When something is too good to be true, sometimes it’s just true!

Oh no no no, please don’t make me get up!
It’s cold out there in the real world, and I am cocooned in my duvet of warmth and cosiness and please no.
Trouble is, when you’re a scribbler, there is nobody telling you to get up. You have to do it all by yourself, just like a grown-up.
Most of the year I’m one of those loathsome out of bed with a bounce and out of the door to stomp the Prom types, but when it’s cold, oh my, just a few minutes more, I mean, I’m really tired here, and I might even be coming down with something, y’know, so I’ll just, like, skip the Prom this morning.
Best to rest the old body when it’s out of sorts, eh?
Besides which, it’s bloody cold out there and nice and warm in here.
This lump of a blatherer needs to have a tactic that gets his lazy quilted arse kicked right up and out to the real world. Recently for some reason, I have used a memory of the January I spent as a 24 year-old.
I say ‘for some reason’, but there is a good reason I dwell there when trying to overcome sloth.
In January 1985, I arrived in New Zealand for my first time. At the airport I was greeted by Tim, the ever-smiling Kiwi DJ with whom I had shared much fun and many recent adventures on an obscure island in French Polynesia.
At my side stood Cory, seventeen foot thirteen inches of bronzed Amazonian, a beauty from her Valley Girl mental reflex to her painfully constant therapisin’ an’ philosophisin’ an’ self-analysin’ Orange County ‘tude.
Cory was on a mission to cure me and took great pleasure in pouring nowt but scorn upon me, but we travelled together well. I was, as my friend Soldier Boy would have it, ‘Young, dumb,and full of come’, so it didn’t really matter at the time whether I liked her or not.
The airport seemed empty, and I asked Tim if it was a national holiday, to which he smiled even wider than normal, stretched his arms and declared
‘Nope. We’re just a quiet sort of a country, eh!’
To us, having just shared four nightmare days with fifteen others, marooned in a hut stilted above muddy flood waters, whence came swarms of mosquitoes the size of tennis balls, where supposedly grown adults argued for hours over the re-use of tea bags, well, New Zealand was a revelation.
Cory and I booked into a hostel, but were about to part our ways. I wanted to hitch around, to go with the lifts, meet the people, see where the winds of fate sent me.
Cory analysed this desire with much psychobabbly crap, telling me how egocentric and selfish I was being; how self-destructive and blah blah blah; she wanted to take the bus.
I bit my lip, trying my best not to ‘Groucho’ her with:
“You want to be on the stage? It leaves in ten minutes!”
But then, on the noticeboard, we both saw the card declaring its author’s interest in recruiting young people to sail on his yacht.
We looked at each other and called the number.
Even at that tender age, I had learned much whilst travelling, and three things in particular:
First: that happiness is more than feeling content; more than a mere absence of problems. Joy is an active feeling. Happiness pumps your blood, so never settle for less.
Second: that sometimes, if it looks too good to be true, it might just be true.
Third: that unless your cold sad lazy arse gets out of bed, you’ll never know. Gotta be in it to win it. Carpe bleedin’ diem, and all that.
Early the next morning we met with a small grey-haired man called Morris.
At first my naive macho suspicions felt he might be a bit of a dirty old man with an unhealthy interest in Cory, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Indeed, he and Cory ended up spending much time together, but that was because I was, as Cory loved to point out, egocentric.
But really, who wouldn’t have been?
For two New Zealand dollars a day, which covered sumptuous board and comfy lodging, Morris would sail us out of Auckland and into the Hauraki Gulf for two weeks.
A retired schoolteacher, he had hand built the stunningly beautiful Celeste, his 38 foot yacht, and now he wanted to teach people like us how to sail her; how to live on the water.
He loved all things natural with a vast and patient passion, and sailing, he felt, was entirely natural. Morris hated the sound of an engine on the water, and by the end of the first week under sail, so did we.
He showed Cory how to tie knots, raise sails, and all that malarkey; he showed her how to steer for the birds when she wanted to catch dinner. We threw lines over, reeled in lovely large fish, and then went to shore on the dinghy. One of us set the fire and the barbie going, while Morris took the other on a trail along the cliffs, the dunes, the rocks, where he showed great depth in knowledge and understanding of all the flora and fauna.
Cory found it fascinating, as I would now, at this point of my life.
But I owed neither of them, and was in my own place.
Two months earlier, I had jumped out of a career in marketing, and had since travelled to the Bahamas, America, Polynesia, and within 24 hours of arriving in New Zealand, I was there.
Sitting cross-legged on deck in the still of sunrise, while Cory and Morris still slumbered below.
A fine mist rising off the South Pacific waters.
Narry a ripple disturbing the bay wherein we moored.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to learn from Morris’ monumental scholarship and experience.
Simply, I felt happy. I felt calm and complete and thankful, all at the same time. Surrounded by subtropical splendour and safe as houses, in the arms of an expert, and what I knew then, and know still to this day, is a balanced universe.
Sometimes it can be wonderfully and generously benign.
At others, darkly cruel.
But you never know, and unless you get out of bed, you’ll never find out.

‘Suffer and Pay’ is the order of the day with phone charges!

I’m feeling lucky, like the perp in Dirty Harry. Maybe the time has come once again to try and sign up with Talk Talk.
Oh no! Please no! Not again!
Just the thought of it sends a tired sigh diving down my spine.
When you’re a Jewish son who lives in a different country to his family, the phone plays a daily role.
Like, we talk, and then we talk, and then we call back and talk some more.
If I signed up to Talk Talk’s ‘Talk Lite’ and ‘Talk 3 International’ packages, I would make massive savings.
‘Talk Lite’ is only availiable if you sign up online, and so several times I have wandered through their website, filling in page after page of sign-up, until, like a block of ice hammered onto a rampant member, at the very last moment they refuse.
Nu-uh. No thankyoooo. Ezzz nooo posseeeeblay, amigo. Gotcha again.
On the phone I go, to tell them what happened, and they explain that my telephone number already has an existing account on it.
“Yes, I know it does, Niamh. That would have been the bloke who used to live in my house five years ago. Could you cancel it, please?”
“Sure, that’s done! You can go off and sign up now!”
“Are you sure, Niamh? You see, I’ve already called four times before about this. I’ve spoken to so many of your colleagues I’m beginning to feel a bit like a stalker at this stage of things. I know Katie, and Anita and all the crew. And each time they say just what you said, and then I go off to try it on my computer and it still doesn’t work. But I want to believe you. I really really do. You sound like a nice girl who visits her mother. And I want to give Talk Talk my money but-”
“Sure, that’s done! You can go off and sign up now!”
“Are you sure, Niamh?”
“What did you say about being a stalker?”
So I tried it and it didn’t work, and then I had a private manly little cry.
And then I left it for another few months.
Then the Snapper had a go. Maybe with her womanly ways she would see a blip that I had missed.
But no. She too was told that the old account was finally cleared, destroyed, null and void, an ex-account, dead gone pining for the optic fibres, and so off we went, onto their website and filled out absolutely everything again, only to be told ‘No, nyah-nyah nya nyaaaahhhh-nahhhh!’
So today I’m feeling lucky, but should I risk it?
Trying to spend money shouldn’t be this difficult.
You might think that in our consumer society, companies would make it as easy as they can for us to pay our money; sign on the dotted line, roll in with wads of green folding, cross their palms with shiny euro.
But the relationship between them buyers and us sellers has deteriorated to such an extent that global Corporates now treat us with contempt and derision, while fledgling start-ups struggle to offer anything approaching efficiency.
All I want is a reliable service that doesn’t cost the earth, and feel reluctant to sign up with every fly-by-night outfit that sends some poor unsuspecting salesperson, armed only with a smile and a clipboard, to knock on my door just as the footie has started on TV.
So I settle for the safety of the status quo. Every two months I pay a massive amount of money to eircom for their grossly-inflated line rental charge, and resist the bombardment from other telecoms companies to swap.
With Options and World Select I don’t do badly out of eircom, but hey, what is this?
Right there on the front page of my eircom bill is a bold-printed ‘Did You Know?’ advertisement, which says:
“Introducing 2 new voice packages: eircom talktime UK and eircom talktime international, which include line rental, local, national, and international calls all for just €35.99 per month.”
There it was, in print.
So I called eircom’s sales number, and was intercepted by not one, but two of the most infuriating voice menus I have ever encountered. It is impossible to believe; to mentally absorb in any calm or untroubled way, that this is how the nation’s supposed No.1 telecommunications provider treats people approaching their sales department.
But I remember my manners when I finally get through to a human, who naturally asks for all the information that I have already given, first to a talking computer and then into the keypad.
“Sinead is it? Hi Sinead. I wonder if you can just clear something up for me? I was looking at my bill, and noticed the bit that’s advertising the new voice packages.”
“Oh, the talktime packages?”
“The very same, Sinead. What I was wondering was this: When they say “eircom talktime UK and eircom talktime International includes line rental, local, national, and international calls all for just €35.99 per month, do they really mean it?”
“Do they mean what?”
“Do they mean what they say? Do they mean that if I take talktime International, I pay you €35.99 a month, and that covers my line rental, local national and international calls?”
“Well, no, of course it doesn’t mean that.”
“Well, thanks Sinead. Goodbye.”
Just as I thought. Throughout decades of state-owned services, we were lectured by the political Right about how, once monopolies were broken, we would all benefit from the effects of ‘healthy competition’.
Yet now, between the labouring old monolith that is eircom and the jabbering carnivorous beasties that are talk talk, Perlico and all the other bottom feeders, I find myself being deceived in print, unable to sign up and generally left drowning in a sea of junk mail, useless offers and absurdly expensive services.
There was a similar telecoms situation when I lived in America in the mid 1990’s, but the way they dealt with it could not have been more different.
We left our provider AT&T, and switched to MCI, because they offered us $100 free calls for the move. Then, unsolicited in the mail, we received a cheque for $100 from AT&T, which we could cash the moment we switched back to them.
We played them off against each other and made several hundred bucks a year.
Now that’s what I call a special offer.

Don’t be a yo-yo victim of the Beauty Bullies!

Each year before Christmas we are bombarded by a barrage of industries’ nagging advertising campaigns, persuading us that we are beautiful beings who deserve to wear the finest jewellery, the most expensive shoes; to eat vast amounts of the most luxurious of foods; to drink oceans of beer and rare vintages of wine and generally indulge in all manner of excess.
Then, after New Year, we annually find ourselves assaulted once again, under attack from several different industries trying to convince us that we made a terrible mistake; that we are in fact gross, ugly and fat; sick in mind and body; that we must lose weight, detox and clean up our acts.
The only requirement placed upon us at subjects (sic) of the consumer society is that we consume. Trouble is, if we behave like good little citizens, buy loads of shit, and adhere to the imperatives of the bottom line, (the gross and net margins), we become nothing more than merely the other half of the equation that creates profit:
Industry creates, we consume and somebody gets rich.
Human beings are expendable links in this chain. It doesn’t matter if we become obese or anorexic. The angles are covered by products on the shelves.
Well, right now, I want to detox, to cleanse my life of this selfish greedy society.
I’ve just spent a few fascinating minutes sitting on the loo, reading a little freebie red top tabloid magazine called ‘Individuelle’.
Under a subtitle declaring itself a ‘Beauty Essentials Magazine’ the front cover promises:
‘Lose inches in an hour.’
‘Bigger breasts without surgery.’
Despite its name, ‘Individuelle’ is clearly concerned with anything and everything apart from individuality, steering its readers away from beauty, and into the murky mediocre world of homogeneity, where all of us look the same, or at least, for some godawful and as yet unknown reason, aspire to.
The mag leaves me with a really nasty taste in my mouth, and no, I didn’t munch it, but I did feel like screwing it up and chucking it into the recycling.
Instead I kept it to share it with you, because the perception of beauty is important.
We are a beautiful species.
Although I may have been in my dim and distant past, I’m no longer an inveterate slut, but still when people ask me if I fancy a woman, I invariably say ‘yes’, because, well, because I just think women are beautiful.
Even though the stuff that goes on between their ears remains a mystery equal only to the fascinating words that spill from their mouths, I find it easy to fancy all women: tall short thin fat white black brown and yellow.
Blokes aren’t bad either, and despite being a straight as the next man, (often that ‘next man’, however hairy chested, macho and GAA he might like to appear, has actually got a whole loada woman going on inside him that he tries his manly desperate darndest to ignore) I am able and willing to admit that I can spot a pretty boy and a handsome bloke as well as most birds.
Sometimes, I get it completely wrong, and to this day cannot fathom what the fuss over Brad Pitt is all about, but I can see clearly why George Clooney and Jose Mourinho are considered handsome.
But so are you, and you and you, yet to believe ‘Individuelle’ and the industry it belongs to, we must each consider ourselves loathsome.
Flipping the pages of ‘Individuelle’ we travel swiftly through the need for whiter teeth toward something that is ‘Better than Botox’.
Next up is a tablet that will increase your breast size, followed by a scary-sounding hair retardant spray that will nuke your body of any trace of its natural mammalian fur.
There are pills that will have the fat falling off you and potions that will make your spider veins disappear.
If you put on a Detox Foot pad your liver will somehow magically shed its poisonous load onto the tiny bandage overnight.
Your life is apparently meaningless without a décolleté patch, breast enhancer, underarm sweat shield and something called an EasyLife Speed Shaper, while your HairPro laser zapper gun will encourage hair to grow once again where it has given up the ghost.
My eyes start to swim as I read about cold sores, stretch marks and fake tans. Bloody hell, an alien who picked up this maglet of tripe would imagine humans to be a complete bunch of mingers.
This magazine is not about beauty at all: it’s dedicated to making you feel ugly and disgusting, and whoopee, it just so happens that right now so many companies out there want you believe that you are in desperate need of a makeover, inside and out.
Well, this colyoom says screw ‘em.
Their hypercritical and bullying tactics seek to destroy your self esteem.
If you believe, you will be worshipping at the altar of an industry that treats you as a victim; an industry that insists on pointing out every thing it considers ‘wrong’ about you: (and here I quote from another tabloid freebie simply entitled ‘Beauty’):
‘You want a cleavage that makes other women jealous.’
‘You want a facelift.’
‘You want serious pouting power.’
But do you?
Do you need to look like everybody else, when you have your own unique beauty, that nobody else can buy?
Why am I on my high horse about this? Of course, we need the freedom to do what we want with our bodies, but by participating in this narrow-minded perspective on beauty, we have created a culture where a narrow band of beauty is held in such esteem that it has become more important than our own humanity.
This selfish beauty is insidiously eating away at values that humanity demands be kept intact.
Everyone in Galway remembers the tragic murder of 17 year-old Swiss student Manuela Riedo last year.
But ask yourself this:
Would you have cared as much, or felt so much remorse, had the murdered woman been a fifty year-old alcoholic homeless person, whose pockmarked aged and decrepit face looked like the back end of a bus after a rear-end collision?
Be honest.
Come on, wasn’t it easier to mourn Manuela, because she looked good, in a conventional way?
Now tell me that one life is more important than another, and I will leave this place and pay someone to wax my crack back and sack.

Stop forcing me to be happy!

People say that Christmas is for kids, and New Year is for grown-ups, but I’m not so sure.
Unlike New Year, there are several different reasons to celebrate at Christmas, or the Solstice, depending on your sensibilities; but by the time New Year comes around, I’ve had it with enforced festivities.
I’ve smiled my way around crammed shops to buy presents.
I’ve kept my cool in the supermarket when my trolley is blocked between herself with the three kids and the special promotions stands the shops put up to sell even more stuff but just get in the bloody way.
I’ve been sung to by thousands of Muzak tapes that ‘tis the season to be jolly, and I have been jolly. My heart had been warmed by the smiles of the kiddy widdies. My palate has been pleasured with foods of all kinds and levels of cuisine. My liver has been under siege from the ports, brandys and cold ones from the fridge.
What about the whiskey, I hear you ask?
Didn't you know? Whiskey doesn’t count.
Oh my, so so jolly.
But now I’ve had it with jolly.
Now I’ve had just as much fun as everyone else, and I want it to stop. I love fun, and I love being happy, but don’t tell me that Christmas was just the hors d’oeuvres for the main course to come, because I’m not interested.
I think Christmas is for kids and grown ups, and New Year is for people between the ages of 18 and 25.
At those splendid years all you really want is an excuse to get plastered. You feel the need to drink insane combinations of as many different kinds of alcohol together as fast as your poor body can take it.
You want to be in a crammed pub with all your mates, or squashed into a house party with a multitude of fellow hedonists of little experience.
I don’t. To be honest, New Year has never really tickled my fancy. Don’t know about you, but the movement of a metal arm from one minute on a clock face to another does not make me feel excited. The fact that there has suddenly been a sequential increase in the number allocated to each year I find incredibly unexciting.
When I feel like it, I love to party and have fun. I have been known to dance, and smile for long periods of time, sometimes simultaneously.
But spare me from being compelled to cheer and yell and sing.
If my grump is upsetting your equilibrium; if you think I am being unnecessarily grouchy, please tell me why I should celebrate something that affects me not in the least.
Okay, I’ll try it out.
Here I am at 11:59 on Monday night, and here comes the next minute.
Oh whoopeeee, it’s New Year.
No, sorry. Still underwhelmed to the nth degree.
Some of the insignificance I attribute to New Year might come from the fact that while the culture in which I live is celebrating the arrival of 2008, my family’s culture is already in the year 5768.
Yep, sorry folks, but in the pointless world of years and numbers, the Jews are way ahead of the pack.
We all have different New Years anyway. The Chinese say ‘Gung hay fat choy’ in February and go partying the streets with dancing dragons and swathes of red silk, so who can say which is the most significant?
The best New Year’s Eve party I ever attended was held by the Guru, back in the days of yore when we all still lived in London. He hid his TV, radios and clocks, and upon arrival at the door, we all had to hand over our watches (this being long before the intrusive invasion of the mobile phone).
We just partied and had a great night. Of course there were a few wimps who started getting a bit antsy around what they considered to be midnight, but the Guru held firm against their pleas for contact with the world outside.
We all knew we were in the New Year when we saw the first gentle and pale shards of dawn seep from the grey London sky.
“Happy New Year, lads!” we said to each other, slumped by then on our arses, past caring what planet we were on, never mind what year or time zone we were in.
We are are naturally a happy species, and lose sight of that fact far too often, so we have constructed a formal time, precisely at which we have to be instantly ecstatically happy, and it simply doesn’t work.
When you’re nineteen years of age, and the bells of midnight strike, you live only if you have managed to grab a bird or bloke and are playing tonsil tennis as the New Year comes in. You sing and dance in an alcoholic haze and love life like there is no tomorrow.
Fantastic. But not for me now, thanks all the same.
What will I be doing when we ring in 2008? What will Mister So Very Mature be doing, that’s so bloomin’ different from what he was doing back in the 70s?
Well, errr, hmmm, I suppose I’ll be intoxicated, surrounded by beloved friends, probably having a lovely time.
But I won’t feel I have to enjoy myself.
****
Sadly there can be no DV Awards for the year of 2007, because the absurd truth and rank reality of Irish politics this year simply leaves no room for satire.
There is, however, room to recognise the winner of The Worst Lyric Of All Time, as voted by the listeners of the BBC.
Beating off serious opposition from this enigmatic little ditty from Snap:
‘I’m as serious as cancer / when I say rhythm is a dancer.’ and the crass efforts of Razorlight: ‘And I met a girl / She asked me my name/ I told her what it was., the runaway winner was soul singer Des’ree, for her 1998 song ‘Life’:
‘I don’t want to see a ghost / It’s the sight that I fear most / I’d rather have a piece of toast / Watch the evening news.’
Mazeltov! Great goin’, girl!
On that magical musical note, I thank you all, new readers and time-hardened colyoomistas, for bearing my blather in 2007, and for the New Year, I wish you all you wish yourselves.

In a mad world only the crazy people know what’s going on!

Back from four exhausting and emotionally trying days in England, but with Dadley Adley still in hospital there’s a temporary feel to each day, hour, minute.
If all goes well and he comes home soon, I can relax, but if not, I’ll be back there again in a few days.
I’m all over the place. Splattered, scattered and shattered, that’s where I’m at this week, lost midway between my lovely life in Galway and my loving family in England.
Midway eh? So my soul is treading water just off the coast of Liverpool, is it?
Fair enough.
You’ll not get much sanity out of me this week, as if you ever did, but anyway, I’ve always felt that sanity is vastly overrated.
Find me a human being who has never declared aloud or silently wondered to themselves just what a crazy world is ours. Thus it makes sense, does it not, if we all agree our world is crazy, that crazy people are the only ones who know what is going on.
I’ve never really been attracted to sane people. All my friends and loved-ones are nutty as fruitcakes, in wonderful, interesting and sometimes challenging ways. As I’ve got older I’ve developed a talent for seeing the inner hidden nutter that lurks just under the surface of some people who still, to this day, regard themselves as sane.
In fact, they are now doubtless outraged that I have slurred them as less than sane; but were they not, I could not count them among my friends.
If only our forbears had had the foresight to listen to their loonies, instead of locking them up and making them walk around and around in circles in grey stone prison-hospitals.
Maybe the mad people of 1799 were muttering
“It ha would be ha wonderful if when ha they invent the aerosol ha ha ha, they didn’t use chlorofluorocarbons!”
“Tel them! Tell them!! You must tell them there will be no WMDs in Iraq!”
“Iraq irackky missy mack Iraq aq aq aq wackker dacker dack. Oh, you have to be careful to use the drop-down menu to select ‘No Insurance required’ on that Ryanair interwebby malarkey arkey dooby doo.”
So this week ‘sane’ is very totally oh-so absolutely last Millennia, and ‘crazy’ is the new ‘black’. Crazy turned out to be pretty handy, when last I had to keep a straight face, having just met a man who lived in Lickey End.
A gentle and wonderful nurse in my Dad’s hospital, the 20something lad had a bit of a local yokel combine harvestery oooo aaaaarrrr me lover accent about him, and so I asked him where he came from.
“Me? Oh, I come from Lickey End.”
Holding my childish breath to stifle my guffaw, I let my eyes bulge out a little too long.
Bless him, he had no idea that he had so amused me. Looking over at my contorted features, he reckoned that must be what I look like when I’m thinking, trying to work out where Lickey End might be.
“It’s in the West Midlands.” he offered.
By then I had settled down. My ‘Infantile Response To Humour Team’ had been arrested by the tiny but efficient ‘Adley Adult Assault Force’, and I was able to offer a little conversation.
“West Midlands, eh? Sorry, I thought I detected a South-West accent. No offence mate.”
“None taken!” said he, “And you’re right! I’ve got a strong Devon accent, because my mum comes from Pennycomequick, see?”
Staring into his eyes I detected not the slightest trace of irony. He was genuinely telling me the truth.
I can believe that this bloke might have gone through life never seeing anything the slightest bit funny in the fact that his mother came from a place called Pennycomequick, and he now lived in Lickey End. However, what I couldn’t quite buy was the chance of his going through life without anybody else having a laugh at his locational expense.
Back in the sad bad days of my youth, I used to drive over 1,000 miles a week around England, in my smart reppy suit in my zippetty-dippetty reppy car. During those dreadful years, I did take some solace from noting England’s wealth of eccentric and bizarre village names.
So I knew this guy was being straight.
But was he being just a bit too straight?
Just as the Drink Driving adverts on the tele advise us to always expect the unexpected, when faced with somebody who appears just too unbelievably sane and normal, I suspect the contrary.
Hah! Yes! Was that not a twinkle in his eye?
“C’mere!” say I, all of sudden sounding just a ton or two too Oirish for a good ol’ London boy, “Don’t suppose you’ve got a brother living in Great Cock-Up, have you?”
His eyebrows instantly lift, stretching his face upward into a smile.
“How did you know?”
“Oh, i don’t know! Just a feeling!“
“Yes, and I’ve got three sisters.”
“Have you indeed? Do they live together?”
”No, they live in Fry Up, Splat and Pity Me.”
Finally we relaxed and laughed together. He confessed to changing his home town as often as the sun pops out of a LOndon cloud.
“It helps me get through the day, and sometimes I get a laugh or two out of a patient. But I never let on, and if I don’t like the people, I can act quite offended if they have a laugh at what they think is my expense.”
Extraordinary behaviour. This guy was a professional. He had had me fooled completely at the beginning. Deep inside me, just when I most needed it, my love for the madness of our species burgeons anew.
I love our compassion, our imagination and our utter lack of regard for whatever normality might be.
Instead we seek whatever it takes to get us through, which is, in my experience, rarely sanity and sanity alone.
For five magical minutes, the nurse and I played at high speed a shouting exchange of all England’s strangest place names”
“Nob End! Great Snoring! Piddle!”
“What about Slack Bottom! Horneyman! Hackballscross!”
Right, but beat Pox! Or Twatt, for that matter!”
My own favourite? Ever enigmatic and mysterious, I wonder how life (or just simply the filling-in of forms) might be for the folk of Co. Durham, who live a town called No Place.