (which coincidently was the last year Arsenal won a trophy). And yet I find that news about the club is the first thing I look for on the Internet.

 

I’ve started supporting the team in 1971 when Charlie George scored a magnificent goal to win us the FA Cup and to close out the league and cup double for that year. My memory of it suggests a forty yard screamer into the top corner, but Youtube shows me that it was more of a tap in. That’s the problem with memory. It makes everything in the past bigger and more impressive than it actually was, which by default makes us believe that the present is a little bit shit!

 

I do support other teams, such as Carlton in the AFL (who at least I get to watch regularly), Dundalk in the League of Ireland (at least when they are winning) and Louth in Gaelic Football. Louth are probably the only team that would prompt me to get on a plane and fly to the other side of the world at short notice, if they managed to make it to a final. I can make this statement however, comfortable in the knowledge that everything that has happened since 1957 makes this a remote possibility.

 

I have wavered in Arsenal support over the years, mainly coinciding with fallow periods at the club but also with significant changes in my life. I moved to Luxembourg in 1993 and found myself in Amsterdam on the weekend of the FA Cup Final. I was in a pub and somebody mentioned that Arsenal were playing in the match and it was on a TV screen down the back. I was more interested in the thrill of living in mainland Europe by then and Arsenal seemed part of my old and boring life in London.

 

I moved back to Ireland in 1996 at the beginning of the satellite TV revolution in Football. It coincided with Arsene Wenger becoming Arsenal manager and the start of their Golden era. It was impossible to live in Ireland and watch football without picking a team to follow in much the same way as anyone in Melbourne with even a vague interest in sport must pick an AFL team or banish themselves to internal conversational exile.

 

I kind of lost interest again when I moved to Melbourne, because the games are on at strange times of the night and the team were rubbish. But technology has dragged me back into the tent. For a start, I tend to listen to podcasts now rather than music on my way to and from work.

 

And the smartphone I bought at Christmas has lots of football related Aps that can be read everywhere. This is particularly useful in the toilet as it avoids having to hide a newspaper in your pocket.

 

For the past three months I’ve been following the soap opera of Arsenal’s summer transfer policy. This has taken up hours of time on podcasts and consumed gallons on digital ink on the web, despite the fact that Arsenal have not actually signed anyone.

 

The Internet has been a god send to the English Premier League. There is a hardly a news related site in the world that won’t have some reference to it. If you contrast that to one of my other sporting loves, Gaelic Football, you’ll see a startling difference. Soccer is statistics based and at the click of a few buttons you could find out who finished bottom of the West Cork under 12 league in 1993.

 

Gaelic Football treats its audience in the same way we were treated by our Irish teachers in secondary school. They assumed that after 8 years of primary school, you were fluent in the language and they could spend their time teaching us how to interpret 15^th Century poetry written by some blind harpist.

I’ve read match reports in the Irish Times for example headed “Tribesmen too strong for Saffrons” and not find the names of the teams anywhere in the article, any reference to the competition they were playing in, whether it was football or hurling or even whether it was men or women involved.

Gaelic games have a long way to go when it comes to harnessing the web. I just looked up my local clubs website, which in fairness seems mainly geared towards renting their all-weather pitch out as much as possible. Their “latest news” talks about an upcoming match on 26^th September 2012.

 

I do wonder if I’m being sucked into the English football hype. It’s so easy. They repeat all the games here at reasonable hours and there are plenty of people at work to discuss the sport with, including many Australians who have spent a year in London and now think they are experts.

 

So I’ll sit back and enjoy the new season. We lost our first game and still haven’t signed anyone but there is always hope. If I was Arsenal manager, I’d make the team sit down and watch the 1979 FA Cup Final, which is probably my favourite game of all time. Arsenal were leading 2-0 with only 5 minutes left to play when the hateful Man United scored two quick goals to equalise. Momentum plays a key role in Football and United had all that. But equally important is mental attitude.

 

After Man United’s second goal, Arsenal legend Liam Brady picked up the ball for the kick-off. The expression on his face said “I’m not having this” and he drove at the United defence before laying the ball off for a quick cross and a Sunderland tap in at the far post.

 

That’s how you win football matches. So come on Arsenal. Win something so that my time spent reading about you in the toilet won’t have been a waste of time.

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.