I’m a control freak, not an arsonist!

Thanks to emeraldinsight.com

The ear plugs are in, the double whiskey has been digested and I’m finally dropping off to sleep in the Premier Inn.

BWAHH   BWAAAAAHHHH     BWAH BWAH        BWAAAAAAAAH

Bloody Hell! What’s that?

Wrenching out my earplugs and blinding myself by hitting the full row of light switches beside the bed, I leap up and … well, stand there.

I don’t know what to do. It sure as hell sounds like a fire alarm. At least, it would do if it was a constant noise, or even a dopplery crescendo siren, but it’s arhythmic.

BWAAAAAAHHHH BWAHH      BWA

Whatever it is, it’s happening and I want to stay alive. From my top floor eyrie window I can see the whole hotel, and there’s no sign of smoke, fire or any apparent danger.

A small crowd of people are milling around outside the hotel entrance, smoking fags.

BWAAAAHH BWA BWA         BWAAAH

But really, am I going to get back into bed and try and sleep? I’ve got to get outside. How much of a plonker will I look if I’m rescued by firemen in 20 minutes?

Dammit dammit dammit. I so needed a good night’s sleep before my flight from Luton to Knock. I know what I’m like. I can make this journey home feel like an Antarctic expedition if I put my mind to it, so I’d already wrestled with my conflicting instincts.

When I was a youth worker I heard my boss point out to a sixteen year-old that self-knowledge, on its own, is worthless. We’d been trying to make the lads start to think about what they did, become aware of the consequences of their behaviours. But as my boss explained to the confused teenager

“You can understand all your behaviours but that means nothing unless you do something about it.”

‘Cor, that’s good!’ I thought to myself, slightly embarrassed to have only just learned what I evidently needed to know as a spotty yoof.

So now I’ve not only become more aware of my unhelpful and destructive behaviour patterns, but I also try to do something about them. Not all are matters of life and death. Indeed, many just help eradicate pointless self-made stress. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve made this journey, from Edgware up the M1 to Luton; refuel the rental car; return the rental car and take the shuttle to the terminal; check in.

Hardly Shackleton, but invariably I massively overestimate how long it’s all going to take, because there might be a 24 truck pile-up on the M1 or my car might blow up and I’ll have to hitch to the airport and you can see where this is going, can’t you? I end up leaving the hotel ridiculously early to avoid the stress of having to worry about being late for my plane, always arriving at the terminal an hour before the check-in desk is even open.

Thankfully I have the ability to stare into space for hours, so being early is great, save for the fact that I could have had another hour in bed.

That might have been nice.

On this trip my flight home leaves Luton a few hours later than normal, so there’s a chance I could be there crazily early, and that would be plain stupid, so I spend most of the day mentally reminding myself not to pack before I go to bed.

Just relax, sleep on, chill out, and then pack after a shower in the morning.

Shoofty shoofty. Easy does it.

Right, but there’s this other part of me: the control freak anal retentive be ready for anything alpha male leader ug ug chest hairs sprouting that does not allow slack behaviour.

So with this erratic alarm going off in my ears, I’m immediately able to slip into my ready-laid out clothes (and when I say laid out, I mean in a pile of order dressed; sad but true), slide into my available boots and zip up my already-packed bag.

Throwing on my overcoat, I enter a corridor lined by people with bleary eyes wearing jim-jams, hanging out of their bedroom doors, asking each other what the hell’s going on.

Just like me, they can’t understand keeps sounding on and off intermittently, and there's no staff to be seen.

Suddenly they all stop talking. They’re all looking at me, standing there fully-clothed to airport-smart standards, as if I’d somehow expected all this to happen.

“Bloody ‘ell mate! You’re ready a bit bloody sharpish, encha?”

Smiling as I walk past them, I successfully resist the temptation to scream

“Yes I’m ready, but that’s because I’m a neurotic freak and not because I’m a bloody arsonist, okay! I didn’t start the fire, all right?!”

because that might possibly sound a tad suspicious.

Down in the lobby the night porter is pressing buttons on an electrical board, but it’s all pretty chaotic.

Eventually we’re sent back to our rooms, assured that all is safe. Doesn’t feel very safe, but I need sleep.

In the morning I ask a member of staff if they are trained to come up to the corridors when a fire alarm goes off. He doesn’t understand my question. I ask two others, who point out the letter of apology we all had shoved under our bedroom doors, but it’s not until I speak to a third person behind the reception desk that I’m assured that there should have been staff up in the corridors, guiding us to a fire escape.

However, my favourite comment of the night came from the 30something wide boy salesman in the room next to mine. While we were standing in the corridor, unsure whether we were in danger of being burnt to a crisp in a raging inferno, he’d referenced Premier Inn’s guarantee of a good night’s sleep or your money back.

“Free night for us mate. That’s what this is! Guaranteed!”

Intelligent human hotspots and volume problems!

You’ll get no sense out of me today. My brain’s gone whackadoodle in reaction to the Man Flu. While my physical symptoms are boring, more interesting and varied are the ways being ill affects my brainbox. This time there’s definitely been a-wandering. My brain has taken itself off into a place of idiotic fantasy, where long periods are spent contemplating the tiniest detail.

Stop the front page! Scoop ! Scoop! Charlie Adley is a space cadet.

In fevered nights I dream of a crazed Galway City, which has four hour Pay and Display Parking limits. It’s still €2 an hour for the first two hours, but then the rate drops to €1 an hour, up to four hours. Dangerous and radical stuff, allowing people time to both shop and have a meal in our lovely city.

Why on earth would Galway City Council want to let people enjoy themselves and spend money with local retailers and restaurateurs?

No, two hours is just enough to do nothing at all and return to your car. That way we can make sure that local traders can’t earn enough to pay their rates to the council.

Lovely. That makes sense.

But still the nightmares tumble around my fevered brow, insane images, not of notorious Intelligent Traffic Lights, but instead, the horror the horror, Intelligent Humans.

I know! Who’d’ve thought of such a thing!

Tossing and turning through wheezy sweaty nights of delirium, I imagine impossibly Intelligent Humans who actually test transport plans before implementing them. Humans capable of counting the number of exits on a roundabout before they demolish it. Humans who understand the insanity of bus lanes that have no buses and right-turn lanes inaccessible to those who need to turn right. 

Mad, these Intelligent Humans.

Just as well they don’t exist, or Galway would run like clockwork and make a fortune.

Another minuscule peccadillo spinning around my sick cerebellum right now concerns the bloke down the garden centre. His smile is endearing, revealing a gentility and complete absence of thought.

When I go down there I secretly hope he won’t be on duty, because I appreciate the greater experience of his colleagues. But sure enough, there he was, walking right past me as I dragged a huge wooden container towards my car.

“Hiya! Just wondered if you knew the capacity of these half barrel containers?” I asked him. “How many litres would it take to fill this?”

“PshooOOOOoooossshhhh….. Wouldn’t know. 150 maybe.”

“Great, thanks! So I’ll take two of those 75 litre bags of compost please.”

“Oh … compost is it? I thought you were talking about water. Sure you’d only need one of these bags of compost to fill that.”

“Oh really I er but oh, I sort of thought it’d be about the same, compost and water in litres?

“Oh no. No no, not at all.”

I bought one bag and drove home, my tiny brain spinning, just as it is now, fascinated not in any intellectual way by the obvious error of judgment, but more experiencing envy: I want to be inside his head.

I want to experience the universe through the eyes of somebody who thinks like that.

Not for long, mind, like that cruel old Dylan song, where he wishes that for just one day you could stand inside his shoes and he could stand in yours, so then you'd know what a drag it is to see you.

Except I don’t think it would be a drag to be inside that lad’s head. It would be marvellous.

“What mpg do you get out of your car?”

“Dunno, it’s red.”

I want to think like that, just for a wee while.

If it were plain stupidity there’d be no elegance to it, but from within my sick stupor something about it beguiles me; enchants me.

While I’m imagining looking through Garden Centre Boy’s Eye’s, I’m simultaneously captivated by a story by Will Pavia, writing for The (London)Times, that represents all that is magnificent about the human race, apart from the heinous truth that we have homeless people living in our so-called Developed World.

Each year Austin,Texas hosts a convention of social media and technology entrepreneurs called the Next Big Thing. Last month, while all the nerdy billionaires were inside the convention centre, the greatest technological innovation was happening outside the building, where the local homeless community had turned themselves into human wi-fi hotspots.

Clarence Jones, who lost his home in Hurricane Katrina, declared that he accepted PayPal:

“I’m a 4G hotspot!” pitched the 54 year-old on the street, “You don’t have to go in the building no more. Homeless people are outside. We do the outside thing!”

 Forgive me if you’ve been led in any way to believe this colyoom is heading towards some kind of meaningful conclusion. To be fair, I did warn you. When I’m both physically ill and mentally incapacitated, these colyooms can’t do their regular thing of ending all neatly.

 With Intelligent Humans, homeless hotspots and garden centres, that might not be possible this week.

Although to be honest, deep inside me I do feel a strong common bond, a unique link that encompasses all these stories:

I love the human race.

We can conceptualise the beginning of time and space yet find ourselves unable to count roundabout exits or understand the nature of volume.

We live in affluent societies so cruel as to deny that most basic human right: of a roof; a home; a bed; of safety. Yet being human, invested with spirit and imagination, those that others disregard turn a tragic situation to their advantage, reinventing themselves as marketable commodities.

But they are neither products nor services. They are simply magnificent human beings, using their initiative and making an income by parodying the corporate culture that discarded them as expendable.

Enda’s Michelin star is a great Galway stew!

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 All power to Aniar restaurant proprietors Drigín Gaffey, Jp McMahon and head chef, Enda McEvoy. Being awarded Galway's first Michelin star is a massive achievement. While they deserve no end of credit, this success is the result of a wonderful Galway stew, with contributions from patrons, entrepreneurs and talented people from several continents.

Apologies if I forget one or two of the stew’s ingredients. This is more an anecdotal memoir than a fact-perfect account.

I’ve always got on well with chefs. Passionate, vibrant and all just slightly crazy, they speak my language.

Long-serving colyoomistas will remember my very excellent friend Grumpy Chef, who is now neither grumpy nor a chef (if one can ever truly un-chef oneself!) but happy and a father with a family in Hobart, Tasmania.

But one night back in 2000, whilst drinking in the back of the sadly-still-missed Taylor’s bar, he met another young chef called Enda McEvoy. They did what chefs do - they drank and talked about food and drank some more, so when Grumpy was heading off to India, he suggested that Enda fill in for him as downstairs chef at Harriet Leander’s Nimmos, which with her approval he did.

As my friend explained to me:

“Over the next few years we worked together at Nimmos and became firm friends with plenty of banter and piss taking of each other. Since my departure to Australia I have worked with him every time I’ve been back, on weddings, game dinners and other functions. I’m also very blessed to be Godfather to his lovely boy Fin.”

Nimmos was a fantastic place back in those days. The tiny downstairs kitchen turned out great bistro food, while upstairs, chef Jacky Lelievre pretty much singlehandedly introduced fine dining to Galway City. Jacky had already worked in several Michelin-starred restaurants in France, so it must have been great for Enda to encounter such a combination of flair, experience, passion and charm as offered by Harriet’s unique influence and Jacky’s imagination and shining professionalism.

After Harriet sold Nimmos, Enda went to work for her friend and erstwhile colleague, Seamus Sheridan, at the restaurant above his eponymous pub on the docks. Seamus could see Enda’s potential and gave him all the staff, time and financial support he could to bring out the young chef’s talent.

By now Enda was passionate about foraging, and would be out each morning at dawn, prowling woodlands and beaches, collecting local wild produce for Sheridan’s kitchen.

There he worked alongside a talented team including John McInnes, Jeremy Hunt and Pawel Karnafel, some of whom would later move with him to Aniar, when Sheridan's was sadly forced to close.

We now take a slight sideways step to recognise the work of another young chef, Alan Williams, who years before had taken the bold step of opening his own restaurant, Abalone, in what was then the culinary desert of Dominick Street.

Williams’ success attracted Jp McMahon to open the incredibly successful Spanish restaurant Cava next door to Abalone, and subsequently the street, and indeed the entire West End, has become a stroganoff of culinary delight, with Rouge, Creole, La Fine Bouche and Jess Murphy’s award-winning Kai Cafe added to the mix.

When Abalone closed, Jp seized the opportunity to continue the work that Seamus Sheridan had started. Aniar was born.

Inbetween Sheridan’s and Aniar, Enda collaborated with John McInnes on the Cook Wild Project, a pop-up restaurant offering degustation nights. When chef René Redzepi then offered him the chance to work a stage at what many consider to be the world’s finest restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen, Enda leaped at the opportunity to contribute to the natural home of foraging cuisine.

Inspired by his experience in Denmark and lucky once again to have a visionary patron behind him, Enda and the Aniar team worked their socks off to create their own terroir-based menu, inspired by the wild food of the West of Ireland. Enda’s recognition comes well-deserved and timely.

Last month the Snapper and I were lucky enough to be invited to Co. Offaly, to celebrate Enda’s marriage to his better half, the mother of his children and frequent foraging widow, the wonderful Sinead. It was a beautiful event, strange only because we found ourselves at the bride’s family farm, far culturally and geographically from Galway, yet surrounded by the entire restaurant workforce of the city.

Pity the poor punters who tried to find good food and service in town that night!

As the bonhomie and alcohol worked their magic, all the hard work the bride’s family had done paid off. An atmosphere of a mini-festival started to imbue the Midlands air.

The respect that Enda has earned from those who influence our food in Galway was evident everywhere. In the garden Jp McMahon was supervising the pulling of a huge pig that had been roasting on a spit for several decades. Inside the marquee there stood the most sublime and bizarre wedding cake I’ve ever seen - built entirely of rings of Sheridan’s cheeses, it caught the eye and brought a smile to our lips, more as an art installation than traditional sliceable.

Later in the evening, as the music started to play, I sat at a table and watched Enda dancing, eyes closed, his little boy clasped to his chest. Lost in an exhausted joyous reverie, he’d just married his sweetheart, been nominated Food and Wine's Best Chef in Connacht and been awarded 4.5 stars out of 5 in that day’s Sunday Times review.

I sent him a silent pulse of love, hoping that he appreciated how it felt to be at the top of the tree.

But I was wrong. The best was yet to come.

Thanks to the talent, spirit, faith and hard work of all the ingredients in this massive stew, Galway has a star. Michelins may come and go. Hopefully Enda’s will only rise.

I was shocked to receive good service!

We’ve all felt moments of utter hopelessness when dealing with those who dare to describe themselves as ‘service providers’. Just the other side of desperation and rage, you refuse to feel insignificant because you’re human, while you know you’re not worthless because you’re their customer, goddammit.

Yet you’re beaten up by menus, holding patterns and reiterating the same information to humans and machines, rendered indistinguishable.

Being simple in some ways, I have hope in my heart each time I enter any first round of telephone menus. If it all goes well then shufti shufti, I move on. But when I am lied to, misled in any significant way, treated with disdain or negligence, then I tell them I’m thinking of writing about it.

Not a champion of consumer affairs, I’m nobody’s Esther Rantzen. As you long-suffering colyoomistas know, it’s just that I write about any insignificant morsel that might drop into my wormhole.

Unashamedly, I do it for myself, but also for us, all of us who are habitually treated like scum by those at the receiving ends of bills and direct debits.

It’s not a case of pompously roaring ‘Do you know who I aaaaaaaam?’  because they have no idea. But big corporations loathe bad PR, sending bots crawling over our blogs looking for keywords, so when this scribbler stamps his foot, ooh look, a higher level of service appears, where all of a sudden I’m called by their PROs, lovely to deal with, because that’s their job.

Oh and the computer voices have gone. Pure human it is, up on this new level.

Don’t we all deserve that service?

Out of the blue I get a call from a bloke called Ciaran Maddison, from our internet provider Airwire. Apparently they’d been upgrading the network in my area and it looked like I wasn’t getting as good a connection as I should have. Could he come round with his engineer and try to improve our set-up?

On the other end of the phone I was waiting for the punchline, but it never came: no call-out charge; no service charge; no upgrade charge. They just wanted to help.

A couple of days later they arrived at the house with a cherry picker, changed the globular thingy on top of the wireless mast on the roof with a concave thingy (blinding you with nerdy tech-speak here!) and then they fiddled about a bit here in my office.

I asked Ciaran if he worked in sales or support, and was truly shocked when he explained that he was in fact the co-founder and co-owner of the company, alongside his colleague Martin List-Petersen.

So the owner of the company had called me, offering to improve my service and then made the house call himself. Even though I’m well aware that staff wages are the single biggest drain on a small company’s resources, I told him I was very impressed by his and the company's attitude.

He seemed quite surprised I was so grateful, so I explained to him that for us punters on the ground, the word ‘service’ has become synonymous with ‘bad service’. I truly cannot remember the last time a utility company offered me spontaneous good service free of charge, driven by no other motive than to offer a better service to their customers.

As we talked I started to remember what service used to mean. In days of old when the sun shone at night and salmon swam out of the tele and onto the grill, people behaved like Ciaran Maddison

This is not an advert for Airwire. I signed up with them because they offer unlimited data upload and download, but their speeds are nothing to write home about. If you live in the country and want fast speeds, you have to sign up with a satellite provider, but then you’re saddled with monthly data limits, and I cannot afford to run out of internet connection.

So I suffer Airwire’s relatively slow speeds and those times on a wet Sunday afternoon or most evenings, when everyone around us is online, at which point the connection goes so slowly that I inevitably just give up. But on a day such as this, midweek and early, the connection does what I need it to do as a low-end user.

Anyway, this colyoom is not concerned with whether Airwire are the best provider or not, but simply that it was a joy to be treated as if my custom really did matter to a company. It is admirable that Airwire appear to take a professional interest and not a little pride in the service they offer.

A few weeks ago this colyoom churned out knocking copy against Ryanair. Everything I said was heartfelt, but it’s really easy to write Ryanair knocking copy. If there is no service to praise, criticism quickly becomes pointless, so it is with great and undiluted pleasure that I now write thanks and well done to a small business who appears to really care.

I remember when the Tiger spluttered its last asthmatic breaths that certain folk on the streets of Galway muttered about how now we could be human again. Uncomfortable in the madness of a malevolent obsession with money, they longed for the return of that way of being we in the West of Ireland have enjoyed in the past: of looking after each other.

While multinational corporations impose their products upon us, we will cling to our humanity and care for our neighbours, grateful that there are still people out there intent on making sure that we are getting what we’ve paid for, and delivering it with a smile.

Airwire reminded me what service used to be: not merely a matter of how quickly a provider responds to problems, but being proud of what you’re offering and making sure that your customers are getting what they pay for.

How refreshing.