Head Rambles

Grandad January 31st, 2009

Since before Christmas, our County Council have been playing with their temporary traffic lights in my area.

They pretended they were doing work, but I knew better.  They were just fucking with my head again.  Why else would the lights always turn red just as I approached?

On Thursday last, they stepped up their campaign against me, and shifted those lights so that I couldn’t get out of the house at all.  I didn’t care as I had no plans on going anywhere anyway.

I was up early on Friday.  I was surprised to see machinery trundling past my place as it was only seven in the morning.   They drove up and down, mostly backwards judging by all the beeping that emanated.  I left them to it.  If they were trying to piss me off, they were going to fail.

They are a determined lot though.  They worked right through Friday, creating a hell of a racket, because at this stage they had started to remove the road.  They were drilling and banging and thumping all day.  They still didn’t annoy me though as it was pissing rain all day, so they were getting soaked and I wasn’t.  Guess who was having the last laugh?

To my amazement, when it started to get dark on Friday, they erected massive floodlights and carried on removing the road.

During the night, I got up for a piss bit of exercise, and they were still banging away and driving around backwards.  This was at around four in the morning.  I have never experienced such a concerted effort by my council to annoy me.  I just shrugged and went back to sleep.

Saturday morning, they were still there.  The road was completely gone at this stage.  They were still driving around backwards at the bottom of the hole, and were still making an unholy racket.  I left them to it as it was still lashing down.

Later in the day, I realised that all was quiet.  After about thirty hours on non-stop noise, the silence was deafening.

The rain had eased a bit so I went out to survey the damage.

They had put the road back again.

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that they were just rebuilding the road.  But you’re wrong.

They had put the road back exactly as it was before.

With great care and precision, they had replaced each bump and pothole precisely in their original locations.  It was a masterful job.

I would say I dreamed the whole thing, but there was a lot of mud around still, and I had my photographs.

I don’t know why they have it in for me, but I admire not only their determination but the extent to which they will go.

But it’s no wonder the country is broke.

• On the road
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Grandad January 30th, 2009

I have a very simple solution to Ireland’s financial problems.

I hear that Mugabe has no further use for his Zimbabwe Dollar.

Fair enough.

Why don’t we quit the Euro and adopt the Zimbabwe Dollar?

We can adapt it to our own needs.

I reckon we could buy it at an exchange rate of about one Euro for Z$50,000,000

We would have to rename it, of course.

Just think –

It is deflation proof.

And we would all be multi-millionaires.

Sorted.

• Rambles
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Grandad January 29th, 2009

There are two times during the year that I dislike.

There is the depressing period which lasts through November and December.  That is the time of dark wet night and fucking Christmas commerciality being rammed down my throat.

We are bang in the middle of the other period – The Gloomy Period.

There are nice things about this time of year, such as the lengthening evenings and growth in the estate. The daffydowndillies are thriving and should be showing buds soon [which is about six weeks too early?].  The snowdrops and the witch-hazel are all in full flower.

But I get pissed off with the weather.  It’s cold and damp.  I hate damp. It’s grey and it gets into my bones.

I have developed a wee trick when the gloom sets in.

If I’m working on my laptop, I minimise all my windows for a little and stare at the screen.  I feel much better.

Now why in the name of all that’s holy would I want to stare at a blank screen?

The answer is as simple as it is obvious – my wallpaper.

Of course the picture on my screen is just a tiny bit bigger, but you get the idea.

Look at that blue sky!

I have other photos too.  I must set them up as a slideshow.

This one is the view from the front of that house.

I booked it last October in a fit of madness and despair at the early winter.

Also in a fit of madness, I booked it for a whole month.  I have never had a whole month on holidays.  In fact, including travel, it will be nearer five weeks.

It’s a long time to the holiday, but I don’t care.  I love the anticipation.  In fact I find the anticipation is a whole aspect of the holiday in itself.

There are four of us going.

Herself [if we’re still married], myself [someone has to do the driving], Sandy [who has never been abroad before] and Roger in his little SatNav thingy.

I don’t believe in wishing my life away.  At my age you begin to appreciate that life isn’t limitless.

But fuckit.

I can’t wait!

• Holidays
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Grandad January 28th, 2009

I am sick to the back teeth [what’s left of ‘em] of hearing about Recession.

So things are a bit rocky on the economic front, but do they have to keep going on about it?

The meeja are having a field day, of course.  They love bad news, and they are milking the current situation for all it’s worth.  Thy are really getting their jollies trotting out the latest redundancy figure and shop closures, as it they were some kind of score to make us feel better.

The financial world is more delicately balanced than a Swiss watch.  One word out of place, and shares can soar or plummet.  One whisper can decimate a company’s share prices.

The one thing that can be done to help the current situation is to display a bit of optimism.  I’m not saying we should pretend that nothing is happening, but this constant doom and gloom is not helping.

The worst offender is, of course Biffo. our Glorious Leader.

Singlehandedly, he kicked off the recession in Ireland with his tales of ‘things being worse that ever before’ and ‘we are billions in debt and things are going to be extremely tough’. 

I have sniped at Haughey and Ahern in the past.  Both were corrupt gangsters, but I have to grudgingly admit that they knew a little about running a country.

Biffo, on the other hand is worse than useless.  He appears to be genetically incapable of making a logical decision.  He is a rabbit that is caught in the headlights.  Every decision he does finally make invariably exacerbates the situation.  To say that he is out of his depth is like saying that Everest is a bit of a hill.

To make matters worse, not only is he grossly incompetent, but his arrogance knows no bounds.  He is now stating that he will run the country ‘as he sees fit’ which as we have seen is a recipe for disaster.

This country is floundering and foundering for lack of leadership.  There is no one at the helm.

Incidentally, for those of you abroad who wonder where the name Biffo originated –

Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly.

Very appropriate.

• Politics
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Grandad January 27th, 2009

When I was a lad, bin collection was a simple matter.

You put out your bin and they came along with their lorry and emptied it.

If you had something that was too big for the bin, you just left that out too, and that also was collected.  The rule was that if there was anything on the pavement on bin day, it got dumped.  Maybe that’s why we had fewer tramps in those days?

Now of course we are in the twenty first century and everything has to be complicated.  There seems to be an unwritten rule somewhere that everything has to be unnecessarily complex.

We have two bin collections here, and shortly we will have a third.

The first bin collection is every week, and that is the one for general rubbish.  We have our black wheelie bins and of course they have their ubiquitous computers built into them.  Everything has to have a fucking computer these days.  This computer racks up my bill every time the bin is emptied.  I removed it, of course. 

The next one is the green bin.  This one is collected every second week.  This bin is for ‘recyclable’ shit, but they don’t tell us what is recyclable and what isn’t.  I thought glass was, but we aren’t supposed to put bottles in the green bin.  Apparently there are different kinds of plastics too, some of which they will accept, and others they won’t.  The green bin collection is free, so what I usually do is throw any old rubbish into it, and then put a layer of newspapers on top.

They obviously know about my concerns about dumping whiskey bottles glass because they are about to introduce a third collection just for that.  That collection is going to be every sixth [or is it ninth?] week.

So now I need a fucking computer to tell me what day they are collecting what. 

They came this morning.

I’m not sure whether is was a black collection or a black and green collection.

It doesn’t make any difference, because I forgot about it and the bins are still in the garden.

I am annoyed that I forgot.

Now I have to go to the trouble of emptying the bins into the neighbour’s garden again.

• Around the house
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