Home - Page 75 << 1 2 … 73 74 75 76 77 … 81 82 >>
<< 1 2 … 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 … 81 82 >>
Not Hooking-Up
The nature of dating has changed since my time, or so I am told anyway. Older readers will remember that we had to wait quite some time for that first kiss and when it did finally arrive one night, it wasn't long afterwards that you got to meet her parents.
Now call me old fashioned but I do not think that human nature has changed at all. Lads today are still lads and the lassies likewise. Perhaps the words we used to use like, demure, attractive or affection sound outdated today but the sentiments behind them are as real and relevant as they ever were.
Lat Wednesday evening I had a chat with a guy in his early twenties where the subject of girlfriends came up, (I used the word actually). He gave me that gentle smile reserved for village idiots and said, "Ah John, that doesn't happen any more!" I was flabbergasted. I was fascinated. I was flabbergasted and fascinated. If young guys didn't have girlfriends, I innocently asked, then how was mankind to ensure the propagation of the species?
Had I not been a customer of that young barman at the time he might just have reached over and patted me on the head. "We don't waste time dating," he told me, "We just hook-up when we feel like it." In my parlance you "hook-up" a trailer to a toe-hitch so I wanted to know more about this "hooking-up" business.
The lad, in fairness, gave me a pretty good explanation and Niamh Horan this morning in the Irish Independent filled in the blanks. Apparently it has all become a bit laissez-faire and loose and after many questions of clarification from me, I am left with the distinct impression that hooking-up now means having sex for the sake of it without ever needing to get to know each other.
In my defense first, I am a liberal-minded man and have never suffered from Catholic guilt regarding sex. But I have always considered the act of making love to be a rather sacred and special thing in its own right. It is the ultimate physical manifestation of a strongly felt emotion so it's an expression of love of some kind. The so-called "Joy of Sex," is the happy contentment of making someone special to you feel happy. That surely is the purpose of it?
However, if all you wish to do is hook-up then none of this complicated emotional stuff need bother you. Just think of two dogs in the street where one of them is in heat and the other is a male dog. They hook-up, no strings attached. The lack of strings though is where I see the problem.
In her article, Niamh asks, "Am I the only one who finds solace in the old days of romance and the warm comfort it offered, compared to the cold, hard face of today's hook-up generation?" She maintains that women are looking for "connection and intimacy," To this I can add from the male prospective that if a complication-free shag is on offer then why not? It's exciting for a little while and maybe a welcome change from the usual boring routines. If a young healthy girl with a skirt up to ass is sidling up to a young guy half-drunk at some late night kip then who came blame the guy if they should "hook-up"? Some voices will even claim that it is the girl's right to assert her femininity in this way if she wants to.
But as a man who has been in a stable loving relationship for so many years, I feel qualified to observe that any worthwhile relationship is damned difficult to keep together. At the very least, it has to start on all of the right principles of mutual respect and understanding. Through careful and frequent communication, feelings grow and at the risk of using another quaint word, those feelings finally reach fruition in consummation. The resultant intimacy brings everything to another level and thoughts begin about spending the rest of your lives together. Even then it can be touch and go.
But I cannot imagine the aftermath of one of these modern hook-ups ever becoming the basis of a long-term commitment. Indeed if anything, it must surely turn to revulsion in short order?
Protest & Plutocracy Don't Mix
News this morning suggests that twenty of those who were involved in the Joan Burton water protest incident are to be served with criminal charges by the DPP. (Director of Public Prosecutions)
I don't know about you but I find that a most troubling development for a democracy. If you have forgotten the incident, the Tanaiste was in attendance at a school right beside a planned water protest and the mere sight of her, (The leader of the Labour Party), was enough to incense the crowd who surrounded her car and they chanted anti-water slogans at the deaf politician.
I heard that lying woman on radio shortly afterwards maintaining that she felt in fear of her life. It was no such thing of course but merely a frustrated crowd of citizens and voters who had been ignored and vilified by Dail Eireann for exercising their democratic right to protest.
If this court action is successful though, even if they give suspended sentences or paltry fines, a precedent will be set in this country and the right to protest bad political decisions in the Dail will be removed. We will be darkly threatened against protesting anything in the future.
If I look back now to the inception of this Government I remember Enda Kenny coming on TV one night, (pre-election of course), to address all of us commoners. His message that night was that we didn't do anything wrong and it was delivered in the style of a gentle understanding fatherly-figure insinuating that he had a plan to fix everything if we voted for the bastard.
Weeks into office and the tone changed dramatically. Ministerial voices were heard daily warning us commoners that they were going to get tough with us. At the birth of Irish Water, Phil Hogan even went so far as to say he intended to, "Put manners on us." The new-look fatherly-figure was now the one with the clenched fist. In their newly elevated positions of power, these self-important so-called leaders were rubbing shoulders with powerful bankers and influential industrialists, paving the way for a soft landing for these people.
To do that though, they had to financially rape the rest of us. You can think of the myriad of taxes since then as a set of fines for being innocent of any wrongdoing in the "crash." They have been applied to all of us of to bail out the greedy profligate wealthy in our society.
It is true to say that today, our Government operates in a vacuum of its own choosing. The electorate is not consulted about anything because they, (the rulers), have decided not to ask us. They just do as they please. It has become apparent that they see getting elected as a carte-blanche to do as they wish for five years regardless of their pre-election promises and manifesto's. This is not Government by the people by any stretch of the imagination.
In response, the only weapon we four and a half million citizens have is to protest. Now to get us out on the streets in the first place is no easy task. We Irish have become quite shy about marching in defense of our rights. So for hundreds of thousands of us to have marched consistently against Irish Water shows just how deeply incensed we are at this latest punishment for doing nothing wrong. Irish Water is not the worst thing they have done to us, just the final straw.
As I see it then, if the Government and the DPP get away with charging the water protesters, then protest as a tool to express our anger or dissatisfaction will be banned. The most alarming aspect of that is, that in the absence of our protests to new laws by the Government, they will loudly claim our silence as a sign of support for them.
When that happens we will truly have become ENSLAVED to a plutocracy.
Posted in Politics | Leave a reply
A Car with Personality.
Older readers will remember the "Renault 4"
It was an odd looking humpy thing with nothing to recommend it visually. Once inside and driving it, things didn't improve either. Measured in available horse-power it was about a hoof-and-half. When turning corners it gave it's exaggerated impression of overturning completely. It offered an experience akin to an aircraft making a sharp turn, (pointing one wing towards the earth before leveling off again).
If you liked basic simplicity though, this junk-heap was a right charmer. There wasn't a single frill or bauble anywhere in or out of that car. It had five wheels of which one was the steering wheel, the heater worked weakly in summer and not at all in winter. You had to provide and wire up your own radio & speakers and the bench front seats were deck chairs with cushioning. The one I bought for £400 (Punts) was chocolate brown and damned sad looking even before we met. Two tyres were bald, (Front right and back left), and one of the many windows was badly scratched but as it was a side one, it ended it's days like that. A screwdriver and monkey wrench was all you would have needed to strip it down to a chassis only. The brilliance lay in the simplicity.
And I loved it after less than a week. It was huge inside, I'm not kidding. Loads of legroom and headroom and because the mats were black and made of rubber, muddy boots didn't matter. I drove to Dublin and back in it one time and apart from the fact it took four times as long as a normal car to do the journey, I was as happy as Larry with my secondhand Renault-4. On that trip too I was traveling so safely within speed limits that I relaxed with a few beers on the way home as I drove.
The back door was like a van door and the space inside was similar to that of half a van floor in space. Then, two clips flipped at either side of the back seat and two floor clips then slid easily out, allowing you the remove the whole thing in one (folded) piece. The resultant space was enormous. When the (Polish) Pope came to visit us all in Ireland in Sept. 1979, I took my then girlfriend with me in the 'Brown-Horror' to Limerick. The deal was that we had to get parked in a muddy field with all the other thousands of pilgrims in their cars and then wait in that wet rainy field until dawn. When they sun tried to come up, we were allowed to walk the five miles to another muddy field and watch El Papa fly in. I often believe that her Father took one look at my sad brown car and assured his wife that their daughter would come to no harm in it. Remember at the time there were skin-headed youths skidding all over the place in souped-up Escorts. Those guys never even gave this long-hair a second look.
Never mind the Pope though, the car was brilliant. I kitted out the huge floor space with a mattress and slumber down and stocked up with beer, wine and some sandwiches. Add a shapely sexy girl for the night and I was in heaven, (arf, arf). And when many other cars got bogged down trying to get back out of the field, the mischievous Renault slipped and slithered out the gap in the field and down the road for Cork, dirty but undaunted.
A most useful tool I always carried in the Mini was a hand-held wooden mallet and like the Mini, it worked a treat on the Renault too. Any attempt at spluttering starts and a judicious couple of taps of the mallet to the engine block worked a treat.The first time I opened that long bonnet I was taken aback by an equally long aluminum pole than ran from behind the dashboard, over the top of the engine and right down to the grill in front. This turned out to be the gear lever, the knob of which poked out from the middle-top of the dash inside. There was plenty of play on it too because when you went from third to top, (ie. fourth) the whole apparatus came back about two feet or more.
Following the aluminum pole to the grill, it curved down at a right angle to the gearbox which was right up forward and below and a big clip attached the pole to the gears. One day while putts-ing along minding my own business I went from third to fourth when damn me, the aluminum pole just kept on coming. The clip attaching it to the gearbox just fell off and the pole lay limply on top of the engine. But my mini toolkit had many useful things in it including some wire and a pliers. Arse in the air then and head and arms buried deep down the front of the engine, I reconnected the pole and the gearbox with wire and was once again putts-ing.
A few months later I put the car up for sale and the guy who called around to me first just drove it once and gave me £450 for it as was. It was several months after that before I saw that bloke again. He was in a city boozer one night and we did a double-take before remembering the Renault-4. For some reason I remembered the patch job done on the gear lever and asked him if it had ever given him bother.
"Naw-boy! She's grand," he answered cheerfully.
Even if the body rusted completely and fell off that baby, I like to think the aluminum pole is still wired to the gearbox somewhere. The crazy Renault-4 just had that kind of personality, a sort of beautiful ugliness. I liked it! You know the Pope was memorable too but for me that day and many more days to follow, my little ugly Renault was the star of the show.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a reply
High-Handed Presumptions
To pay your car tax you must go to the tax office yourself or have an internet connection and credit card. Your payment is then subject to a percentage penalty from your bank for using their service, whether by cheque or credit card. The presumption is that although you are doing them a favor by paying up, you must put yourself out to do it both with your time and your money.
The country is crawling with so-called experts of all kinds and they charge for their time. Say hallo to one of them and the meter is running. I had a doctor friend of mine phone me once and ask, "How are you John?" When I said, 'fine' he answered jokingly, "That'll be twenty-one guineas please!" Do you see where I'm going with this?
Our time, we are told, is precious and indeed that is true. If you get a GP appointment now for 10.00am, so do eight or nine other people. He's charging fifty squids a go while you are sitting bored, waiting for your turn. The stark message is that the doctor's time is far more important and precious than yours, whoever you are. Well, I say it isn't.
How would it be if we all charged them right back? Just say we all put an hourly rate on our time for those in officialdom wishing to communicate with us. Say you are commanded to appear in court for an unpaid motoring fine. You should be able to write back and say, "I'd be happy to oblige at €24.50 an hour up front. However, the date you suggest doesn't suit me because I'm extremely busy at present, (your Honour) I could fit you in the following Thursday between four and five but you'll have to come to my home. Terms and conditions apply."
Just look at the businessman who actually charges and collects VAT for the Government. He has to gather the relevant information first, pay an accountant to prepare the facts and then take time out to write the cheque. Why shouldn't the businessman be able to add his own invoice for all of his time and work on their behalf? The guys and gals in the VAT office are getting paid for their time and work, aren't they?
It seems to me we have become too placid and obedient. The next time you are asked to fill out any official form, tell them about "your" hourly rate and point to the small print where it should state that there is a minimum of one hour applicable as soon as you begin. You have to live after all and we only get one finite life. Why presume you must do everything for free? After all, you are the expert for the form you are asked to fill and so you deserve to be recompensed. The person asking you to do this work is not doing it for nothing themselves, are they? And you are giving them the necessary information they need to do their jobs. Do they really believe information is free? Try getting something free from them. You even have to pay for the 'Freedom of Information" stuff and you are supposed to have a right to that.
Perhaps we should all be paid for voting on polling days too. Do they think we have nothing better to do with our time? They are the ones looking for the turnout after all. Most of us don't give a shit which party is in power because one is as bad as the other and point of it all is so they can really party afterwards. A few quid wouldn't go amiss and it might incentivize us to make a better effort for them. When a Garda waves you down and asks for your license or insurance, shouldn't you be able to answer, "Certainly Guard, and which station do I send my invoice to?"
Any of you got other examples of what we could all invoice for?
Posted in Life | 6 Replies