Maybe this 'year' lark is not so stupid...

As I posted the colyoom below, I noticed on the right of the web page that it was the 52nd post of 2010.

Here we are at year's end, with me wondering at how the posting of this colyoom has felt so arbitrary, yet somehow and purely coincidentally matched the number of weeks in the year.

Maybe there's something to this calendar malarkey after all. Whether yea or nay, I wish all of you, my regular colyoomistas and random readers, a safe warm and happy new year, and thanks for havin' a gander at my blather.

It started with a banana and got completely out of control!

Doubtless over the next few weeks we’ll be assaulted by a barrage of advertising gyms and preachy magazine articles trying to make us feel like slothful fat slobs.

We all want to live longer and most of us these days recognise that it’s our personal responsibility to do what we can to look after ourselves. 

Tread carefully, dear colyoomistas, into the world of self-medication. I turned round the other day and realised that I’d let a little harmless prevention grow into a monstrous behaviour pattern that threatened to run amok.

It all started very harmlessly, as these things tend to do. Why indeed , it started with a banana. What’s more benign than a banana?

Yes, with due respect to Errol Brown, it started with a banana, just as each of my days do. I drink water, take my blood pressure pills and then sit in bed and read. A splendid way to start each day. That little banana hits me with some sugar, a healthy dose of vitamins C and B6, a little dietary fibre, some potassium to settle the blood pressure and some tryptophan to settle the dark and dangerous early morning thoughts.

Then it’s downstairs to squeeze a lemon into a glass of water. Apparently my Great Aunt Threedlewhispy used to do this every day of her life and she lived to be 143 years old. I know it’s meant to be squeezed into warm water, but fuck it, cold it is and a lovely sharp healthy buzz it gives too, as well as more vitamin C and all those other blardeeblars we get from fresh  fruit.

Then a handful of omega 3 capsules, which really do seem to help with the depression, as well as obscurely and imperceptibly helping my heart.

Sadly they’re not doing a great deal to help my joints. Refusing to be denied the pleasure of walking beside the sea, I try to defy the pain of osteo-arthritis, so I put a tablespoon of cider vinegar into a mug of hot water, and drop in a generous teaspoon of honey, followed by a teaspoon of molasses in a glass of warm water. This triple act might help to reduce the inflammation of arthritis, by reducing the acid levels in my body, whilst beefing up the haemoglobin, which is often low in arthritis sufferers.

But if I'm doing this, I shouldn’t be putting citrus fruit into my body at all, so why did I do that?

Move on, Adley, move on regardless, to the sachet of glucosamine sulphate, which the doctor prescribed for me, despite his own misgivings that it might help form cartilage. 

Thanks to nutritionist friend Annette, I then eat a spoonful of lecithin granules, because she insists that with my family history I need to emulsify my fats better, and this strange mouthful I wash down with a benecol anti-cholesterol drink and

- and hang on just a bleedin’ moment - 

A year ago I did only the banana, the lemon juice and the omegas. 

Now I’m looking like an obsessive nutter hypochondriac who's devouring the contents of health food shop before he even gets to breakfast. 

It’s got to stop. 

I’ve got ease up on this nonsense. 

I’ve got to get back to banana basics.

Hey, did someone mention breakfast?

That’s right, breakfast. 

Hmmmmm, I’m bloody starving.

Think I’ll have a fry. No harm with some bacon and eggs now that I’ve taken that lot!

Stop attacking the black ice -it's only fulfilling its own destiny!

You’ll have to excuse this scribbler his fascination with words. I just can’t help it when one comes along and gets used every minute of every day, regardless of whether its usage is correct or apt.

The official word of the present cold spell afflicting Ireland and the U.K. is ‘treacherous’. The roads are treacherous. The pavements are treacherous. The black ice is treacherous. News readers and nanny’s alike use the word at every and any given opportunity, but each time the sad pedant that I am hears it, I want to wander off with that person into a gentle line of whimsical enquiry.

Do they really feel that the roads are treacherous? Do they believe the little lumps of tarmac are conspiring to trick them? Will the pavements chuckle with evil mirth as the old fella slips on the ice?

At a push, I can accept that we rely on the safety of surfaces upon which we walk and drive, so that if they should suddenly become dangerous they are in no small way letting us down. Even though I see ‘treachery’ as something rather grander, involving a castle, a king, a dagger and a close confidante sneaking into a royal bedchamber in the cold dark night, I can see how a pavement or a road might be construed as treacherous, if rather than supporting you safely it suddenly threatens your life.

But give a break to the black ice, eh? Black ice is designed to be dangerous and invisible. As it causes your car to skid it is simply fulfilling its own destiny. If black ice were to be truly treacherous it would probably have to melt upon impact with rubber, thus letting the black ice side down altogether.

If it’s treacherous you want, take a look at the way Nick Clegg and his Lib Dems have sold out their voters in England,.or the way the Irish people have been financially murderated to save the euro.

The black ice is innocent. It may be lethal , but it’s meant to be.

Relax and enjoy the movie - as long as you're not a fat slut behind the wheel of a death trap!

Went to the movies last night. Stocked up on 2 shcoops at the heavily-hyped Ben and Jerry’s ice cream concession in the cinema and took our seats.

The lights go out and we settle back to be smothered in the wonder of cinema.

First up, the advertising reel, which starts with a short film featuring a fat 20Something lad (message: loser) living with his mother (loser waster sexual failure), being fed too many sausages (glutton pig farty slob) waltzing through his sad lonely non-life towards an early death (don’t be a fat greedy lazy basstid or you’ll die). 

Okay, but don’t sell me lardy buckets of ice cream and then make me feel like a glutton.

That was cheerful. 

Glad I came out.

Now a commercial for a mobile phone network. Phew, what a relief. Lots of pretty colours and loud music, perfect. Escapist and nonsensical, just what we expect.

This is followed by - oh god - another cautionary tale, this time about unwanted pregnancies (message: you slut) and where to go if you make a mistake (you whore), and how easily they can be avoided (you dirty irresponsible vixen). Preachy and depressing, especially in a context where sex and promiscuity is being sold to us as an aspirational lifestyle choice in the movie.  

I’ve left my home and paid to be entertained.

This is meant to be a fun night out.

A couple of ads for takeaway food and cologne respectively, (to help you get fat and get someone pregnant!) followed by a harrowing and deeply disturbing short film involving a car crash, young people dying, general dismemberment and terminal scarring, ending with the tag line:

“If you drive on drugs, you’re out of your mind.”

Well said, of course, but pleeeeeaaase, can we just have some fun and not feel assaulted by this finger-wagging úber-parental shite?

Aha, the ads are over and the film is - no, there’s a new slide on the screen, and a voiceover. 

Don’t drop litter. 

Don’t chew gum. 

Don’t talk or use your mobile phones. 

Don’t eat bad stuff or you’ll never have sex and then die early.

Don’t die in a car crash.

Don’t have a heart attack.

Don’t have a baby you didn’t plan for. 

Arrghhhh....

Ahaha, the film. At last - let the suspension of disbelief begin!

I’m all ready to let myself drift off into the magical and escapist world created by the gods of film, except I can’t, because the doors have suddenly opened and large groups of people who have been hanging around outside are coming in to find seats in the dark. 

They have avoided all the lecturing messages that we’ve been bombarded with.

But how on earth can I lose myself in the movie when there are hordes of students stumbling around, giggling, talking and blocking the screen as they try to find seats in the dark?

We’ve paid good money, been preached at and lectured to, and now we can’t actually enjoy the movie, so what’s the point of leaving the cave at all?

Maybe the cinema should ease up on its ‘Don’t live your life like this don’t live your life like that’ attitude, and worry more about its customers’ experiences under its own roof.

They might even think of starting off with: Don’t allow people into the theatre once the film has started. 

The Euro has already failed!

Always good to see people exercising their right to march in protest on Irish streets, but to whom are they protesting? 

To the property developers whose greed had no bounds? 

To the (at best) criminally negligent Irish bankers?

To the complicit politicians who sucked money from the dirty sponge of corruption?

To the self-serving ECB?

To the floundering EU?

To the anonymous monolithic IMF?

Whoever it is you're most upset with, march loud angry and proud, because your footsteps are the soundtrack to the sight of capitalism eating itself. 

The EU decided that their currency is more important than the people of Europe. Everything must be done to protect the euro. The people of Ireland haven’t been helped in any way whatsoever. We have been sacrificed on the altar of the euro. The people of Greece and Ireland (and maybe Portugal next) will suffer for decades so that the single currency might survive for the greater good.

For ‘greater good’ read: ‘German and French economies.’

The Euro has already failed. The bailout which injected us with untold billions of new national debt is the same Band-Aid they used to cover up the mess in Greece, in the vain hope that the speculators won’t move in on Portugal and then Spain. 

If Spain goes down, the euro disappears. No amount of Band-Aid debt injection will revive an economy that size. So we people of little PIGs (Portugal Ireland Greece) are deemed expendable to the survival of the euro. 

Except it’s not working, because they’re missing the whole point of capitalism, which is to make as much money as possible and devil take the hindmost. Those speculating bondholders are flying around like fiscal Death Eaters, moving from this ailing economy to that, all for the dream of making a fast buck.

They are as likely to stop as you are to walk past a big fat 50 note sitting on your doorstep. 

Collect fire wood now.