Author Archives: Eithne Tynan

So many of us! So many of us!

by

 

IT’S that time of year again, when the food safety people start pleading with us anew not to poison ourselves. Well, in truth, the food safety people are nearly always pleading with us not to poison ourselves – a Safefood type is forever standing over your shoulder in the kitchen and then (having furtively measured your waistline) falling into a hysterical faint because your dishcloth hasn’t been changed in two days and is therefore waging merciless biological warfare against western civilisation.

However, usually they’re referring to accidental food poisoning, rather than what you might call the intentional kind. This time of year it’s about the dangers of eating wild mushrooms. And if you have poisoned yourself by picking and eating wild mushrooms, then – at the risk of offending the luckless – it has to be said of you that you have at least connived in your own fate.

These mushroom-warning stories appear seemingly overnight, in great multitudes, every autumn. You just wake up one morning in October and there they are, in abundance, all over the papers. But it’s hard to know whom they’re aimed at.

Is there an assumption among the health authorities, shared by the media, that there are people out there who somehow still do not know that some mushrooms are poisonous? If so, who can these people possibly be? And what have they been doing until now that has sheltered them so effectively from the knowledge? Most important of all, which unhappy combination of whim and circumstance has led them to go out mushroom-hunting, of all things?

Perhaps they reason, with Panglossian optimism, that because nothing bad has happened to them so far, nothing bad ever will happen to them. And so, instead of harmlessly gathering blackberries, for instance, or collecting interesting pebbles, they decide to set off into the shimmering woods in search of wild mushrooms, swinging a wicker basket, their cheeks pink with delight, foreseeing no harm. “That one there,” they cry. “That one with the purple-spotted red cap and the toad sitting on top and the elves frolicking thereunder. That one looks tasty.”

It’s easy to see the attraction. Mushrooms are so bewitching, so diverse, so… so pleasingly eerie. They’re neither plant nor animal, yet are full of lore – and almost comically plentiful. As Sylvia Plath wrote in her eccentric 1960 poem, ‘Mushrooms’, “So many of us! So many of us!”, which – with all due respect to the poet – sounds better when read in a Pinky and Perky voice, I think you’ll agree.

But if there really are people who don’t know that mushrooms can be poisonous, then clearly they are the sort of people who don’t read the newspapers anyway, so it’s unlikely the warnings are aimed at them.

That means that possibly the food safety authorities are directing their advice at a little-understood second group – those who know that some mushrooms are poisonous but who don’t care.

This group must include those hardy free food advocates who are constantly boiling up nameless molluscs in their kitchens and exhorting you to eat them. They’re forever banging on about seaweed. They cannot understand how you can derive more pleasure from looking at your nasturtiums than from eating them; to them, “can be eaten” is the same thing as “should be eaten”. They brew coffee with dandelion roots and have the nerve to call it coffee. They make – oh God – they make their own wine. And they think they know their chanterelles from their false chanterelles, their Agaricus from their Amanita, but they don’t. And they won’t be told.

This group are probably also beyond the help of the health authorities as well, since they’re not the type to take instructions from anyone – well, maybe from Ray Mears, but not from anybody else.

So who is left who can possibly benefit from these hardy annual warnings about the dangerous of eating wild mushrooms? Could it be that all the cautionary tales are aimed at the one group of mushroom-hunters that dare not speak its name – the group who, upholding a tradition that dates at least as far back as Cú Chulainn, like to gather magic mushrooms at this time of year?

If so, all the warnings are still a waste of time. Magic mushroom eaters are not likely to pay any attention to the food safety authorities either. They might take advice from someone who has picked magic mushrooms before, and who can therefore reliably identify them. Having taken that advice, they might then be persuaded to take the advice of a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah, if the advice went something like the lines of: “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter”. But they don’t take advice from The Man.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 14 October 2012

 

Uachtaráin Bill Clinton? Close but no cigar

by

 

THE facts have got in the way of Bill Clinton’s speculative bid for the presidency of Ireland. Dammit. Just when we were having fun with the idea.

Clinton claimed eligibility for the role in an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN this week. Forgive me for playing fast and loose with the word “interview”, when what I’m really attempting to describe is Piers Morgan climbing into Bill Clinton’s lap for a cuddle.

After lamenting the fact that Clinton can’t “be president for the next 30 years” because of that “goddamned 22nd Amendment”, Morgan said: “We’re trying to change the rules in Britain, actually, because if you can’t be president again here [in the US], we’d quite like you to be prime minister in our country. Are you available…?”

Clinton replied that there were only two countries in the world where he can run for president – Ireland, because of his Irish forebears, and France, because of the Louisiana Purchase. (Clinton is from Arkansas, which was once part of French Louisiana, which is probably the best thing that’s ever been said about Arkansas.)

He’s wrong though, as everyone rushed to point out. Clinton’s maternal ancestors, the Cassidys from Fermanagh, are too far back to confer Irish citizenship on him. Similarly, the Louisiana Purchase was too long ago to make him French.

So the notion was quickly put down, before everyone had had nearly enough time to sport with it. Half of France and Ireland were busy wondering whether to take it seriously. The rest of us had seized gratefully on the chance to reflect yet again on the Louisiana Purchase, and were sat on our stoops with a bellyful of gumbo, thinkin’ on it.

Ireland certainly claims ownership of Bubba. Why wouldn’t we? Haven’t we claimed all six American presidents since Jimmy Carter – or been claimed by them, as a sop to Irish-American voters? Even George W Bush could boast Irish ancestry, although he tended not to, much to everyone’s relief.

Midway through Bill Clinton’s second term, Toni Morrison described him in the New Yorker as “our first black president”, saying that he displayed “every trope of blackness”: single parent family, childhood poverty, saxophone playing and so on.

We need tinker only slightly with those tropes to make him ours. We’ll have to get rid of the saxophone, naturally; we can substitute an acoustic guitar – not so much played as regularly beaten half to death for the sake of three chords. And let’s replace the single parent with married parents who spend 55 years destructively loathing each other because they don’t approve of divorce. Now throw in Bubba’s alcoholic dad. There, you see? We’ve taken Toni Morrison’s Clinton and turned him into Classic Irish Lad, straight from Central Casting.

However, Clinton might prefer the French post to the Irish one. Being the president of France must present at least half a chance of bagging another Carla Bruni. After all, it is a well-known fact that the doors of the Élysée Palace are battered down daily by beautiful heiresses in search of even more upward social mobility.

Áras an Uachtaráin, on the other hand… No one is clamouring to get into Áras an Uachtaráin except activists and community workers and the like who – in all fairness to them and we all know they do great work – are probably not going to put out.

Nevertheless, the Irish job pays quite a bit better than the French one. Uachtarán na hEireann gets just under €250,000, which is a sight better than the French president’s stingy €180,000. It even compares favourably with the $400,000 (€310,000) that the US president gets, considering the difference in responsibilities.

The US president has to Lead The Free World and what have you; the Irish president’s duties consist merely of praising schoolchildren, standing around in the rain at the Ploughing, and articulating pious hopes about the diaspora.

He’s also the Supreme Commander of the armed forces, of course. This might present Clinton with a challenge: that of keeping a straight face while inspecting the troops. “I’d like to pay tribute to our brave service men and wom… Wait a second, where are the rest of them? This is it? You’re kidding.”

But only imagine if Clinton had been eligible – and available – to spare us the soul-destroying boredom of Mary McAleese’s second term. How heartily would we have thanked him. Alas, it was not to be.

However, let it not be said that Bill Clinton, having done America twice, is now in the unhappy position of not being eligible to run for president anywhere at all. No, he has hope. He can become a citizen of France, either by living there for five years or by – oh well now, isn’t this lucky? – marrying a French woman. Carla? Carla! You’re wanted.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 23 September 2012

Papal indulgence

by

 

IF I were pope… No, don’t worry, I’m not going where you think I’m going with this. If I were pope, I would not be able to help entertaining the secret hope that someone would present me with a gift of, at the very least, a sleek Alfa Romeo, and ideally maybe a Lamborghini. Vow of poverty be damned.

The pope lives in Italy, where the world’s most beautiful and enchanting cars have historically been conceived and manufactured, and yet this week he accepted a gift of a customised white Renault Kangoo, which is arguably one of the boxiest, ugliest vehicles ever to roll off a production line.

The story was published under the wrong headline, too. Instead of ‘Pope goes green’, or ‘Renault blesses Pope’, or ‘Pope shows faith in electricity’, it should have read: ‘Inexplicably, Pope agrees to do promotional photo shoot for French automaker.’

The photos released to the media show the pontiff looking slightly uncomfortable, sitting in the back of the Kangoo in his little red shoes, the suicide doors open beside him, while Carlos Ghosn, chairman and chief executive of the Renault Group, gazes on with pride. In the pictures, Ghosn looks just about oleaginous enough to be France’s answer to Ireland’s erstwhile Renault king, Bill Cullen, yet the pope was somehow, miraculously, able to resist the temptation to jump into the front seat and drive right over him.

Pope Benedict has wanted an electric vehicle for some time, as he is by all accounts very attentive to environmental matters, having installed solar panels in the Vatican and what have you. So perhaps he was grateful for the gift. But even if he wasn’t, what could he have done? Refusing the Kangoo might have precipitated a Diplomatic Incident, so he was no doubt obliged to accept it. It makes you wonder what the pope must do with unwanted presents. It isn’t as if he can pass them on to other popes. And he probably has to be careful not to show favouritism among the cardinals – if one gets a little something, then they’ll all have to.

Pope Benedict will use the Kangoo for travelling around Castel Gandolfo, his summer home, and between churches within the grounds of the Vatican itself, but not farther afield. It will do for the urbi but not the orbi, if you will. It won’t replace the popemobile either. The popemobile is a purpose-built, bulletproof Mercedes. The pontiff has another Merc as well – a sinister-looking black one with tinted windows – for getting from A to B. Powerful Germans really only trust other powerful Germans, as we know.

Nevertheless, Renault is at pains to emphasise how speedy and practical and reliable electric motoring can be. The group’s website has a “myth-busting” section, in which all your doubts about driving an electric car are magically dispelled. What’s that you say? You don’t want to have to drive at 30mph all the time? Never fear, “the electric motor provides its maximum torque immediately – you’ll find you’re pushed back in your seat whenever you pull away quickly”. (Renault might have enough money that it can go around throwing Kangoos at pontiffs, but it seems the marketing budget won’t stretch to hiring people who can write elegant English.)

And yet then, in one casual remark, Renault’s man in Italy gave the lie to that, and undid all the good the pope was busy doing for the brand’s image, by pointing out that an electric vehicle would never do as a getaway car.

Asked whether Renault was working on an electric vehicle for longer papal journeys and trips abroad, Jacques Bousquet was unequivocal. “There’s a problem in terms of power and security, because a completely electric car would not have sufficient acceleration power in the case of a security problem,” he said. ‘Fossil fuels essential to papal safety,’ the headline might have read.

There is another reason why this holy alliance might have proved embarrassing for the Vatican too. It’s not just because so many of Renault’s vehicles have names that sound like euphemisms for the kind of body parts that would be unmentionable in the vicinity of St Peter’s. It’s because one of Renault’s ads for its Twingo (see what I mean?) featured a couple of gay men getting hitched in a church, with the tagline ‘Times change, the Twingo too’.

But to each his own, I suppose, when it comes to morality. The pope is all in favour of electric vehicles, whereas for some of us, electric vehicles are an abomination. In automotive terms, the only true marriage is the marriage that takes place between a quantity of fuel and a quantity of air inside a combustion chamber; anything else is against nature.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 9 September 2012

World’s best homework excuse

by

 

READERS may be familiar with the meme known as First World Problems, or White Whine: “I tried to spread cold butter on my toast – the bread ripped”; “one pillow is too low – two pillows is too high”; “can’t apply for a college grant – my parents earn too much”; “ordered schoolbooks – they haven’t arrived yet”.

OK, that last is not one of them, but it will be after this week, and the sight of all those “frustrated” parents clamouring outside the gates of Schoolbooks.ie in Walkinstown, Dublin, demanding delivery of the books they had ordered weeks ago.

How laudable, observers might have been thinking to themselves. Look how deeply those parents care about their children’s education – giving up their free time, fighting on-air battles, fearlessly navigating Dublin 12, agreeing to be photographed without makeup and so forth.

Then your thoughts might have turned to those parties most closely affected by the non-arrival of the schoolbooks – the children. We are encouraged to believe this experience is upsetting for the children. Ha ha. Slapping my thigh.

Fine Gael TD Mary Mitchell O’Connor is particularly keenly attuned to their tender little feelings. “Some students may feel nervous or embarrassed about not having all of their books, and it’s important for all school staff to be aware of this,” she is reported to have said. She urged teachers to be patient and sensitive, which seems rather hopeless. Some teachers are innately patient and sensitive and some – famously – aren’t. It was ever thus, and there doesn’t seem all that much that can be done about it at this stage.

But consider for a moment the spectre of hordes of schoolchildren turning up in their classrooms without any books – and not just without any books, but with a proper excuse for not having any books. It’s not that you’ve left them at home, or on the bus, or – and this is every bit as likely – that you haven’t actually got around to acquiring them yet. You haven’t got any books, which means you can’t do any schoolwork, and it’s someone else’s fault. For a child, that’s your little cup of happiness filled to the brim right there.

Which of us doesn’t distinctly remember wishing for an outbreak of swine flu, or a heavy snowfall, or a burst pipe, so that the school would have to close? Even as you read this, there are hundreds and hundreds of children of school-going age, all over the country, hoping that someone famous will die tomorrow so they can get the day off. The little darlings are actively wishing death on people. Face it.

Ideally, what you want is a big death, on the scale of an Eamon De Valera, in the hope that you might get two days out of it. One pupil I recall tried to fool the teacher into believing someone important had breathed his last. “Miss, Miss, did you hear? The Taoiseach died.” The teacher said: “Mr Lynch the Real Taoiseach is alive and well. Now go back to your seat and cop on to yourself.” Teachers were like that in those days – full of ripe, visible politics.

It isn’t as if we’re known to be a nation of swots, either. Mind you, President Michael D Higgins has this week demonstrated that he can become fluent in another language in only three weeks. This seems a little suspicious. You can’t help wondering if he might have been able to speak Spanish already – all those years championing Latin America! – and pretended he wasn’t, just to get the praise, and be teacher’s pet.

Incidentally, President Higgins, if you were just looking for a Spanish translation of the word you used to describe Michael Graham and his fellow Tea Party types in 2010, I think you’ll find it’s ‘pajero’. Any red-faced Mitsubishi driver would have been able to tell you that.

No, if going back to school were a pleasant experience, then why would you continue to have recurring nightmares about it for years afterwards, in which you turn up in the classroom with not a clue what’s going on and not a stitch on under your gabardine? (Some of us like to combine our anxiety dreams into a single narrative.)  Why would you remember the scent of new stationery as the sole pleasure associated with September – a pleasure that wore off as quickly as an agreeable smell?

This little hiccup in the delivery of schoolbooks will do wonders to ease the children through the sorrow of this time of year, when their freedom is taken away once again and they’re ushered back into the awfulness of routine. Remember, the object is to prepare them for a whole lifetime of predictability and constraint. Let’s let them enjoy the interruption.

 

Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 2 September 2012

A gat in the hand means the world by the tail

by

Image

THE film rights to this Chris Andrews Twitter story have probably already been sold. It’s got everything – a powerful political family, a sting, a love interest (well, a wife, but we can rewrite that), an unexpected twist and, best of all, lots of Pelican Briefy close-ups of someone at a computer screen going tap-tap-tap-frown-tap-tap-tap, without which no thriller is complete.

Andrews was exposed as the anonymous tweeter @brianformerff, who posted some 300 tweets critical of his own party. That wasn’t where he went wrong, though. After all, you can’t throw a stone nowadays without hitting a critic of Fianna Fáil, which is why stone-throwing has gone so much out of favour. No, he was exposed because @brianformerff reportedly made derogatory remarks about the wife of a man who turned out – imagine that – to be a keen amateur detective.

I say Steve Buscemi for the character of the mysterious gumshoe who rumbled Andrews after hunting him down for months. Admittedly, Buscemi is no Humphrey Bogart, but then no one is any more; that’s what’s wrong with the world today.

Here’s a brief reminder of what he did – if this fantastic story is to be believed, at least. Having suspected for some time that Andrews was responsible for the antagonistic Twitter character, he collected every tweet issued from that account. He then deduced – using powers that you would not understand, Watson – that they had all come from a computer, rather than a mobile phone, for example.

This is where it starts to get even more weirdly obsessive. He set up his own web redirection server, so that if his prey clicked a given link, it would reveal the computer’s IP address. It turned out to be an internet café in Rathmines – not the most promising setting from a cinematography point of view, I’ll grant you, but we can change it in the final script.

The last stage of his plan involved covert photography and video surveillance of Chris Andrews tap-tap-tapping in the café, and it’s at this point, I think, that we’re going to have to give our private dick a little more flesh.

Let’s make him wear a fedora, so that we can enjoy the rare opportunity of quoting Sam Spade: “Say, what’s on your mind, besides your hat?” Throw in an unfiltered cigarette, together with the consequent hacking (forgive the techie pun) cough, and a certain fragrance, from spending all night in his car on Rathmines Road, piddling into a bottle. Let’s add a dog, as well – a Jack Russell – sitting in the passenger seat, panting, staring, understanding.

At the front desk of the internet café in Rathmines is one of Dashiell Hammett’s lanky brunettes with a wicked jaw. She is chewing gum and whistling some popular number.

“You do know how to whistle, don’t you?” she challenges him. “You just put your lips together and blow.” She knows that’s not a quote from a Dashiell Hammett story but heck, we live in an untidy age. If DJs can call themselves musicians, then shop girls can surely mash up their literary references for art’s sake.

“I’m not here to whistle,” he says, charmlessly. “I’m here to secretly spy on the other patrons.” And when he splits an infinitive, God damn it, it stays split. And when he sets his sights on a disgruntled Fianna Fáiler, God damn it, he gets his man.

If the man would go to these lengths because someone belonging to him was insulted on social media, where insults fly about like a drunk’s spittle, then what other immense feats of vengeance is he capable of? It’s practically Shakespearian (setting up a redirection server to track someone’s IP address being the modern equivalent of pouring hemlock in their ear).

Pity the children who make the mistake of ringing his doorbell and running away. They open their Spongebob Squarepants lunchboxes the next day to find scrawled notes clipped from newspapers saying, ‘i kNow wot u Did’.

What if you pranged his car in a car park and drove off without leaving a note? You’d end up with two or three of those flying camera drones circling your patio.

“What are those, darling?”

“Beats me. They’re probably something to do with the barbecue. I told you you should read the instructions on the barbecue.”

It just goes to show what you can achieve if you have enough time, energy and money to indulge your crazy. You can despatch a device to see what Mars looks like up close; you can establish Wikileaks; you can uncover which member of a Fianna Fail dynasty is peevishly dissing his former associates; you can even put together a film script exploiting every detective cliché you know.

 Published in the Irish Mail on Sunday, 19th August 2012