Maxithermal's Golden Greats #5 (Storkboy does not like Killarney part one of about four)

Tweet The brother once lived in Killarney y'know?

I didn't. But I have no doubt you will fill in the gaps in my knowledge of your sibling and his erstwhile place of abode. 

He's a man of the world, is the brother. A cosmopolitan you might say. He's been all over - Australia, Galway, Ringsend, Yorkshire, and Killarney. And I'll tell you a good wan. It's on account of the sewerage. The shite. That's right, the brother travels the world and makes his fortune out of shite. 

A rare profession.

I'll tell ye a funny wan, will I? This'll give you a real good laugh. 

I'll let my ribs know that there is no doubt they are about to be tickled.

The brother has a PhD from the National Universities of Ireland. He is a qualified docther in the sciences, no less. He brings home the piece of paper with the proof in it - written in Latin, the ould language.

"There's no flies on you" says I, when he comes in the door. And do you know what he says?

I do not.

"There's plenty of flies on me at the best of times...", isn't that something now, to come from an educated man with the qualification? 

It is a strange admission I will admit. 
Begob I had to ponder that one. But you know what he says next, the joker? "Sure anyone who works around shite would be crawling with flies". Crawling with flies. On account of the shite. Isn't that a great one? Didn't I tell you the brother is a funny man? And do you know what else?

No. I cannot for the life of me divine what you are about to say, I'm afraid.

When he was hikin' around the world he kept one of those websites. "A blog" says he. Oh the brother was well ahead of the times back then. He still is a forward looking man.
A veritable Mystic Meg

Well, the brother doesn't do the 'blogging' anymore. He declared it dead, no less, in 2006. He's a man for the twitter now. "Brevity is the soul of twit", says he, quoting the bard. But begob he penned some funny words when he was living in Killarney.

The brother is a modest man, and wouldn't share them himself. So I will share them for him...

Contrived Killarney, oh how dull you seem to me, with your cute-hoor jarveys, porcelain leprechauns, tired rebel ballads, uninspired seafood restaurants, and endless throughput of grey-haired geriatric globe-hoppers. It can be overwhelmingly awful living in a tourist destination that lacks a soul; a place which seems moulded by the tourists' wants rather than being an independent entity of its own. This is opposed to, say, a place like Galway. Galway demands respect; it's a place that is more than able to assimilate tourists into its laughing silly-hatted essence. Galway basically doesn’t give a fuck about how it should appear. It just 'is' and the 'is' happily appeals to tourists.

Unfortunately, tourists are Killarney. That’s what makes it such a sad, shallow, transient place. Worse, it’s mostly shotgun tourism. Hop on a bus - bang  - the lakes of Killarney - bang -  Muckross house - bang - the ring of Kerry - bang - back to town for a seafood platter and the old crook-neck round the door of several pubs - bang - glass of Guinness in a pub that’s suitably suffused with ‘blarney’ and ‘the craic’ - bang - watch indigenous musicians with a knotted, fawning expression of cultural appreciation - bang - move on to the next pub which hopefully isn’t ruined by too many tourists - bang - click, click, shit, errr, reload - bang, make way and let a fresh batch keep the turnstiles turning - bang, bang, bang.

I sleep with the window open. The rebel ballads drift across town from The Scott’s Garden Hotel. The session ends each night on the same three songs. Green Fields of France. A Nation Once Again. Amhrain na bhFiann. All are sung in a rousing battle-cry by the band in their trademark Derek Warfield style (and are mumbled along to in a wordless nasal whine by the tourists). Little known fact - the nasal whine of Maureen-Slizlky-Corbett from Milwaukee (2.78% Irish and proud) comes in at a whopping decibel level just under that of a jumbo-jet engine taking off, but over that of a donkey bray mid-castration (Lapara and Alleman, Acoustic Physics; 1999).

Now, back to the ballad session. Killarney is once again preparing to take on the feared black and tans at three in the morning. Pub Patriotism I like to call it. The drunken Killarney twentysomething captivates a clucking brood of Americans with the tale of how his uncles (Wolfe Tone and Michael Collins) planned to blow up Oliver Cromwell and his friend Edward Carson the night they stayed in The Great Southern hotel. However, said conspiring uncles got drunk on a bottle of TCP up in t'Reeks and danced their mortal toes off with the miniature folk ‘til the following morning. Still drunk, they remembered their plan and they hurriedly exploded the bomb under what they thought was Cromwell’s automobile - it later turned out to be an old tree shaped like a 1992 Vauxhall Cavalier. “Yer drunk yer drunk ya silly old fool/ still you cannot see/ that is the oul tinwhistle that your mother gave to me”.  It’s a little known fact that we Irish were always better at singing about rebellion than taking part in it (O’ Connor; Cowardly Drunken Bragging: An Irish Case Study, 1978). Anyway, I hear and think about all this seven nights a week. 

I have one scientific conclusion. The same guys sing the same songs in the same order because there’s a new audience for them every night. 

That’s a lonely buzz.

It was with some relief I retired to Ceathra Rua for the weekend, where, among other things, I attended the Doilin boat races. Afterwards, I drank Guinness from a warm keg on the pier in front of a soul-stirring backdrop comprising the Twelve Bens and the Atlantic Ocean. All around me people spoke and laughed casually in Irish, and nobody was in a rush to get anywhere. Later, in a bursting-full pub, some crazy musicians launched into a rousing version of John Denver's 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' - sung as gaeilge. We danced like lunatics to The Joyce Country Ceilidh Band. And you know, there were satisfied tourists here too. They did not seem to mind that there was an absence of the bang - bang - bang - instant hits of twee pot-of-gold wank, or handlebar-moustache wielding balladeers. Those things are just for the Disneyworld OAP-brigades. May they stick to Killarney.

But enough of happy weekends, let’s get back to what I really enjoy writing about -  things that annoy me. A year ago, I wrote of Spud-boy the wunderkind of the west, a man whose foggy-bottle mountains still loom in my nightmares. Every now and then, I am forced by circumstance to live with characters like Spud; people who (to me at least) are the sum of several unpalatable personality traits. Naturally, I then foist yet more repugnant idiosyncrasies upon them; until eventually the bespoke party transcends their status as a mere individual to become something larger and more frightening - a bit like the pink goo in Ghostbusters II. After a few months of co-habitation, a person like this eventually develops into a typecast symbol, representing vast swathes of (as I stereotype it) stereotyped society.

Subsequently, my relationship with the person is doomed to petty hatred. They become the epicentre of all my disgust; my disgust at their housekeeping habits, or even, my disgust at their cultural tastes. It is not unlike Yeats’ Connemara fisherman in reverse, I know. It is the simplification of the complicated on my part, for the sake of lazy compartmentalisation of the people.

Any-wayzzzzz......my return to Spudville in the preceding ramble serves as an introduction to another anthropomorphic vegetable I’ve recently become acquainted with; The Cabbage. She is rarely seen in daylight without her close-associate, The Carrot. In the company of the empty-headed Cabbage, my days spent shooting the shit with Spud on such varied subjects as THE NIGERIAN INVASION and the authentic Spudley guide to environmental conservation (summed up as 'fuck it') now seem like noble and questing philosophical arguments carried out on the marble steps of a long-forgotten age of enlightenment. You can’t converse with a vacuum.

If Spud and Cabbage serve as two random samples taken from the pool of the ornery folk of Ireland, then things have deteriorated in the past twelve months. A TV3 news poll suggests a ten percent decline in peoples' reasoning ability in news polls (due of course, to watching too much TV3), but the question we must ask is this; are these results skewed by the very decline they are trying to describe? It’s a nice circular argument, if ever I heard one.

So to get on with it, here (at a later date, I’m all typed out now) will follow a horror story in which I will attempt to describe a bizarre ménage a trois, involving TV3, The Cabbage, and The Carrot. I hope with this tale to finally exorcise some of the tired themes which are recurring too often on the Blog and move on to fresh pastures. It’s an uneasy task, and one I hope does not serve to make me look condescending or snobbish, as it is never my intention to criticise the intellect, or ability of people, but rather the insidious vices of sloth, greed, apathy, and wilful ignorance. These provide the fertiliser from which cabbages sprout and thrive.

…..to be continued…..the following MP3s are songs the brother and I both like...

MP3: The Stone Roses - Bye Bye Badman

MP3: Rollerskate Skinny - Speed to my Side