WHAT’S BEHIND THIS SURPLUS OF SERVIETTES?

Clumsy scribbler by Allan Cavanagh of caricatures-ireland.com/blog/

Early Saturday morning and I’m sitting in the pub. Everyone needs a treat once in a while, and I make sure to enjoy my weekly cooked breakfast without guilt, much to the annoyance of my arteries.

Yet today, as I survey the plethora of plates laid around the table, I’m twitching and perplexed.

What’s with all these serviettes?

Don’t get me wrong. I can be a right clumsy oaf, well capable of knocking over cups, spilling bottles and sliding my elbow through food on plates you didn’t even know were there, so I’m delighted that there’s a serviette under my cutlery.

I can even understand the serviette sitting between the teapot and its saucer, because those little metal teapots can present a heck of a challenge when pouring.

If you just lift them willy-nilly and thoughtlessly try pouring tea straight into the cup, the tea will run out of the pot’s spout and then, as if the pot emitted the gravitational force of a small planet, the liquid will cling to the pot and flow in a small tidy line down to the bottom of the pot and onto the table.

Serviette time.

Ah but your scribbler is ahead of the game. I raise the teapot up to eye level, grip the handle firmly between two fingers and holding the little blighter high over the centre of my tea cup, I pour a slow steady stream directly and accurately straight into the cup below.

Tea is important. It’s the rarest of things, fundamental to the essence of culture in both my native England and adopted Ireland.
Anyway, the tea is well-behaved and in my cup where it belongs. No spillages, no serviettes necessary.

There’s a serviette under the saucer upon which sit the little bottles of jam, marmalade and butter. There’s a serviette between the china bowl of saucy ketchup and mayonnaise sachets and the saucer underneath. There’s a serviette under the salt and pepper jars, which also sit on a saucer.

None of this offends me in the slightest, although it makes me wonder about resources and waste, and ponder about extra work for serving staff.

Then there’s the yuk, the really yuckkety poopers, which is the serviette underneath my hot toast, which is now disintegrating, and in the process rather unpleasantly proving itself to be less paper napkin and more some kind of evil plastic/paper hybrid, that is presently both crumbling onto the plate below, while kind of melting into my toast.

What with all the serious suffering going on around us, there’s no way I’m going to sit here and give out about how the serviette screwed up my slices of brown pan, because I don’t live in a world where that matters very much.

No, I’m much more concerned about where this mass serviette behaviour comes from and what mentality it represents.

This place is far from the only establishment currently guilty of serviette excess. Everyone’s at it. I wouldn’t be surprised if next week the checkout bloke in the garage passes me the credit card zapper with a serviette underneath it.

At this point you’re probably wondering what the hell the problem is with serviettes. Who cares about the bloody serviettes?

I don’t, but the statement behind their overuse is significant. We live in the West of Ireland, where historically life has been tough. These counties endured a holocaust during the great famine, and as a result there’s a strong ethic here of waste not want not.

If you’re a guest in a house in Connacht you’re expected to clear your dinner plate, even if there’s potato cooked five different ways and half a ton of swede.

When the Irish economy booms we in the West enjoy only a few drops of the sweat flipped off the foreheads of dancing Dubs. A boom in the West is when there’s no mass poverty here; when most of us can afford to live without financial fear.

That’s as good as it gets here, for most of us. That’s what constitutes good times west of the Shannon.

Well, financially. What makes the West the best is that we don’t need money to have a good time.

Yet now, there are serviettes everywhere.

Not all are cheap and noxious. Some are high class triple-ply numbers in rich burgundy hues, so posh that you’d think twice before wiping the melted cheese off your mouth onto one.

Whatever they’re made of, this blanket use of serviettes is an ostentatious display, representing a delusional attitude to our economic situation.

After the last crash there were many voices, from townlands to cities, complaining that we’d lost the run of ourselves; that for some reason we’d overdone the good times.

Not me. I believe we all deserve to live large if we want to, but right now we are not in a boom. Kabillions in debt has been swept under the carpet for your grandchildren to pay off, and while house prices and rents are through the roof, nobody (save for the usual suspects) is getting rich.

Yet for some reason the ether feels that good times have come again.

Aren't we one of the fastest growing economies in the EU?
Let’s cover the place in serviettes to show we can afford to splurge that bit extra now.
Sure, isn’t it mighty that things are great again!

Sorry to be a downer, but reality bites. Whatever form it takes, Brexit will devastate our economy. Like a ghost flying unwelcome through the door, it’ll instantly reduce Boom to “Boo!”

Then we’ll see how many serviettes there are to waste.

©Charlie Adley
20.01.2019

A CURIOUS COCKTAIL OF POKER CHIPS AND DEGRADABLE PLASTIC!

Come on. No good sitting here.
 
Time to get cracking.

If only I didn’t feel so lethargic.

My body is telling me to rest and my mind isn’t exactly fighting the idea either, but rest is not on my menu today.

I’m truly tempted to stay here, sitting by the fire with my mate, who’s working his way through a backlog of Match Of The Days, but no.

I’m moving house in a couple of weeks so my mood is neither here nor there. Ideally I’d be leaping enthusiastically into this process, but after months of painful chaos I’m exhausted.

Challenges always feel less daunting when I’ve made a plan, which this time is mind-numbingly simple: do it room by room, carload by carload, until there’s only furniture left for the van.

Nobody’s going to do this for me, but how hard can it be? Muttering mantras about longest journeys and first steps, I head off to my bedroom to find and pack up the nooks and crannies of my life.

In a plainly pathetic effort to make it more fun for myself, I decide to turn this sorting of worldly possessions into a TV show called Keepers or Crappers!

Do you love it or need it?
If not, bin it.

Off we go with round one, which entails sitting on the floor and opening the door of my little bedside table.

What might be in here?
Not a clue.

Ah, my playing cards and bag of poker chips.

Keepers.

I’ll be a complete stranger in the place I’m moving to, and in the past I have found poker a way to make friends, especially as I tend to lose.

Reaching for the carrier bag I lift it out of the tiny cupboard to watch, as if in slow motion, the bag disintegrate in front of my eyes, allowing light plastic poker chips to explode to the floor and rebound energetically -

 - running under the bed -
 - rolling under the bedside table -
 - rolling further, under both chests of drawers -

… and what
… and how
… and please no!
 
No no no!

In my hands I’m holding the raggedy handles of what merely seconds ago appeared to be a bag, but the plastic in my hands is all that remains of it.

Beneath me, a pile of recently liberated poker chips lies completely enveloped in a dry soup of beige dust.

I know plastic eventually degrades, but there’s no way this bag has been in that cupboard long enough to disintegrate like that.

Now, instead of heroically plunging into my packing, I have to get the hoover out, move all the cupboards in my bedroom, find and fish out the errant plastic discs and somehow wash off the powdery remains of what the bag has become from all the chips, the floor and oh, I want to lie on my back, kick my feet in the air and wail like a baby:

“Which part of this is making progress towards a carload of boxes?”

but I don’t, because I’m a grown-up and that’s not deemed acceptable behaviour, unless
you want the funny farm on your family crest.

Could the packing of my stuff have started in a more trying way? Well, I suppose I could’ve accidentally cut my arm off. That would’ve been much worse, and no less likely than a disappearing bag.

Making appropriate grunting noises as I struggle to my feet, I look at the tatty remains in my hands, and see that behind the beige background there are hundreds of tiny lines of green printed words running all over it

Sitting on the side of the bed, I unfurl the last inches of complete bag that are stuck between my fingers, and peering closely discover that those lines of words all say the same thing: ‘biodegradable plastic bag’.

Oh that’s bloody great.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for biodegradable plastic bags. Don’t tell the others, but I’m a big fan of all those survival shows on TV, when a bunch of obnoxious humans get dumped on a island in the middle of nowhere.

The level of human obnoxiousness might rise and fall, but the one constant factor, wherever they are in the world, is that the beaches will be strewn with plastic bottles and waste.

It’s deeply sad and maddening so yay, absolutely triff, let’s find a way of making plastic disappear, but - and right now this is a bit of a deal breaker for me - please let us know clearly, in no uncertain terms, when the bag you’ve given me is going to crumble into dust in a few years.

What’s that?

Why don’t I use the eyes in my head to read what’s printed all over the bag?

Yeh well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, and go away and I never liked you anyway.

As I sit here and write this I know that there are still poker chips hiding under wardrobes in the bedroom. I hoovered up all the skunky gunk and dusted off all the chips, only to find they were still covered in manky grey goo.

Can’t give guests I haven’t even met yet poker chips covered in manky grey goo, so I washed them off in the sink, and then spent ages trying to find a way of laying them on tea towels and draining boards, so that they could all dry, because I needed to get on with packing my stuff.

Didn’t work, so I gave up and dried each one individually, by which time it was dark, and I had to cook dinner.

Not a single box packed. Guess today wasn’t the day I was meant to start packing.

Should’ve just chilled and watched footie with my friend.

Ah well, next time I move, I’ll listen to my body.

Mind you, I hope by then I’ve long forgotten all about this curious cocktail of degradable plastic and poker chips.


©Charlie Adley
13.01.2019.

I BELONG IN THE WEST OF IRELAND!

Ossie tribute by Allan Cavanagh of caricatures-ireland.com

“How was your trip?”

“Great, thanks!”

“So what did you get up to?”
 
“Oooer. Blimey. So much.”

Inside my skull my brain spins this way and that, like an agitating tumble dryer loaded with conversations.

Standing in the away section of Watford FC’s Vicarage Road, on narrow concrete steps between my friend and other middle-aged men who make me feel less than fat. 

All have anoraks zipped up over their half barrel bellies, and before the game they seem jolly and avuncular.

I laugh at something said, at which point the True Blue behind me turns and asks

”So who do you want to lose it most - Liverpool or Spurs?”

Here in the heart of Chelsea’s diehard supporters I know this is not the time for me to go off on one, opining about how I love the game whenever it’s played well, and how watching both those teams at the moment is a pleasure.

No. I say exactly what I’m meant to say.

“If it’s got to be one there’s only one it’s got to be, ain’t there.”

He nods and approves, as I have correctly shown my understanding of the age-old rivalry between Chelsea and Spurs.

It’s impossible for me to be at a Chelsea game and not mourn for my father. He first took me to Stamford Bridge when I was a boy of nine, and then he bought me a season ticket seat next to his.

We went to Wembley twice together for cup finals and those Saturdays spent together forged eternal bonds, to which I’m happily shackled today, ten years after his death.

That’s why I sang my heavy heart out when the Chelsea fans decided to celebrate Christmas by belting out a roaring rendition of our Yuletide classic, to the tune of ‘The First Noel’.

“Out from The Shed came a rising young star,
Scoring goals past Pat Jennings,
From near and from far,
When Chelsea won,
As we all knew they would,
The star of that great team was Peter Osgood!
 
Osgood, Osgood!
Osgood, Osgood!
Born is the king of Stamford Bridge!”

Who cares about rhymes at times such as this?

Then the game started and this cosy Band of Blue Brothers around me instantly transformed into beings of incandescent rage, bile and hatred.

Guess I was out of practice. Hadn’t been to a game for years. I’d forgotten what it’s like.
 
Here I live a gentle life in which it’s unusual to encounter public displays of outright aggression.

The bloke next to me, with whom I’d been sharing a giggle, was now using every ounce of strength in his body to reach out his pointed finger and scream at the linesman, not 10 yards way.

“‘Ere you f***king moron, did you get that f***king Hitler moustache for f***king  Christmas you f***king blind c**t.”

They were all at it, behind me, below, all of them, sending my mental tumble dryer back to a conversation with a taxi driver the day before.

The car rental companies were asking silly money for the festive season and there were no buses, so I took taxis when lifts weren’t available, enjoying the company of intelligent, sensitive cabbies who, given the time of year, were mostly Muslims.

“So why’d you leave England, then?” he asked.

“Because I felt so tired of the anger. So many people in England exist a hair’s breadth from a fight, and that’s not the world I want to live in. Don’t get me wrong, mate, I love England and I’m proud to be English, but I just don’t want to live here, that’s all.”

He laughed. As a cabbie he completely understood.

Back in the stadium, as if I wasn’t missing my dad enough, the Chelsea fans burst into a rendition of the Liverpool slum song, which may have had some political poignancy in 1967, but now sounds like the soundtrack to a vile black and white newsreel, running around the ground.

Overwhelmed by memories and the power of the crowd, I forget who I am and find myself singing along...

“You look in a dustbin for something to eat,
You find a dead cat and you think it’s a treat…”

I’d packed my Chelsea scarf, but before we left for the game I asked my mates if I should wear it. What’s the story, these days?

Both decided I was better off not to, just to be on the safe side.

Mental tumble rumble tumble as I reflect on how shocked I felt years back, when I saw my Dublin friend who lives in Mayo give his son the blue jersey to wear.

“Isn’t that asking for it? Won’t he get beaten up in school?“

“Not at all!” scoffed my friend, in his rich deep voice, ”We all stand together here!”

Away from the mindless hostility, football offers refuge and benign escapism to middle aged men. We watch, follow and support out teams without question. You win draw or lose and you play well or badly.

It’s a no-brainer.

I gave both the friends in this story team shirts, even though one’s a Tottenham fan!

It was a no-brainer.

We like no-brainers, men do. Just watch us shop.

Tumble away to more cabbie conversations.

“So how does all this Brexit stuff look to you over there in Ireland? Are you all wondering why the English chose to vote for recession?”

From strangers and my closest kin I enjoyed much care and kindness. I sat on my sister’s sofa with my 89 year-old mum on my left, a friend of 45 years to my right, holding my baby great-nephew in my arms.

How was my trip?

It was wonderful and hard, sad and joyous. 
It was easy and exhausting, a pleasure and essential.
 
I felt loved.
I felt both lost and at home in the place that I come from.

Only here in the West of Ireland do I feel I belong.

©Charlie Adley
06.01.2019

Roll out the red carpet, it’s the DV AWARDS 2018!

Precious DV Award as seen by Allan Cavanagh of caricatures-ireland.com/blog/

Dwarlinks, Luvees, Lords and Ladies, adults and babies, busy and lazies, all are welcome to the award show that’s better than all the other award shows you’ve already forgotten.
 
Live from Galway, here come the DV Awards 2018!

As ever we start on the international stage. First DV of the night is the much-coveted ‘Bertie’s Tears Were Really Real DV’ for absurd interpretations of media events, which this year goes to the conspiratorial nutcases who suggested that actors were playing the parts of those exceptional Floridian teenagers, who made inspirational and astonishing speeches against gun ownership, after their schoolfriends had been slaughtered in that week’s mass shooting.

The ‘Ronald Reagan smiling and appearing stupid while threatening apocalypse DV’ is shared this year between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump, for terrifying the world by threatening to annihilate each other, and then managing to make the end of the world seem boring, by planning a summit that was on and off, on and off, until we didn't care anymore.

The ‘Camden Is Just Like Crossmaglen DV’ for dangerous nonsense that costs lives goes to all of us, for being shocked by Assad’s gas attacks in Syria, while accepting the use of conventional weapons.

If your family were blasted to smithereens by a cruise missile you would not appreciate that they were blown apart, rather than gassed. The rules of warfare become meaningless when you end up punishing politicians for killing innocent civilians in the wrong way.

Well gosh and phew, didn’t someone promise a good night out?

Indeed, so moving rapidly into the facile and glittery world of Celebrity, the ‘Princess Diana I Hate Being In The Headlines So Put That In Your Paper DV’ for services to red top tabloid trivia goes to Girls Aloud superstar Cheryl, for crowing about keeping her son Bear’s image out of social media.

She claimed to want “to give him a chance of a childhood.” but well, sorry Cheryl, if you really cared about that you wouldn’t have called the poor wee bollix Bear at all, would you? First day of school, the teachers are going to put one and one together and come up with today’s Sun Fun To Play quiz: Guess Which Father Is Pop Star’s Son?

This year’s ‘We Blindly Obey Because We Lived Under The English Cosh For 800 Years DV’ goes to the government’s reaction to Storm Emma. Snowpocalypse was threatened. We were told we all had to be inside our homes by 4pm and wait for flakevasion.

At the time it felt wonderful to be forced to do nothing, yet it was one hell of a nanny state reaction.

This year we’re delighted to introduce the inaugural ‘#metoo #Ibelieveher DV’ for womens’ bravery in the face of the patriarchy, which goes to everyone who voted to repeal the 8th, while special recognition is awarded to all the Irish women presently facing obscene sexism in rape trials.

Next up, the ‘Is This Ireland or Iraq DV’ for global warming goes to the imposition of a hosepipe ban on a nation which from the air looks like a few green bits sticking out of vast puddles.

The ‘Thank God Blasphemy is Gone DV’ for crushingly inappropriate assumptions goes to the world press, for the number of times they refer to Ireland as a progressive republic purely because we’ve got a gay Indian Taoiseach.

Who cares that he’s the son of an immigrant? Who gives a phooey he’s gay? 

Doesn’t a republic become modern when we all stop noticing those criteria and concentrate on the way Leo is singularly focused on dragging Ireland’s economy back into the Thatcherite 1980s?

Hopefully for the last time, this year’s ‘Be DUP Careful Who You Have Brexit In Bed With DV’ for avoiding noxious political partners goes to Fianna Fáil, for rejecting Peter Casey’s divisive bigotry.

For a while your colyoomist felt so disturbed by Casey’s burgeoning popularity I actually started to long for the old Ireland where, if faced with a new and threatening phenomenon, politicians would set up a Tribunal to investigate and after nine months come up with a draft report that would be considered by a group of disparate people with a variety of vested interests, who would return for a final report to a Dáil Committee, who would put it in a prescribed fallow field, lay upon it 3 lumps of horse dung and see which way the wind blew.

At last we arrive at that part of the awards ceremony where DVs become local, so reliable as the tide, this year’s winner of ‘Best Place To Live DV’ goes once again, as it always will, to Connacht, where the friendliest of people, both artistic self-starters and stubborn local survivors gather to live among breath-suckingly beautiful landscapes.

Finally, and most personally, the ‘Apart From That Mrs. Lincoln, Did You Enjoy the Play? DV’ for the most important double use of the letter ’N’ goes to my annus horriblis: 2018. Early in the year I lost a friend of over 40 years, then my marriage, my dog and my home.

At times such as this my much-missed late father used to say “Onwards and upwards, Addles!” so that is where I’m going, feeling sure of only one thing.

2019 will be a better year for me, as I hope it is for all of you, my loyal colyoomistas. As we sign off from our glittering award ceremony, all at DV wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!

©Charlie Adley
31.12.2018.

Thank you Winter. Don’t listen to the others. I love you.

Waking to the sound of no rain hammering my bedroom windows, I turn on the lamp.

6:43

Above me silence reigns, where last week the wind played a violin concerto, as waves of rain smashed violently onto the roof. 

The mighty old ash trees that surround me here reveal by the pitch of their howl the energy of the storm. 

I see stars through the velux window.

Splendid.

Clear means icy, frosty, the end of the nasturtiums at last. 

There are countless downsides to being a writer, but having to get out of bed while it’s still dark isn’t one of them.

Propping up a pillow behind my head I reach for the doorstop of a hardback that has sustained and entertained me for two weeks now.

What luxury!

For years I commuted into London, physically hurling my body at packed tube trains, just as the doors started to close, so that my impact would allow me to squeeze into the space between glass and wedged workers.

No more.
                        

No need, reason or desire to leave the house. Just get up, do my stretches, make a fire, have breakfast and go to my office. There I can sit and write as long as I want to, because outside it’s freezing/lashing/blowing a gale/winter.

Apart from housework, there is nothing else I can do today. 

Good writing weather: that’s what I call it.

Lovely.
                             
God knows what other poor souls who live rural lives do on days like this. Sometimes being a scribbler feels like a blessing, because I’m condemned to neither loneliness nor Loose Women.

Without the writing Winter would send me even more doolally than I already am.

Ireland has produced so many writers, because instead of going on merry social jaunts, we’re forced by the rain to stay inside; to apply our madness to writing.

Others warn me of the dangers of isolation, but I experience way more craziness out there in the human world, than here in my solitude.

Exchanging pleasantries with shop workers or howyas on the street inevitably entails listening to them giving out something rotten about the wind and rain.

They can take the cold, and love the sunshine. Oh they’ll take anything, except that rain, the wind and the rain. They just can’t bear it.

I nod and smile, eager but socially unable to moan back at them:

“Well why the bloody hell do you live here then, in this country famed for wind and rain? Move to Morocco. But no, ‘cos once it gets above 20 degrees you’re giving out like babies that it’s fearful hot. And as for humid, well believe me, what you call humid in Ireland truly isn’t.”

Would you want to sit there and tell me you hate a quarter of your life?

Well then, don’t give out about the only Irish season that does what it says on the calendar.
                        
In Winter we can enjoy each day’s sunrise and sunset. With the sun so low on the horizon, the heavens offer severe contrasts and jaw-dropping colours.

Shafts of fire and crimson shoot from both dawn and dying sun, up into black clouds bulging with rain. The light and dark bleed together, mutating into a menacing purple glow, intense with latent power. 

As the sun creeps along its low Winter horizon it lights up the empty branches of trees.

The best of Winter comes not with what is, but what is not.

During the darkest months, while we uncivilised beasts rush around in festive frenzy, arrogantly believing ourselves immune to mammalian hibernation, the natural world becomes calm.

Stand still for only a few minutes each day and you’ll discover how in Winter our environment exists in a variety of silences, offering the bliss of several levels of peace. 

At Winter dusk there are no power tools; not even birdsong here.

Not a sound; not a movement; not a car in the distance nor a ram at a ewe. 

A majestic calm hangs over the land. Away from war and Christmas shopping, here right now, at our feet, the world is placid. 

With shorter days I sleep more and try to expect less of myself. A very fine and fancy shmancy idea, but the outside world (a.k.a. life) always steps in and dictates the rules.

Still, despite the trials and challenges life presents, which as we all know it does, relentlessly, I make sure to give thanks for Winter.

 

When the trees are still, silent and naked, I enjoy nothing more than standing by the back door, watching the birds eat the seeds I’ve strewn.

Oh wow!

A young fox appears, not 20 feet from me.

Robust with health in his lush rusty coat, he licks up a few mouthfuls of birdseed and jumps over the stone wall. 

The weather forecast unfolds over my house.
I take time to appreciate the glorious tranquillity.  

I like to stand on the bog road at 8:30 on a January morning, watching the huge sun creep above the hill, slashing the sky so that it bursts a blood red snakeskin pattern above pitch black mountains.

 I love the abruptness of Winter silence.

Trees demand attention: starkly silhouetted inverted lungs, plugged into the planet.

Away over there another fox appears in daylight, because it has to, and I admire the size of this beast, surprisingly brown, with a yard long brush ending in a white bobble.

By god, it’s thriving.

When all the undergrowth is stripped back, Winter allows you to encounter Ireland’s wildlife up close. The pair of herons that in midsummer would have no need to be close to humans now launch themselves out of the drainage ditch up the bog road.

I stop in my tracks as they rip-roar out of the reeds, casually flapping their great dinosaur wings, rising straight up only to settle back down 20 yards away on the bog. 

At midday, dazzled by the low sun, I stand under a deep blue sky, vivid rust bogland to the horizon.

Drinking in the stillness; the only sound a breeze in my ear.

Thank you Winter.

Don’t listen to the others.

I love you.

 

 

 

 

©Charlie Adley

08.01.2024