Author: damienowens

ABBA, black sheep, does your mother know?
Ring ring, ring ring, Fernando.

I realised recently that the selection of hand signals available to motorists is woefully inadequate. There are only a few universally understood gestures and almost all of those are designed with the red mist end of the spectrum in mind. The two-fingered salute, the one-fingered salute, the frantic onanist, the languid onanist … it is not an extensive list. The reason, no doubt, is that we’re all great drivers who rarely need to express anything but rage to the other idiots on the road (who must all be blow-ins). Once in while, however, even the best driver among us – me, obviously – finds himself at a disadvantage. I misjudged one of those yellow box yokes the other day by, eh, presuming that the truck on the other side of it would disappear if I just kept going. It didn’t, for some reason, and I found myself blocking the path of a middle-aged woman in a Corolla and tracksuit. If she’d reacted the way I would have – see list above – then I wouldn’t have felt so bad. But she simply sat back, expressionless, and waited for this little trial to be over. I was suddenly awash with guilt and tore through my mind in search of an appropriate gesture. When I drew a blank, I found myself turning in her direction and bowing. And not just a head bow either, hands too. Of the ‘I’m not worthy’ variety. Then I did it again. Then again. By the time I realised how impressive this must look, the truck had gone and I was able to escape. Anyway. The upshot is that I’ve come up with a new gesture to avoid this kind of embarrassment in future. So if I cut you off one day and you see me slapping my forehead with alternate hands while touching the end of my nose with my tongue, you’ll know I’m really very sorry.

Far be it from me to tell you all how to live – that’s what TV is for, after all – but I am home to a thought that I just can’t keep private any more. It’s been weighing on my mind for some time now like a dodgy butcher’s thumb, and I must give it air. It is this: people should get shot out of cannons more. Now I’m not suggesting that you personally get shot out of one and I’m sure as hell not flagging any ballistic intent on my part. Nevertheless, I feel quite sure that we would all be just that little bit happier if once in a while someone took the trip. And circuses don’t count. For one thing, a circus is a place where the noble elephant, proud behemoth of the savannah, is reduced to wearing earrings and standing on one leg like a fi-dollar ho. More importantly, you expect to see people getting shot out of a cannon at a circus. But! Imagine the thrill that would course through your body if you turned a corner in your own home town just in time to see one of your neighbours sail confidently through the air and land in a big net outside the chemists. Wouldn’t it make your tired heart sing? We could make it a weekly event, say every Saturday afternoon – like a public execution, only without all the guilt and knitting. Every town in the country could do it. People would come from all over, from abroad even. Think of the boom in tourism (and pardon the pun). “Ireland … land of saints and scholars and people getting shot out of cannons.” Let’s hurry, before someone else thinks of it.

I was recently alarmed to see questions raised in the media about the relevance of Who Farted?, that hilarious programme that comes on just before the six o’clock news. You know the one – mournful bells chiming over a succession of touching vignettes, each featuring an ordinary Irish citizen pausing and sniffing the air with suspicion. Although I find it hard to imagine the meeting where the idea was first floated (pardon the pun), the end result has proved to be a piece of art that, truly, we can all be proud of. Those sixty seconds of film tell us more about the human condition than a dozen earnest documentaries. For who among us can honestly claim that they’ve never been stopped in their tracks – scrubbing a monument, say, or piloting a fishing boat – by the sudden realisation that the very air itself has turned foul? And which of us has never looked around for likely culprits only to realise that he or she is alone? It’s a fundamental human experience, one of God’s regular reminders that we are frail, imperfect things who have no good reason to act so uppity all the time. Speaking of God, I believe that the Catholic church is the principal sponsor of Who Farted? Well, good for them. It’s nice to see the faithful displaying a sense of humour for a change instead of just moping about, po-faced, gloomy and utterly bereft of the joy they claim to know so much about.