Month: September 2016

There used to be a small plastic bag in our house that held some odd socks. Over the years, that plastic bag morphed into a bigger cloth bag and I noticed lately that even that bag couldn’t hold them and so they have progressed to a basket. It was always something of a mystery to me how half the socks managed to disappear between the time they went into the washing machine and the time they came in from the washing line.

I worked overseas for a year and I had an apartment to myself and I never lost a sock. Whatever I put into the machine came back out and nothing disappeared. So I came to the conclusion that there could be only one explanation. My wife was selling odd socks to the Russians.

The Evidence.

When I thought about it the signs were there all along. I saw her drinking vodka one time and she asked me about the Russian athletes during the Olympic Games. I also know that she watched Doctor Zhivago on TV. Now it’s just a matter of catching her in the act.

A Transfer Home Is The First Priority

When I arrived in Dublin in 1980 as a young garda, my first thought was ok, how do I go about getting back to Cork? It was well known at the time that while there were guys from all over Ireland being sent to Dublin from the Garda Training Centre in Templemore, it was the guys from Cork who almost always went on a mission to get back home. The first task to be completed on arrival at the new station for any Cork man was to stick in a transfer request and then settle back for the long wait.

I had spent three years attached to Blackrock Garda Station when one day, as I was walking through the back yard to begin a shift, I heard a shout from an upstairs window. A guy in one of the offices upstairs was leaning out of the window and he was shouting at me. He told me that I had got my transfer and that I was on my way to Bantry.

I just stood frozen to the spot. That wasn’t part of the plan. Bantry was so far out of the way for me that I would nearly have been better off staying in Dublin, at least I‘d have a main railway line. While I was trying to digest this, my friend upstairs was talking to someone in the room behind him. Then he stuck his head back out through the window again and he shouted that I was going to Bandon, not Bantry. This was a completely different kettle of fish and a hell of a lot closer to where I wanted to be.

I got into the station and went straight up the stairs to have a look at the paperwork just to satisfy myself that this was actually happening and wasn’t just a rumour or a wind up. Sure enough the paperwork was there and in clear print it stated that I was in fact going to Blarney. The idiots couldn’t read it properly but at least I was getting closer to home. And so it was that in April 1983, I arrived in Blarney.

Worry And Stress Should Be Avoided At All Costs

I came into contact with many people back then who are now, sadly, no longer with us and it underlines how short life is. For the eight years that I worked there I was part of the community and many of those I came to know through my work have departed this life and looking back on it, it wasn’t all that long ago that we were all together dealing with the stresses and strains of ordinary life. Now I wonder what all that worrying was about.

I can remember in the early noughties I was in Anglesea Street Garda Station working as the sergeant in the Communications Room. There were five or six of us who worked together regularly and we were responsible for taking calls from the public and sending the members to deal with the various incidents. We also monitored the CCTV cameras across the city and we were hub for all communications within the greater city area. It was a busy place, particularly at the weekends.

There was a clip board hanging on the wall next to my desk and it was loaded with important messages. There were faxes about incidents that needed certain action, reports that required special attention and instructions that had to be delivered to the troops on the street. The one thing that all these pieces of paper had in common was that they were all urgent. The sky was going to fall down around us if these instructions, guidelines, orders and points of special interest were ignored.

More pieces of paper would be added to the existing pile on the clipboard until it would eventually get to the stage where the contents would hang on for dear life until gravity finally won and the contents hit the floor. That was the time to put most of the stuff through the shredding machine to make room for the next load of essential reading which would surely make its way to the clipboard. These too would soon make their way to the shredder.

Anytime I saw young lads getting stressed at work or feeling the pressure from too much paperwork I would tell them about the clipboard. I would remind them that whatever was bothering them today would be consigned to the bin tomorrow. Problems are lessened with the passage of time and everything needs to be kept in perspective. Life is short enough without making our stay here any more difficult than it already is.

Don’t Clutter Up Your Mind With Rubbish

I remember working with a guy one time that worried himself to a frazzle. He was so bad that it actually damaged his health. I approached the sergeant one day and I suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to give him less responsibility and take the pressure off him. The sergeant was a senior character who had seen it all before and he said that it didn’t matter what job you gave him the result would be the same. He said that if you asked him to just sweep the street in front of the station every day he’d then worry about the dirt he was leaving behind. He was right of course.

There are some people who seem to be incapable of separating what’s important from what is trivial and for those, life can be a constant struggle. Their minds are, I suspect, a little bit like the clipboard on the wall in the Communications Room, full of clutter. How much better their lives would be if they could learn to de-clutter and dump the nonsense that’s taking up so much space in their minds. Life is meant for living and not for wasting time fretting.

 

Breaking news on RTE this morning is that there are indications that the Orange Order and nationalists residents in Northern Ireland are about to formally end a three-year-old row about parading.

Does this strike anyone else as odd or is it just me? With all that’s going on in the world at the moment such as children being pulled from rubble in Syria, riots in the US over the killing of a black resident, the shooting dead of three women in the States, this parade agreement is making headlines here. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has welcomed the move so it must be big news.

So what’s the story? Well, a bunch of adults have almost agreed to allow each other to march up and down without throwing stones at each other. Earth shattering stuff. Although to be fair, it is probably a big story if you happen to own a quarry.

It must be thirty years since I first wrote about the poor condition of the roads in Cork. There was a crater at the bottom of Faggot Hill in Blarney at that time that was eating car wheels for fun. In a fit of frustration I wrote a letter to a national newspaper to let off some steam. I did feel a small bit better after it but now after all these years I’m still complaining about the same thing so obviously it was a waste of time.

I didn’t think that my letter was going to get Charlie Haughey all riled up at the cabinet table and demand that the Minister for Pot Holes take immediate action. But there was so much annoyance generally about the condition of the roads at that time that I did think that popular opinion might have made some impact. God bless my innocence.

In those days there were so many roads in such a bad state that the life expectancy of your shock absorbers, suspension and tyres was similar to that of a hedgehog attempting to cross the M50 at rush-hour, short. Every so often a council truck would appear and a couple of guys would throw some tar at the bad bits of the road and smack it down with the back of the shovel. Then after a two hour tea break they would add a bit of gravel and head off home.

For the next week or so you would have to drive around with one hand on the glass to avoid getting a cracked windscreen from some of the flying gravel. Then the rain would come and remove the gravel from the holes again and normal service would resume. The pot holes would sprout up like weeds and they would remain there until the council lads managed to get their hands on another fill of tar.

It’s sad to see that thirty years later we still seem to be playing the same silly game. There are pot holes and sunken drain covers on the main road coming out of Cobh and they have been there for the last twelve months at least. At some point council officials put white paint around them. I’m not sure if this was done to reward them for having been there for so long or whether it was marking them for some future improvement. In any event, nothing happened except that the paint faded so they will have to be repainted soon.

The main road into Midleton has its share of bumps and hollows and the roads down in Castlemartyr and Killeagh are nothing short of disgraceful. This is a main national primary route we’re talking about here. Once you start to travel on the secondary roads then that’s a different experience completely, similar to off road driving. If I had to live in some of these areas permanently I would leave my car somewhere near the main road and walk home.

Apart from the damage and the wear and tear that our cars have to suffer, there is also another issue. At a time when the RSA and An Garda Siochana are calling on all drivers to exercise more care when driving to reduce fatalities on our roads, it doesn’t help that you have to spend half your time staring at the road trying to identify a potentially dangerous pothole and then swerving at the last miniute to avoid it.

It’s worse in wet weather when these potholes can be covered with water and lying in wait to try to drown some unsuspecting driver. There are times when it is necessary to cross the centre line in the road to avoid a bad surface. That is dangerous and at the very least, it’s a distraction that we could all do without.

I recall driving to Midleton from Whitegate a few years ago and I went into a pothole as I approached the dual carriageway. There was a serious bang from the front of the car and despite a number of trips to the garage afterwards, the car was never the same.

That’s not good enough. We pay a lot for our cars and part of the reason they are so expensive is due to the amount of tax we pay on them. That’s money we give to the Government. We pay road tax which is more money we give to the Government. We pay a huge amount of tax on our motor fuel which is more money we give to the Government. This seems to be all one way traffic. We’re coughing up millions in revenue but all we get in return are broken cars driving on broken roads.

If that’s not bad enough we have to take our cars for an NCT to be tested for roadworthiness to make sure that they’re not too badly broken and that they are fit to be driven on the broken roads. And we have to pay for that privilege too. And why does a four year old car need an NCT in the first place?

Now it looks as if insurance companies are getting in on the act. These days it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of a car you drive or what age you are or what experience you have, you are going to pay through the nose. Insurance premiums have gone through the roof in the last twelve months and there seems to be little if any regulation.

Insurance companies seem to be able to charge what they like and it’s never their fault. The threat of losing your no claims bonus prevents you from claiming so they’re on a winner but it’s costing me a fortune just to take my broken car out on to the broken road.

 

 

 

 

 

In Portland, Maine there is a story about a beast that has come into the community and it is all the locals are talking about. The lady who first spotted it said it was about the size of a truck and it looked like a snake and had a head that was the size of a basketball. The legend began and the creature has been given the name “Wessie” and visitors are coming from far and wide to get a glimpse of him. Or her.

Riverbank Park seems to be the haunt of the new monster and it has been seen there on a number of occasions. Residents were cynical at first until a policeman said that he had seen it as well. He described it as a ten foot long snake. A city official then joined the small group of witnesses and reported seeing a large snake in the same area. He took a photo with his phone but it’s not very clear apparently.

Whatever it is, or even if it exists at all, it has brought some prosperity to the community. A clothing company has printed “Where’s Wessie” T-shirts and they’re selling like hot cakes. A local brewing company brewed a drink in the snake’s name and it’s proving to be a hit.

Apart from ordinary tourists, Wessie is also responsible for attracting the kind of hunters that like to track down monsters and strange creatures. Even though snakes are not an unusual phenomenon in that part of the world, these sightings of something unusual are causing quite a stir and the locals are not complaining.

It’s a story that is not that far removed from the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland. Nessie has been on the go for a long time now and there are probably few who haven’t heard of him at this stage. It is estimated that about a million people visit Loch Ness and the surrounding area every year, with the value to the economy worth about £25m and the majority of those visitors come to the area because of Nessie. That’s not to be sneezed at.

Something I didn’t know is that while the story of the Loch Ness Monster has been around since the sixth century, it was an Irish monk who started it all off. Saint Columba witnessed locals burying a man who had been attacked by a ‘water beast’ and it was his report that sparked the first search.

A whole industry has been built around the search for the Loch Ness Monster who supposedly lives in the depths of the loch and while he has been described in many different shapes, the size is generally the same, huge. All sorts of experts and modern technology have been used over the years to try to find supporting evidence of Nessies existence but nothing has been found so far. But that hasn’t deterred the Scots and they continue to fill their sporrans with money thanks to the reclusive monster.

So what exactly is Nessie supposed to be? There is an image that was captured by an Apple map satellite which shows a shape swimming under the water that is around 100 feet long and it seems to have wings. It has also been described as a shiny whale with a long neck and a dinosaur type creature. Another person who supposedly saw it said it had a long tapering eel like head and was about 40 feet long. Its size can vary from being ten feet long to one hundred feet long and it can have either one hump or eight depending on who you listen to.

There are other elusive creatures too like the Yeti, also known as the Abominable Snowman. The Yeti figure has its origins in folklore. The character is an ancient and important part of the legends and history of the Sherpa, the communities that live at an average altitude of 12,000 feet in eastern Nepal.

Shiva Dhakal collected 12 traditional stories in his book Folk Tales of Sherpa and Yeti. In the stories, the animal is always a figure of danger. For example, “The Annihilation of the Yeti” is about Sherpas seeking revenge on a tormenting group of Yetis. They make a show of drinking alcohol and fighting to encourage the Yetis to follow suit and destroy each other. Instead, the surviving Yetis declare revenge and move up high into the mountains to continue their depredations.

Despite the lack of any concrete proof, people still go looking for The Loch Ness Monster in Scotland and for Yetis in the Himalayas. The search goes on because while on the one hand there is no evidence to suggest that they even exist, neither is there any evidence to prove that they don’t. And until it is proven one way or the other there will always be those who want to have a look for themselves and these people bring with them some prosperity to the local communities.

So all this has got me thinking. It was an Irishman who started the whole Loch Ness Monster business so we have previous history for being involved in this kind of thing. In Cork, we have the second largest natural harbour in the world and who knows what lies beneath. Just imagine what we could do if we had our own local monster.

So here’s the plan. I need someone who can take a bad, out of focus, grainy photograph to meet me in Cobh on some foggy morning. It must be early so there won’t be any witnesses about. Then I’ll run up and down the quayside screaming about a big, 90 foot long, hairy monster with three eyes. That should start the ball rolling. We can call him “Corkey”, that would fit nicely on the T-shirts.

It’s Friday and you may be feeling tired or stressed after a long week at work. Or you may feel a little down or perhaps maybe even feel that you don’t fit in and question your sanity. if you are having one of those days then console yourself in the knowledge that no matter how inadequate you think you are or however abnormal you feel you might be, there is always someone worse off.

There is a story in the Irish Examiner this morning about a couple who got married in Oklahoma a year and a half ago. Nothing unusual in that you might say. What makes this marriage a little different is that fact that the happy couple are in fact not only husband and wife but also mother and daughter. The marriage has come to the attention of the authorities and they now find themselves behind bars.

The 43 year old mother married her 25 year old daughter this year. If that’s not bad enough, it now seems that she married her son in 2008 but he filed for annulment after 15 months citing ‘incest’ as the reason. She had three children so presumably the third child is getting ready for a marriage proposal soon.

So cheer up, no matter what you’ve done, you’re quite normal.

 

I had a dream not so long ago that I was in a submarine. I have no idea what I was doing there but I remember the feeling of curiosity as I wandered around exploring until somebody gave the order for the thing to go under the water. At that stage someone closed the lid on the submarine. There’s probably a technical term for that but to me they just closed the lid and the sub started to dive.

At that point I woke up in a puddle of sweat and I was gasping for air. The thought of being in a confined space under the water without being able to pop out for some fresh air, was too much. It’s always been like that for me.

If I’m watching the TV and I happen to see some divers going into underwater caves I have to change the channel. The thought of being trapped in one of those things and running out of oxygen makes my chest tighten.

I would make a very poor hostage. I might survive the ordeal provided my captors didn’t put duct tape over my mouth. The thought of being only able to breathe through my nose would probably be enough to ensure that my heart would explode and make me a useless asset to any kidnapper.

I can remember as a child watching Tim Hayes trying to beat the world record for remaining alive in a coffin while buried underground. Tim was a local character in Cobh who wanted to beat the world record of 100 hours for being buried alive. On Christmas Day in 1966 he was ‘laid to rest’ and a length of plastic pipe extending vertically from the coffin to the outside world provided his air supply and he remained there for ten days.

He read books by torchlight while a crew remained on stand-by to dig him up if anything went wrong. My father was part of that crew so I got to see things up close and personal. They had a caravan next to the ‘grave’ which served as a command post. The event became a huge attraction and it wasn’t long before the caravan became a media centre.

How anyone could allow themselves to be put into a small box and buried under a pile of earth is beyond me. Why anyone would even want to just beggars belief. There is no prize on this planet big enough to entice me to even consider it.

So maybe I’m a little claustrophobic and if that’s the biggest cross I have to bear in life then I can live with that. There are worse things to deal with and many people live very difficult lives from having to deal with phobias. A phobia is described as an extreme or irrational fear or dread aroused by a particular object or circumstance, to the point where it severely restricts your life.

For some people phobias can seriously interfere with their lives and the lives of those around them. In extreme cases they may be forced to give up work or they might have to stay indoors to avoid meeting people. Isaac Marks has written a self-help book on the subject titled,’ Living with Fear’.

Phobias can be specific – such as the fear of spiders, heights or dentists – or more generalised, such as the fear of open spaces, a fear of interacting with other people (social phobia) or even the dread of developing a phobia (phobophobia).

A phobia is a real fear, not the brief anxiety someone may feel before taking a test or giving a speech, but is a deep dread of a situation that poses little real danger, often causing someone to also suffer physical and psychological reactions, including heart palpitations and rashes.

Arachnophobia, fear of spiders, is a very common phobia and the fear of snakes is another one while the fear of heights can lead to anxiety attacks and avoidance of high places. People who suffer from this phobia may go to great lengths to avoid places such as bridges, towers, or tall buildings.

I have come across a few more phobias in my time but I’m not sure if there is a specific name for them. I have met many guys who were afraid of work. As soon as something needed to be done, they would break out in a sweat and simply disappear. As soon as that threat was over, they would reappear and their heart rate would be back to normal.

I have met guys who had a severe phobia about parting with money. The fear was so great for some of them that they were almost prepared to starve to death rather than take out their wallet. Going for a pint always presented a major challenge for these guys and they often had to rush to the toilet when it came to their turn to buy a drink.

Another very common phobia is the fear of making a decision. It generally affects those who suffer from incompetence but who nevertheless have reached senior positions on the corporate ladder by using some means other than ability.

These guys can really suffer at times of crisis and on these occasions they can be extremely difficult to find. When they are eventually found they will often be babbling incoherently and sweating profusely and they will usually be of no use to anyone.

A side effect of this phobia is that as soon as the crisis is over, the sufferers often develop an over-inflated opinion of their own ability and they will often congratulate themselves for handling the situation so well and for saving the day. They will also suffer from an uncontrollable urge to tell their boss how well they performed.