Category: Doodles

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Old MacDonald. He was 76 and had been battling ill health for many years. Old MacDonald had a farm, EIEIO. And on that farm, he had some cows, EIEIO. With a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there, here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo-moo. Old MacDonald was a widower, having lost his dear wife, Old Mrs MacDonald, in a freak milking accident in 1987. He is survived by one son, Young MacDonald, who will take over the dairy business. Young MacDonald has some debt, EIEIO.

There was only one customer in the bar. Short and heavy; a washing machine with a moustache. ‘You ever listen to that song?’ he said. ‘I mean, to the words?’

Elvis Presley was fading out on the radio. The bartender shrugged. ‘It’s a-’

‘Listen hard next time it comes on. “If there’s one thing that she don’t need, it’s another hungry mouth to feed in the ghetto.” If she’s so broke, I’m saying, this bitch, then why don’t she keep her fucking legs closed? She’s starving as it is, Jesus Christ.’ He paused, but not for long. ‘Then this brat she spawns, he “needs a helping hand or he’ll grow up to be an angry young man”. Where was my helping hand? Where were these bleeding hearts when my old man was hitting me with a fucking whisky bottle? “He learns how to steal and he learns how to fight”, this delinquent. You following? He learns how to steal and he learns how to fight. What, does he take a class? No one’s making him do shit. Personal responsibility, I’m talking about. Choices. The choices of the individual. “He buys a gun, steals a car”, this nigger prick. He “tries to run but he don’t get far”. Well, boo fucking hoo.’

The bartender swallowed hard. There was no mention of race in the lyrics. He wondered if he should say something.

‘Choices of the individual,’ the customer said again and shook his head at the sad state of the world.

My gob is regularly smacked by people who are fluent in the use of English as a second language. It’s one thing to learn how to conjugate the verbs or to acquire a vocabulary. That’s largely a matter of brute practice. But how do they cope with the million tiny subtleties that make the difference between getting a warm handshake and getting a thick lip? Take the likes of “normal” and “ordinary”. At first glance from a foreign eye, I would imagine that normal and ordinary seem to mean the same thing – typical, average, usual, par for the course. And yet you can get yourself into real trouble, real fast if you don’t know what you’re doing with them. “Normal” gives us a warm glow in our tummies, like a verbal Ready Brek or Jack Daniels. We would all like our heart rate to be normal, for example. And yet we recoil like a scalded cat from being ordinary. You would look sideways at a doctor who sniffed that your heart rate was “ordinary”. How would you go about explaining the difference to a foreign language student? If they mean the same thing, how can one be good and one be bad? Well, for a start, you wouldn’t bring cardiology into it. But you might point to the antonyms. It’s not that people want to be normal; it’s that they don’t want to be abnormal. And we don’t fear being ordinary so much as we crave being extraordinary. This should clear the matter up for your foreign friend and, better yet, it will give you a chance to say “antonym” and look cleverer than you really are.

Westlife have a new album coming out soon. It’s called The Smell of You. Track list is as follows:

1.  The Smell of You
2.  Take These Tears and Wipe Them
3.  We’ll Always Have Dundalk
4.  My Ring
5.  Big Massive Dove
6.  My Heart is Full of Pus (feat. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa)
7.  Your Good Eye
8.  Feel You Up (Tonight)
9.  Pull My Finger
10. Brand New Micra
11. Don’t Look Fat in That
12. Whisper Your PIN
13. The Smell of You (Reprise)

I once had a friendly conversation with a burglar. I didn’t know he was a burglar at the time, mind you, despite the fact that he was burgling even as we spoke. Burgling me, in fact. I had been semi-woken by some sort of noise – possibly a bang, although I couldn’t swear that it wasn’t a crash – and, alert as ever, noticed that there was what they call “a shadowy figure” standing in the doorway of my room. This was years ago, in the days of house sharing, and I assumed that it was one of my housemates up and about investigating the noise. “What was that?” I asked in the shouty whisper that people adopt when they’ve heard something in the middle of the night and want to find out what it was. “Eh … nothing,” the figure said. “Go back to sleep.” So I did. I think I even said goodnight. Next thing I knew, the stairs were being thumped down, the front door was slamming shut and the entire household was standing at the foot of my bed shouting about their missing CDs. Oops. A Garda later demonstrated how you could open our front door by speaking harshly to it. Your man had just let himself in, didn’t care if anyone was home. Probably high on life, or possibly heroin. The same Garda also assured us that, having discovered we were a pushover (special dirty look for me), the burglar would be back. We bought elephant guns and stared suspiciously at the front door for the next three weeks. Then he came in through a downstairs window one night and got the rest of the CDs. Didn’t even stop to say hello. True story.

I was sorry and you were sorry
but neither wanted to say.
We sat through Countdown in silence;
no mumbled “cat” nor “toe”.
Then you got the Conundrum
and I said well done
and that was that.

Obviously, this list isn’t exhaustive. It probably covers only 20% of the things I can do.

• You know when people name a song or movie and say ‘Guess the year’? I’m really good at guessing the year
• I know the name of those little plastic things on the end of your shoe-laces
• I never get confused between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’
• I know almost all of the lyrics to ‘Dancing Queen’
• I never cut people’s heads off in photos
• I used to be able to do the Rubik’s Cube and could probably get the hang of it again, if I had to
• When I see a dead badger at the side of a country road, I always feel really sorry for it

OK, that last one isn’t really a skill, but I still thought I should mention it.

I caught a glimpse of a punching bag in a sports shop window the other day and a long-forgotten memory came screaming back. I was about ten, I think, and I’d just seen Rocky for the first time. I loved it, the training, the slurring, the beanie-wearing, the idea that a person could overcome some of the obstacles in life by punching them really hard. At last, I thought, my long search is over – I’ll become a professional boxer. So I spent a couple of happy days walking around in a towelling dressing-gown while knocking my fists together, ducking, and breathing funny. The path before me was clear. I would join a gym (run-down but, dammit, honest) where I would meet a leathery old-timer (Ernie or possibly Gus) who thought he’d seen it all. He’d take me under his wing (“You got what it takes, kid”) and give me a rugged nickname of some kind. Before long I’d be overcoming the crap out of lesser talents and wondering who might play me in the biopic. But then I remembered that boxing involved getting hit, sometimes in the face. I checked my list of Things You Should Try to Avoid and there it was, number fourteen – “Getting hit in the face.” I dropped the boxing ruse like a hot turd and went back to pondering what the flowers might wish for if only they could talk. But now I find myself wondering how things would have worked out if I’d actually, you know, tried it. Maybe I would have found my niche. Maybe I would have discovered a natural sense of balance and poise that I didn’t even know was there. Maybe I would have … no, wait. Hang on. I’ve just remembered the getting hit part again. Head like a sieve, me.

Someone just e-mailed me a list of inspirational quotes. Leaving aside the obvious implication that I am personally in need of inspiration, I must say it’s an interesting document. “If you are going through hell, keep going,” Winston Churchill is supposed to have said. Nice. Henry Ford has an entry too: “Whether you think that you can or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Oooh. Sweet. And what about Gandhi? “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Top of the range stuff. The point of lists like these, I suppose, is to comfort the average nobody (me, say) who rarely needs to lead a nation or found an industry, but who is forever losing his keys. A comforting word from a historical great, so the theory goes, can see you skip safely past the myriad tiny thumb tacks that are strewn across the carpet of everyday life. That’s all well and good, admirable even, but it doesn’t bloody work. You read the quotes, every one a winner, and you start to feel worse. It’s all right for Winston Churchill, you hear yourself thinking. He never had to leave a movie back when it was lashing rain. The problem, it seems, is that big ideas just don’t scale down very well. Mind you, they probably knew all that themselves, these historical greats. Gandhi may well have had lots of startling things to say about the human struggle for self-worth, but I bet you couldn’t stick him when he got a stone in his flip-flop for the tenth time that morning.

‘Do you take this woman-‘
‘Do I …?’
‘Yes, you. Take this woman.’
‘This woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re asking me do I take this woman.’
‘Yes. To be your lawfully wedded wife. To have and-‘
‘To hold.’
‘To hold, yes. In sickness and in health-‘
‘In sickness …’
‘And in health.’
‘Sickness and health …’
‘Yes. Till death do you part …’
‘Right.’
‘Well, do you? Take this woman?’
‘This woman, you’re saying, you’re asking me do I take this woman to be my lawfully wedded wife, so forth, in sickness and in health, till death do us part?’
‘Yes.’
‘I fucken do.’