if

 

"James," said the lady in the park, "you're not an anti vaxxer are you?"

A look of refined delicatesse mixed with sheer horror creased her soft patrician features.

And I laughed and laughed and laughed.

When the dust had settled I answered as reasonably as I could.

"The term is loaded," I told her. "People have been trained to think anti vaxxer equals bollocks. Even the way you said it. It was like you were saying: 'James, you're not a complete bollocks are you?' Look. If the Mumps Measles Rubella vaccines have caused a worldwide or indeed a local epidemic of autism, as many clinicians, doctors, scientists and parents believe they have, then yes I would be against those. Against them in the sense that if pharmaceutical companies have deliberately concealed the harmful effects of the MMR vaccine, I would advocate ending the culpable companies. Not fining them. But closing them down and incarcerating the identifiably responsible individuals. As for the vaccines for the Corona virus, they were made or tested on children murdered by abortion whose bodies the pharmaceutical companies have purchased for profit. So you can take it to the bank that I'm anti the practice of harvesting cells and organs from babies about to be murdered. Does that make me an anti vaxxer? Or even a bollocks for that matter?"

She hurried away.

Alone again, a strange glamour touched my spirit.

Not because of the discussion we'd just had but because my mind once more had reverted to considerations of Jimmy Keary's play.

Could I buy the rights off him and stage Uncle Berrnard's rewritten version complete with my own gems in Dublin?

Wouldn't it be a fine adventure.

And there'd be an audience for it.

I just know it.

For more than a decade I've been dealing with harrassment from thug ex cop Stephen Kinneavey and his, er, connections, as well as from the Maloney drug gang, the clan gang operating out of the Alke Babish chipper, the Hutch gang and latterly what looks very much like the Hutch gang's bitter rivals (in murder, drug dealing and harrassing me evidently) the Kinahane gang who have moved to Naas, an adjacent town to my own, probably to be near me.

If I stage a play in Dublin one thing is certain.

All those fuhn kunz are going to come to it.

It'll be a sellout smash.

What can possibly go wrong?

On a lighter note...

Another random thought strikes me.

I remember in the dulcet rose tinted days of my 1970s  childhood, on holidays at the family farm of my countrified Wexford cousins watching the apocalyptic Lindsay Anderson film entitled "If" which was set in an English public school with the kids turning on their teachers, taking up machine guns and generally wreaking havoc.

I was shocked by all the apocalyptic bits.

I was even more shocked by my Wexford cousins enthusiasm for the whole thing.

They kept saying, interspersed with little chuckles, over and over again: "Jaze, the bhoys just went mad... "