obitcheries

The broadcaster Gay Byrne is dead.
If you want to see his monument, look at all the shit around you.

valorous idylls chapter 31

The Credibility Gap

"You fell over because you were looking at a big scaldy crow when you should have been watching where you were going," said Siobhan Patterson of the Kalbarri Restaurant And Cookery School.
Her attitude irked me for some reason.
"It was a scald crow not of this earth," I tried again.
"You mean from another country?"
"I mean from another dimension."
"Ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho, hee, hee, ha, ha. ha."
"Seriously."
"Oh Lordy," wiping her eyes, "that was a good one. James, you never lost it."
"I'm close to losing it now," I told her darkly.

valorous idylls chapter 30

Coincidences

Sitting in a cafe with the business woman Nessa Dunlea.
She says: "You know that a few weeks after you had your fall, Trevor Baines' brother had a fall. He died from his one."
Then she indicates a man across the room chatting to a group of people.
"That man is a teacher at the Cross And Passion Convent. He took a fall a few months ago. The doctors said he wouldn't live. Then they said he'd never talk again. Then they said he'd never walk."
As we watch him, the man says goodbye to his friends and walks from the cafe.
Later that week I meet Maggie O'Clare in the street.
"What happened to you?" she exclaims.
Evidently she missed the memo.
I give her a limited update.
She pales.
"When did it happen?"
"January."
"What day?"
"Er, Wednesday... the 30th."
"What time?"
"Some time after three o'clock in the afternoon. About 3.15pm. Why?"
"A priest friend of mine was killed in a freak accident on that day at exactly that time."
A few days after Maggie's consummate attempt to give me a permanent case of the heebie jeebies, I'm called back to the Dolce And Gabbana Fashion House, known as Tallaght hospital.
The dude doctors probably need a good laugh or to check on Lefty The Arm, or something.
As Farmer Jones is driving me there, I think: "What would confirm for me the providence of God in any of this? I suppose if I met that woman from gangland again."
At the hospital, A Muslim doctor taps my chart and asks: "How did you fall?"
Muslims are close to eternal things.
I consider telling him the whole story.
He might actually believe it.
I decide to restrict my account to the more prosaic sphere and say: "There must have been frost on the ground."
Out in the corridor. the throng of stylishly dressed health care professionals, clerical staff, nurses, doctors and patients, parts suddenly and the woman from gangland strolls up to me.
She looks about a hundred times better than the day she told me she couldn't give up drugs.
We both stare.
She gives me a hug.

valorous idylls chapter 29

Autumn Colours

Walking on the avenue.
Two scald crows in a tree go "caw caw" in greeting.
I pause.
This is a pickle.
Over the years one of the effects of my experience of malicious stalking and harassment by human beings has been to make me less trusting of human beings.
Am I now, simply because a giant supernatural scald crow knocked me down a few months ago, going to write off the whole animal kingdom?
The devil always likes to appear more powerful than he is.
"Hey big birds," I call back cheerily. "Praise ye the Lord."
A thought strikes me.
It may be time to change my presumption of guilt operational policies towards the human race also.

valorous idylls chapter 28

Moral Equivalency

The house is quiet.
What to do.
My masturbation arm is out of commission.
And John Berney has taken the TV so there's no sex and violence to watch.
My eyes are drawn to the largest tome on my book shelf.
No.
Not this.
Surely after all these years, I've not been reduced to this.
I haven't fallen so low.
It is Robert Fisk's The Great War For Civilisation, a 1300 page word heap that someone left in the house ten years ago to annoy me.
Over the decade it's sat on my shelf, I never threw it out because doing so would have been like surrendering to Robert Fisk, or admitting I was afraid of him, or something.
So there's it's sat.
Waiting for this moment of weakness.
Now it has me.
Still.
How bad can it be.
How bad!
Just think.
What if it brain washes me?
What if I actually like it?
What if I end up, heaven forbid, agreeing with Robert Fisk in his advocacy of Islamic terrorism?
Slowly, doom ladenly, as if in a dream, like a man walking to the gallows, I reach for The Great War For Civilisation, blow the dust off it and open the cover.

valorous idylls chapter 27

My Bobble Hat Is Quick

Cousin John Berney arrives to jump start the car.
The car's engine is out in sympathy with Lefty The Arm.
John jump starts the car and enters the house.
I show him the new television.
"I can't abide it," I say. "In conscience I don't see how anyone can support satelite service providers who pornographically exploit the human form for profit.  Whether it's sex or violence, they're wilfully and deliberately disrupting the mental health of successive generations. They're actually culturing people to commit acts of rape and violence. The sensualisation of murder is concealed in comedy zombie films like Shawn Of The Dead and Anna And The Apocalypse. You know, they're eroticising murder. Then there's the licence fee you have to pay in this country. I can't agree to finance RTE's culture war against Christianity and that's what they use the licence fee for. Then there's Putin's Russia Today and the Murdocks Sky' News and the Nazis' Al Jazeera all trying to convince people there's no Jihad only climate change. I don't want to be complicit with any of them. There's only one thing for it. I'm going to have to get rid of the television."
"I'll take it if you want," says the Cousin helpfully.
It was too late to back down.
It had all happened very fast.
My bluff had been called rather sooner than expected.
"Oh! Would you? You'd be doing me a big favour," I manage.
And he took my TV.
When he'd gone, the ghosts of somebody called Gordon Sumner and somebody called Stewart Copeland and somebody called Andy Summers entered and set up their instruments in the corner.
They sang thusly:
"That ain't working
That's the way you do it
You start a car
And you take his TV.
Oh that ain't working.
That's the way you do it.
You jump start a car
And get your tellies for free
We gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliverie-e-e-e-s
We gotta move these refrigerators
We gotta take James Healy's TV-e-e-e-e-e.
Wulla wulla."