Parker on a roll!

Night Fishing by Picasso

Click following link

And who might these be then? Ho! Ho!

And who might these be then? Ho! Ho!

This is basic example of marquee This is basic example of marquee This is basic example of marquee This is basic example of marquee

And who might these be then? Ho! Ho!

And who might these be then? Ho! Ho!

Come on come on Hurry up Harry come on We're going down the pub We're going down the pub Now listen here Harry If we're going down the pub You'd better tell your mum and dad And finish up your grub I wish you'd listen to me No, I don't want a cup of tea Hurry up Harry come on Come on come on Hurry up Harry come on We're going down the pub We're going down the pub

Still trying

Can I edit this?

Serious Name Droppin'

Think of these seismic name changes: Cassius Clay becoming Mohammed Ali; Cat Stevens becoming Yusuf Islam; the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (or, more correctly, Love Symbol #2!) becoming Prince again.  Peking becoming Beijing, Bombay becoming Mumbai. Mars becoming Snickers. Ballymun Avenue becoming Glasnevin Avenue. Many more besides!

People and places change their names or have their names changed for them for all sorts of rhymes and all sorts of reasons. Some, for example, simply might not like the sound of their existing names - Elton for one didn't like Reggie Dwight and Michael J. Fox just couldn't handle being bland ole Michael A. Fox! Others may feel that a different name better reflects their status in life - as Archie Leach did when he became Cary Grant or as Del Boy Trotter did when he became Derek Duval! Others still think a nattier name raises their profile a notch or two on the ole cool-ometer - why else would Mick Barratt have become Shaky or Bernard Jewry, Alvin Stardust!.

Yes, names change because times change, circumstances change, reasons change and people change. And in the case of this here blog we're not immune. In the past weeks and months the scope and direction of what's been written on these pages has changed a good bit - enough for the name The Dualist to no longer really reflect or complement the content. While I set out originally to write a blog to promote the book I wrote this summer, it's no longer just about that and, as such, I don't feel comfortable writing under a misleading moniker or using a scope that's so narrow.

So from today The Dualist blog will change its name to better reflect the source and nature of its content and will now become simply The Bag's Blog - and it's aim will be to be just that, a bag of blog covering a multitude of sins! That said it will be a bit messy and time-consuming to create a brand new template from scratch to cater for the new name so the address won't change immediately but will come in time - i.e. when I get round to setting it up. Meanwhile folks, many thanks again for taking the time to stop by and have a browse - the exercise would be pointless without your support and encouragement.

More soon ...

Coo ca choo it's ... Barney Jewry!

'By-kart' Revisited!

I was spinning along at a brisk 15 kmph on the main road the other day wondering whether to have either the waffles and bacon or the vol-au-vents for dinner that evening when out of the corner of my right eye I caught a glimpse of a man drawing level and then whizzing past me on a Dublin Bike. You could tell by his demeanour that he was enjoying the ride, the giveaway being not so much the grocery items that danced in the basket in front of him as the smile that was plastered on his face as he zoomed along - a face, I was surprised to realise, I'd seen before. Now, I'm good on faces it has to be said, but it also has to be said that I'm rusty enough on contexts and situations, so it took me a few seconds for things to fall into place. But they did.

You might remember a tall tale I told y'all there not so long ago about me trying and failing to help a non English-speaking Asian gent in his efforts to hire a Dublin bike from a station down in Grand Canal Quay. The famous Mister 'By-kart'!

Well, no word of a lie, it was the exact same chap!

So, I thought, he's done it! He's finally done and got his bike! Fan-tastic! I felt a surge of delight for him and his prize and said to myself that I really should be a good tourism ambassador and catch him up and personally congratulate him on his dogged determination and remind him of our previous encounter. So off I sped and within ten seconds I'd caught up with him at the traffic lights ahead. Small problem was that he was in the centre of the road waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass so that he could go right, down Barrow Street, while I was in the left lane headed for Ringsend. But as there was no traffic between us at that moment all I had to do was pull up by the kerb, give him a holler, offer up my best wishes and be on my way.

'I see you got your Dublin Bike in the end,' I shouted over to him and beamed a big smile of congratulations as I waited for his light bulb to switch on and for his thumb to go up. But he wasn't as good on faces, or indeed on situations, as me. Useless in fact and by way of a reply he merely turned his head towards me, scrunched up his face and gawked over at me either in bewilderment or as though I'd just asked him out on a date. Whatever it was, all he said in reply was: paal-don?

So I tried to explain the story to him, about the bikes and about having met him before, but as soon as I spoke, a number 77 bus passed between us and drowned out my words and blocked our lines of sight. Then as I tried to move my bike forward to see around the bus, the ongoing traffic cleared away and he was off on his journey into thin air - without as much as the waving of a hanky or the mouthing of a goodbye. So there he was once again, 'my by-kart friend who wasn't' with his Dublin bike that was, gone, and with them my best wishes crushed to pulp like grapes underfoot!

After that what could anyone do but opt for the vol-au-vents?

The famous Dublin ByKart!

I'm in the mood for ...

Well I've noticed over the past few posts that I keep returning to the formative years and to the times when we were growing up so as to try and preserve, in my mind at least, a picture of the positive things that I remember from those distant days back in the mid to late 1970s. In some ways it seems like a thousand years have passed by since I had direct experience of those times, in others it feels like yesterday. So, to satiate my nostalgic tendencies for a few days at least, I decided today to collate a little mood board for your delectation. Mood boards rock, after all! I gave myself a couple of hours to assemble my version of those times, in their essence and as I remember them, but strictly in the time allocated (already I'm missing at least a thousand icons - Fizzlesticks, Superstars, The Fonz and Tony Hart have just sprung to mind ... as has Roy Castle ... and Bernard Cribbens!). I've also probably got it skew-ways in ninety percent of cases but, hey, feel free to fill in the blanks or create a board of your own times on your screen or in your head. It's a nice thing to cast yer mind back.

Those were yon days!

What in the Name of ...!

I came across a section about rock bands and how they got their names in that new Brewer's Dictionary I was telling you all about a couple of posts ago. Eh, bizarre is the only word to describe some of the entries I read and I suppose the only way to fathom things is to pretend that the writers probably had, well, maybe Prince Char-less or someone in mind as the reader when they were penning their little summaries of each baptism. Otherwise, I'm at a loss! Unless, of course it was aul Carlos himself who wrote each one! Anyway, here be a few and to wit:

• Siouxsie and the Banshees: from the adopted name of band singer Siouxsie Soux (born Susan Ballion) and BANSHEES, known for their shrieking.
• Smiths, The: a name chosen for its commonness to counter the pretentious portentousness of names such as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. There were no actual Smiths in the group. 
• Take That: a phrase implying a sexual invitation to the group's young female fans.
• The, The: a name chosen purely for its minimalist memorability, but also serving as an ironic allusion to the pop music tradition for names beginning with the definite article.
• U2: allegedly a pun on 'you too' or 'you two', implying that all fans could share the Irish band's music either individually or as couples.
• Who, The: a name chosen for its potential to bemuse and amuse, especially in a verbal exchange such as: 'Have you heard The Who?' 'The who?' 'The Who'.

Extraordinary!

More before the end of the month ...

And who might these be then? Ho! Ho!

Nice Ta See Ye ... Ta See Ye ...!

Was reading in the paper there the other day that parents who grew up in the seventies and eighties miss for their own families many of the things that were routine for them back in those days. Things like:

• Taping the Top 30 off the radio
• Watching Top of the Pops on the telly
• Buying singles
• Handwriting thank you notes
• Having pen friends
• Waiting for photos to be developed
• Watching Saturday evening TV with the family (that would, no doubt, include The Generation Game!)
• Making solid plans which do not change as a result of mobile communications

Yeah, they all featured in our house too back then, those and a few more that immediately spring to mind like: waiting for the late edition of the Evening Press on a Saturday and the late results that were over-printed on the front page margin; or buying an ice-pop as much for the joke on the stick as for the clump of frozen hydrochloric acid that was the pop; or maybe pegging a piece of Corn Flakes box to the back fork of your bicycle so that it touched the spokes of the wheel and thus sounded like a motor bike when you pedaled; or maybe adding a spoon of Andrews Liver Salts to your orange squash to make a fizzy drink that lasted all of two seconds. Or maybe ... Gott in Himmel ... Lord Peter Flint! Or maybe Simon Groom and Goldie. Or maybe even Terry Scott and his Curly Wurly. And on and on!

Indeed, none of this seems that far off in the past until you start thinking of milkmen in electric floats or coal men like minstrels with the weight of the world on their shoulders or being told to f*ck off away from the jam tarts and the cream doughnuts by angry men in bread vans; or schoolteachers on Raleigh 20s or neighbours on Honda 50s or new tenpenny pieces the size of dinner plates or even shapers in drapes or bootboys in parallels or bluebottles in Chrysler Avengers or Double Diamond working its wonders, its wonders way back then - a lonnnng time ago!

More in a couple of days ...

Nice ta see ye!

Keep Shorty!

So, I was rooting around in my clothes drawer the other day trying to find the pair of day-glo spandex khaks that I've recently mislaid when I unearthed an old pair of sports shorts way down the bottom which, by the threadbare look of them, had seen many, many better days.

I did a little mental arithmetic and was shocked when I concluded that I bought these very same strides in a K-mart in America back in 1988 and archived footage of me from those days supports my claim. In the intervening years I have moved house nine times and, yet, bizarrely, those shorts have followed me everywhere I've gone. It's a long journey to travel, especially for a garment with such short legs, but the sixty-four thousand dollar question remains: what the hell are they still doing in that drawer? And, perhaps, if I lobbed an extra 50 cents onto that amount I could also ask: why the hell are they still there?

When I think about it, I suppose that, in the same way as any pair of shorts or knicks links the boots and socks on the lower end of you to the shirts and tops on your upper end, these particular ones also serve as a certain kind of link, albeit a more metaphorical one. I reckon that, by holding on to them, the sentimental part of me must be sub-consciously trying to preserve a link to the olden days - days when everything was so fab! And just as general wear-and-tear and changes in styles have now rendered the ole pair redundant as a wearable garment, all that's been going on in my own life and times since has had a similar effect, making me either ignore or forget those fine days and the younger man that once lived in them. So, while the old shorts are not in the game anymore, I keep them because, in a strange way, they remind me of the times when they were in the game. And the further away I go from those times, onwards and upwards so to speak, the more likely they are to stick around! 

So if you're doing naught else, have a think about some garment that's been hanging in your wardrobe or buried deep in your drawer for aeons and ask yourself why you still keep it. Could turn out to be the greatest story you've never told! And we're all ears!

More soon ...

Meet my shorts!

Easy for You to Say!

I got a nice present for my four hundred and eightieth birthday from my better half there the other day - the latest edition (the 19th) of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable - a fine gift and a fine tome, presented to me, no doubt, on account of the unyielding number of references to fables, cables, ables and tables on the pages of this here blog a mine. Brewer's Dictionary has been 'much loved for its wit and wisdom since 1870' according to the blurb on the back cover and is described as both a 'scenic route to knowledge' and as a lexicographical 'treasure hunt' by the kind of people that would know these things. So for today's post, I've decided to put the Brewer to the test and see what it comes up with by way of 'linguistic miscellany'! And off we go with a random flick through its 1480 pages which lands me at the word:

honorificabilitudinitatibus! 

Sweet dee-vine! With, perhaps, the exception of my buddy, Soc, I would nearly chance a fiver that no one that I know has ever heard of that word - or if they have, then they most certainly would be the lucky winner of the FREE pint of Tuborg that coolly fizzes away on the counter in the bar of the Beggars Bush as I type - were it on offer, which it isn't today! Anyway, - honorificabilitudinitatibus - is, according to the tome, a 'concocted word' found in Shakespeare, which, to parpahrase, supports the theory that the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Francis Bacon. One kiddeths one not! And if you don't believe me, the word itself is an anagram of the Latin hi ludi F Baconis nati tuti orbi - which translates as 'these plays, F Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the whole world.' So now! Once again get thee to thy pipes ...! And how do I feel after enlightening you all with such a scintillating bijou of literary gold? I feel like Frank Muir, is who!

Frank whoooo!? :) More soon ...

I say, a fwee pint of Tuborg you say?

Able and Wireless!

Here's a yarn for y'all. A true story too. Me and my band of merry ukulele maestros were playing a wedding yesterday way down in County Wicklow, a good couple of hours drive from our home here in Baile Átha Cliath. We arrived at the venue an hour before we were due to play, unloaded the gear, started setting up the PA and realised - aaaaagghhh - we'd left all the the leads and cables at home!  A simple algorithm: No leads and no cables equals no connection to the speakers equals no sound coming out of the speakers equals no gig equals blind panic equals rapid and random apportioning of blame equals the liberal use of unnecessarily strong language equals resorting to physical violence equals public mortification equals finding appropriate place to hide for rest of life. Equals the humblest ever pie any person will ever eat!

There we were, five hollow-brained musical eunuchs, dressed like spivs, just about to ruin the biggest day in two young people's lives with no way of changing anything and with nothing to offer by way of an excuse. Nada. Zilch. Sweet foot ball!  Lord, I have to say it was the closest I've come to utter panic in a long, long while ...

Then, a bum note from an out-of-tune soprano ukulele sounded the Eureka! moment! It lingered on the air long enough for us to realise that the place we were standing, the place that we were assigned to perform in, had the natural acoustics of a Royal Festival Hall or a Red Rocks Amphitheatre and all it needed was a little boost from a pair of PC speakers, which we occasionally use for monitors at louder gigs, to get the show on the road. So we tried it and it worked and we got started and we played our hearts out and it went down a storm! And the bride and groom were beaming as we finished! And the job was a million cubes of Oxo! Aaah!

So there. I am now convinced there is a God and I am born again!

Us, recently and without cables!

Scary Monsters?

I read author John Gray's superb review in Saturday's FT of Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 'an absorbing and provocative' work that as well as examining where we, as a species, have come from also 'peers into our post-human future' in this here Scientific Age. I'll certainly be adding this title to my short-term reading list as I was particularly taken by several of Harari's fascinating ideas on where we are headed and how we are likely to get there. To wit and to wisdom:

• The power of the human imagination has turned our species into self-made gods, but gods which lack self-restraint ... and with new technologies increasingly enabling humans to create artificial forms of life and alter their own natures, they don't or won't or can't really know how to best use the technology they have created. And, as the author asks, what can be more dangerous than irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?
• At present we tinker with genes, develop artificial limbs and explore artificial intelligence in order to cure or prevent diseases and enhance human longevity but with the effect of these interventions accumulating and magnifying over time, there is likely to be an alteration of the human species.
• The future incarnation of our species will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals.
• If other species, and eventually humans themselves, are reshaped by new technologies - the process will not be guided by any type of ordered, across-the-board, intelligent design but rather by rival governments, competing corporations and, more scarily, by organised criminal and terrorist networks. Any alteration will thus be unplanned and chaotic and, as a result, our future and our ultimate destiny will be impossible to control.

Sheesh!  A bigger than average dose to put in our pipes and smoke today!

But fluffier stuff soon ...

... deffo on my Christmas list!

Anagram Time!

OK - given the weekend that's in it and the fact I'm from Dublin - rearrange the following to reveal what I will actually be saying, or rather, singing, along with fifty thousand others tomorrow afternoon? (4,2,3,4,2,4).

Answer appears below!

But did they come on? Not  a chance!

If the Sky Falls!

A natural concern of my mine is that if the digital world ever breaks down only an elite few people will be able to fix things - the rest of us won't have a clue. It's all very fine that, say, a sailor no longer needs a sextant to read the stars and thus know his location but what if his sat-nav blew a fuse or fell from the sky? Well, it would be hello fishies for him and his crew, I'd wager! Same with all else.

For every analog thing there is now a digital alternative which renders the original technology, and thus the skill required to use it, redundant. But what happens if a cosmic storm causes the new world order to go out-of-order? How can we fall back on the analog equivalent to get us out of the hole if the skills are gone?

They say there is no-one on this earth who could accurately rebuild any of the civic buildings that were erected only a couple of hundred years ago - no one on the planet has the skills to do it now. If things go on as they are digitally then my bet is that in fifty years there will be no one left on earth with the skills to even fix a puncture.

That's why in my own corner of the world, the wardrobe through which I enter cyberspace, i.e. my office - I refuse to give up on my analogue friends, the ones that have stood me in good stead since I started out, completing exemplary tasks for me with little complaint. I'm sticking with them as ye never know what might happen.

So, take a bow please ... my transistor radio; my filofax; my abacus; my pen and ink; my notebooks; my LPs; my sextant; my video cassettes; my magnifying glass; my candelabra; my ukulele  ... ba dum dum 'n'... my scythe and my thresher; my whiteboard and markers; my books; my windy clock; my plus fours; my WD-40 ... annnnd ... my newspaper!

So there - a  victory for all things analog, though, I admit, I wouldn't have been able to tell you about them were it not for the Wi-fi router that connects my cordless PC to the world! Doh!

Eh ...it's ... it's the principle!

Stand Back, Aesop!

Ye might recall that we were talking about ancient fables only recently on this here blog but a modern day one was put across my path on Twitter yesterday and is certainly worth a read. Indeed, once I'd read it, all I could really say was - Aesop, eat your heart out! To wit:

"An old Italian gentleman lived alone in New Jersey. He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden but it was very difficult work as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament.

Dear Vincent. I am feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days. Love, Papa

A few days later he received a letter from his son.

Dear Papa. Don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried. Love, Vinnie

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding anybody. They apologised to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Papa. Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Love you, Vinnie."

Now, go on now and have a nice day!

(Thanks to Jonny Geller for posting and Declan Burke for re-tweeting)

"Only two things that money can't buy - that's true love and home grown tomay-toes."

Ten Things We Didn't Know Last Week - #2

Been a couple of days since the last post, the reason for the slackery being ... ukuleles. Always ukuleles! But the Hooley is over for another year so it's time to get back to normal and to catch up on all those vitally important research findings that I've been missing and have missed. Such things as:

• The reason people gossip - which is because they feel that being in the know raises their reputation among their peers.
• Or the fact that men who walk or take a bus to work are, on average, a half a stone lighter than men who drive.
• Or the fact that women believe they look five years younger than their actual age, according to research by Lancôme.
• Or that readers of paperback books are more likely to recall a book's storyline than those who use electronic devices. 
• Or that the novel Trainspotting was more powerful in the fight against drugs than any warning from the UK's Chief Medical Officer.
• Or that, contrary to folklore, magpies are not attracted to shiny objects but are afraid of them.
• Or the fact that before the white man arrived in America there were an estimated 5 billion Passenger Pigeons there but by 1914 the species was extinct.
• Or the news that Chinese pilots have been told to ditch their regional accents or face losing their jobs.
• Or the revelation that sun-cream which washes off when people jump into the sea is poisonous to plankton ...
• unlike urinating in the sea, which is actually good for marine life - though probably not for other bathers!

More stuff to put in yizzer pipes and smoke, with the exception of that last one of course!

More tomorrow ...

Well I'll be darned!

Me, Myself and Uke!

In honour of this weekend's Ukulele Hooley Festival which takes place in Dun Laoghaire and in a manner quite uncharacteristic of The Dualist in my story, I decided that rather than be in two places at the one time that I would, today, be in one place at the one time but that I'd be there twice - if ye know what I mean! So I brought both my ukuleles with both my mes and we've decided to sing a little song for y'all! It's not often we get the chance to jam together after all! Hope you enjoy.

More in a couple of days ... 

Wonders of science!

From the Puzzle Factory ...

When the mind draws a blank, as it often does here in Bloggerville, it's good to be able to revert to other blank things to get us out of the windy space wherein we do find ourselves! So here is an easy peasy Dualist crossword to help you through your coffee break. But of course we're not scientific enough here to allow you to complete it online simply by tapping the answers into the boxes on the screen. Oh no, nothing so flash. I'm afraid you'll just have to print it out and fill it in by, God forbid, hand! But sure have a crack at it anyway and see how far you get. When you're done take a snap of it and post it below and who knows you could be the lucky winner of a FREE thingammyjig or such like. Let's say, yeah, another pint of Tuborg in the Beggar's Bush with me sitting beside you stopwatch in hand. Yeah that sounds good. So gwan now folks, get a cross addressin'!

More amárach ...

Simplex schmimplex!

One pint of Tuborg a commmmin' up!

Bit of a Giraffe!

There was a piece about comedians telling jokes in The Daily Telegraph yesterday which distracted me for a good half hour. I chuckled at some more than others and to save you the click and scroll here are my favourites.

• 'I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.' - Spike Milligan
• 'The wife’s mother said: ‘When you’re dead, I’ll dance on your grave. I said: ‘Good. I’m being buried at sea.’ - Les Dawson
• 'Room service? Send up a larger room.'  - Groucho Marx 
• 'The worst two Winters of the 20th century . . . Mike and Bernie.'  - Victor Borges 
• 'The New England Journal of Medicine reports that 9 out of 10 doctors agree that 1 out of 10 doctors is an idiot.' - Jay Leno
• 'Just because nobody complains doesn't mean all parachutes are perfect.' - Benny Hill 
• 'When I die, I want to go peacefully like my grandfather did – in his sleep. Not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car.' - Bob Monkhouse 
• 'First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.' - Steve Martin 
• 'She said she was approaching forty, and I couldn't help wondering from what direction.' - Bob Hope

Still laughing at the Bob Monkhouse one! To see all 100 of the blighters, clickety-click here.

Bob, gagmeister supreme!

The Jogi Blog!

Back at the desk after a few weeks in the sun. Indeed, it was a very nice break and I had a really nice time seeing the sights, scratching the bites, sampling the delights, and meeting some very interesting people along the way - the most unlikely and uplifting being the chap below! I reckon this is probably the closest I'll ever get to someone whose hands have been on the World Cup. Funny the people you meet while you queue for a pizza!

Meanwhile, the flat line on my 'activity graph' here tells me that a few gremlins spannered their way into the ole blogworks while I was away as several of the posts I had scheduled to appear went way down south and several of the ones I'd intended to share on the various social networks decided instead to sulk and stick to themselves. Naturally it was all mea culpa - I guess I'm still feeling my way round Blogger's badlands here with my size twelve flat feet. That said, if you want to discover what I'd intended for you to see while I was away - all you gotta do is scroll backwards in time! In particular, if you are interested in reading the first five chapters of my book, The Dualist, the reason this blog exists, and which I published over five consecutive days beginning August 10th, just click here. 

Or if you are just curious to know what it was that Herr Loew und Ich were actually talking about - well, all I can say is ...

More tomorrow ... 

Horse and Jogi!

Birthday Wishes for Nabokov's Young Lady

Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita was published in the United States on this day in 1958. (It appeared a year later in the UK having been banned up to then). Unsurprisingly, given its theme, the book courted controversy from the very moment it was published (originally in France in 1955) and it was this controversy which prompted Nabokov to include an afterword in the US version of the book where he strongly refuted claims that it was either lewd or anti-American. He also insisted that his detractors based their criticisms not on his treatment of the theme but rather on the theme itself - which, he claimed was completely taboo at the time. Nabokov also said that, despite the fictional John Ray Jr.'s claim made in the Foreword, there is no moral to the story and he added that it was childish to study a work of fiction to gain information about a country, a social class or an author. Frankly, he was having none of it. Indeed in 1962 he told the BBC that Lolita was a special favorite of his. "It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real." The book is regularly listed in polls of the best novels ever written with a recent Modern Library poll ranking it in 4th place below Ulysses, The Great Gatsby and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Lolita - Nabokov said there was no moral to the story.

Anyone for Ukulele - Take the Quiz!

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Fantastic Voyages ...

On August 10th 1519 Ferdinand Magellan's five ships set sail from Seville on their mission to circumnavigate the globe but Magellan was killed in the Philippines midway through the expedition so it was his second in command, Juan Sebatián Elcano, who completed the expedition. Nearly 500 years later, on the 10th of August 1990, a NASA space probe named in Magellan's honour reached the planet Venus. I know that linking these two stories is as excessive as the opening scenes of the movie 2000 AD - A Space Odyssey where we see a satellite orbiting the earth immediately after a scene showing prehistoric man throwing his club in the air, but so what! Every once in a while it's probably worthwhile to pause and think about the breathtaking scope of human determination and endeavour and of how, in all likelihood, the latter achievement in this yarn would not have been possible were it not for the former. But I have no idea how Boney M have managed to get in on the act!

More in a couple of days ...

Boney 'M' for Magellan perhaps!

Take a run and jump, Adolf!

Date: Aug 9th 1936. Venue: Berlin, Germany. Occasion: The Summer Olympic Games: Games of the XI Olympiad. Hitler is there still blabbering on about his Aryan master race and all the rest of it. Then this man pops up and gives it to him right between the eyes - the first American to win four medals in one Olympiad - an epic feat eclipsed only by the legend of the man himself. Some victories are eternally sweet.

More tomorrow ...

Sweetest victory!

And in the End ...

No prizes for guessing what I'm talking about here. On this day in 1969 at a zebra crossing in London, the photographer Iain Macmillan took a photo that became one of the most famous album covers in recording history. Oh, alright then ... one teenchy weenchy little clue then.

More tomorrow ...

NW8 one fateful day!

The Dualist - Chapter 5

The temperature changed from warm to bloody freezing in the time it takes to snap a finger. There appears to be no pattern to the weather here any longer. There are no definable seasons. The sun rarely shines in the summer time. The monster rains have drenched its fires. The heavy clouds have, like a gang of kidnappers, put a bag over its head and muscled it from the sky. It is as though the weather is an apt metaphor for our own uncertain times. August had days of winter bleakness. It snowed briefly in July. This October day, the mid-morning was warm and dry until a sudden flow of cold air from the draughty window suffused the room and made turkey skin of my sleeveless arms. I went looking for a jumper and found one in the bottom of the wardrobe. It was an old navy crew neck with felt patches on the elbows and shoulders and a company logo embroidered on the breast. It had been issued to me when I signed up with the Cabs & Couriers radio cab company around the time I first began working as a cab driver. That company went to the wall back in muggy May, another victim of the recession, and cut off a steady supply of lucrative corporate business that I had not yet been able to replace. All that was left was the jumper which didn’t look too stylish anymore, now that the reason for wearing it had disappeared. But when it’s cold, who’s complaining?

I finished my tea and thought about the dead man’s wallet. I went outside and crossed over to the car, clicked it open and sat into the passenger seat. Before I opened the glove compartment, my eye caught sight of my taxi driver’s ID, my tiomanaí deimhinithe, on the dashboard in front of me. It was the first time in a while that I’d noticed it, the plastic sign issued a couple of years or so ago by the Taxi Regulator bearing my ID number E23428, my name and date of birth and my picture, its lo-res passport quality thankfully subduing the varicose rawness of the scar on the right side of my face. To everyone that sits in my cab that photo fully represents the person I am. In its entirety. It is the thing that communicates to them the whole story of my life: Frank Wright, taxi man. Full stop. There is no story or plot or denouement. It is just that. For the twenty or so minutes that I am relevant in the lives of nearly all the people I encounter that is wholly who I am. But to me the picture has no such meaning. To me, it has no meaning at all. It represents the last person I think I am. In fact, it is as though the image details the identity of someone else. Someone who’s being and body I only occupy because with every turn of the steering wheel, every shifting of the gearbox, every step upon the gas, I think I am living someone else’s life and not the one that was intended for me.

I always felt I was made for bigger things.

I still hope for bigger things.

I opened the glove compartment and fumbled my way past a torch, an old cloth, some CDs, a roadmap and an old coffee cup until I retrieved the dead man’s wallet. In broad daylight now I could see it was made of tanned leather which blackened towards the edges with a horseshoe logo on the bottom right hand side of its front. It looked old too as though it had received a lot of wear and tear in its lifetime, although something told me that the steady flow of money had contributed little to its present dilapidated state. I opened it up and went through it again, with no anticipation of finding any cash but in the hope that it might reveal something about the identity of its owner. I searched its pouches and card compartments but there wasn’t much to glean beyond a couple of suburban DART tickets and one Intercity return to Portlaoise. There was a return bus ticket to and from Virginia, Co Cavan and a couple of other scraps of old receipts and betting slips. There was a book of stamps that according to an accompanying receipt had been bought in the post office on Elgin Street earlier on the day I picked him up and it was behind these that I found the card. Bingo! A social welfare ID card bearing the following name and address: Tom Foley, 21 Elgin Place, Dublin 2

Ta-daaah!

The black and white ID picture was of a man, gaunt, charmless, a mouth moulded by meanness, thin lips, the top one shaped like the letter m, weak chin, hard eyes, lustreless hair, stringy and grey, cheeks sunken more from chain smoking than, say, from long distance running. No oil painting. It was hard to tell for sure if the person in the picture was the man in the backseat – but as it was the only ID in his wallet it was good enough for me.

Because now I had a name and address, the means to positively identify this person and bring closure to the whole saga of the dead man in the back of my cab. And to bring this closure sweetly and swiftly, all I had to do was to wait for the Garda woman to call me back and tell her that I had indeed found a wallet with an ID inside it that positively identified their dead guy and that would be the end of things? Nothing more to see here. Time to move on.

But did it turn out that way? It did in its arse. I reckon plain old curiosity played a part. As did boredom. Driving around a desolate town later that morning without as much as a fare in sight was how the two got acquainted. Before I knew it they had me scuttling across the city towards the street where Tom Foley lived.

The sky had taken on the texture of dirty cotton wool and my windscreen was flecked with intermittent spits of cold rain as I turned into Elgin Place, a narrow street lined with red bricked terraced bungalows not far from the place where the Grand Canal meets the Alexander Basin on the south side of town. The odd numbers were on the right I noticed as I slowed to 15 kmph and eased the car towards number 21. A large van outside with the words Staines Removals printed on the back and sides was parked outside the open door of the house and a car parked outside the house directly opposite meant my cab couldn’t get past. So I had to pull up. As I braked I saw two men emerging from inside the hold of the van after loading a rickety chest of drawers into it when one of them noticed me there.  He signalled to me and said something I couldn’t hear.

I lowered the window.

“What’s that?” I said.

 “You the courier, yeah?” he said he said pointing to the logo on the old jumper I had put on earlier.

I can’t remember what I said but whatever it was; he took it as a yes.

 He went on.

 “Yeah, just as well ye showed. We were wondering what to do with the parcel, maybe just fuck it in the skip was what we were going to but … hold on there.”

 “This isTom Foley’s place?” I said.

“Absolutely, pal. Gimme a sec there ‘til I get it.”

Before I could reply he disappeared into the house and came out not more than twenty seconds later brandishing a package.

“Here ye go ...” he said and handed me a heftyish padded envelope which I took from him and put on the passenger seat.

“Thanks indeed, I’ll drop that off right away,” I said, as my chancing arm twitched under my jumper.

I looked at the address and read two words written in blue marker: For Courier. It was addressed to a publishing house in PCP Books in Merrion Square.

 “Nice one, man,” he said.

“So has he moved out or what’s the story?” I asked, pointing to the removals van.

“Kicked out more like,” he said with a laugh.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Didn’t pay the rent. So the landlord sent us over to clear the place. And give him a few slaps first. But I think he was expecting us cos he's legged it anyway.” he said with a laugh.

 “Oh!”

“Ye know yourself, yeah?”

“Yeah … I .. I suppose.”

“Left the place in shite too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So he'll stay away if he's wise.”

I thought about telling him about what had happened to his boss’s tenant only the night before but thought better of it seconds later.

By then my removals man had changed the subject.

“Ye’ll need to get out I suppose,” he said and pointed at the van.

I nodded.

“Hold on and I’ll shift it up a bit,” he said and fished his keys from his pocket.

 “Thanks for that so,” I said, starting up the engine and wondering had I gone temporarily insane.

“No worries, friend. Cheers,” he replied and then got into the van and moved it forward, far enough to allow me drive pass, beeping the horn in thanks as I drove away.

It wasn’t until I turned right at the top of the street that I wondered to myself what the hell had just happened back there. How had such a bizarre sequence of events ended up with me taking possession of something that would, when I look back at it now, alter my life beyond all recognition?

I’ve thought about it many times since and I’ve asked myself that same question over and over again. I never did find the answer and I don’t suppose I ever will.

Not that it matters much anymore.

© Séamus Bagnall 2014

So. There you have it folks, the first five chapters of The Dualist. Hope you enjoyed and hopefully it's the start of a process that'll see this here work of mine on a bookshelf in a shop in the not too distant future. Thanks again taking the time to read it.

Normal service will resume tomorrow ...

The Dualist - Chapter 4

I awoke with a thumping drum in my temples and a squealing pig’s rendition of Rossini’s William Tell Overture ringing in my tinnitus ears. Damn phone. I answered it on maybe the fiftieth bar and heard a female voice responding to my hello.

“I’m looking for Mister Right,” it said.

I didn’t recognise the voice but the accent was of the west, deep, almost masculine. It sounded a warning to fools.

“Well I hope you find him,” I said, hoping it was a hoax or a wrong number, an unintentional interlude from the rhythm-less banging in my brain.

She didn’t seem to appreciate my acid wit.

“I am looking for Mr Frank Wright,” she said, testily, making me wonder briefly might I have I touched a raw nerve.

“Speaking,” I said.

“Mr Wright. Were you the taxi driver, the one who reported the incident of the dead man in Phibsboro last evening…?” she asked.

Thoughts flooded back.

“He be me,” I said.

“I am Garda Joan Casey, Phibsboro Garda Station and I have a few questions I need to ask you about yesterday’s incident.”

My first thought was - the wallet. Shit. Surely they couldn’t know about that.

They didn’t.

“We’re having difficulty identifying this man and we were wondering might you be able to shed any light on things for us. I mean for example, might he have said anything to you about who he was.”

That was an easy one.

“No, quite the opposite he didn’t… he barely said one word for the whole journey.”

“I see. Or might he have left anything in your car that might help us put a name to him – an ID, a wallet, a mobile phone or anything like that?”

In my mind’s eye the wallet appeared before me like a big juicy burger.

But I resisted.

“No, nothing. I didn’t find anything at least,” I lied.

The Garda went on.

“It’s just that it’s a bit unusual for a man not to carry any form of ID on his person. In this day and age particularly. Which sort of led us to think he might have left it on the seat or something as he was paying you.”

Pay me… now that was a laugh.

“Pay me? He didn’t pay me at all, Guard. He was dead before he got the chance.”

“Oh, that’s unusual,” the Guard continued.

“You’d be surprised – in this town.”

“Well I’m sorry about that but there’s not much we can do about it as we don’t even know who he is.”

“Yeah, I’ll just have to write this one off.”

“I was wondering if you could check the car again in case there might be something under the seat or on the floor,” she said.

“What, you mean now? I’m only out of bed.”

“Well no, not this minute but at your earliest convenience,” she said and continued, “because we have no idea who he is at the moment and any information at all about him would be a great help.”

“Well I’ll check again just in case.”

“Thank you, Mr Wright.”

“No problem at all.”

After the call, I opened the window to exorcise the bad air in the room and studied the empty bottles. I tried to unsuccessfully to recall what had happened the night before. To a man with a hangover all episodes of the pre-sleep past, of the drunken night before, seem to have occurred about a thousand years ago, so much so that his memory of them is virtually blank the following morning. Questions like “Did I do that?” “Did I say that?” are often real posers for me the next day. There may well be some clarity at the actual time, as the glass was tilting, but all that turns to black once sleep’s curtain falls. It’s as though the Khmer Rouge conducts a slash and burn in the brain and bludgeons and cudgels everything back to the year zero.

I made a cup of tea and a slice of toast and thought about the Garda’s call again and considered my options.

Broadly there were two.

I could give the Garda the wallet and say that I had found it in the back of the car like a normal civic minded person or I could take the safe option, say nothing at all, leave things the way they were and move on as if nothing had happened.

Of course I wasn’t sure what one to take.

Not until I went through the wallet again.

© Séamus Bagnall 2014

More tomorrow ...

The Dualist - Chapter 3

In eager anticipation of untold wealth I opened the wallet as soon as I was safely away from the Gardaí’s prying eyes. And of course … surprise, surprise!

It was empty.

Not as much as a brass farthing, not a red cent in it.

I thought, that jammy fucker!

I opened the glove compartment and threw it into the back, disgusted at the thought of how even a dead man could rob me blind.

The rain had taken hold as I stopped into a Spar on the way home and was drawn towards a 12 inch ham and cheese pizza on account of the big ‘Only €2.99’ sticker emblazoned on the front of the box and a bottle of Campari and a bottle of 'no brand' vodka that I knew was neither cheap nor good but always did the job.

I drove home nodding my head to the frenetic rhythm of some tune whose name I didn’t know but which seemed to be playing on every station I switched to. I parked the car under a street lamp across the road from my shabby little rat flat and hoped it would escape the notice of the nearby gang of bored corner boys who were looking for something to vandalise.

Inside, I poured a Campari, topped it up with vodka and knocked back a hefty draft. I heated the pizza and set about trying to eat it without having the hot melted cheese stick to and burn the roof of my mouth. One bite in and I felt the familiar burn as the hot melted cheese stuck to the roof of my mouth. I poured another drink and chewed my way through the evening news. According to the man, Ireland remained fucked. I watched the weather. According to the woman, Ireland would remain cold, grey and sodden. I switched stations for a while and saw nothing of interest so I switched off the set altogether. I thought about the day just gone for a bit and concluded that apart from the dead man and the wallet it hadn’t been up to much. I poured another drink. And maybe another after that, I can’t remember or care less come to think of it.

My eyelids grew gradually heavier as I sat on the sofa and considered the pointlessness of such a complex evolutionary concept as a man sprawled on a couch and waited for the night to fade away to nothing just like the thousands of nights that went before it.

I remember dreaming of winning something but I can’t recall what – a medal, some money, a reprieve perhaps. God only knew.

© Séamus Bagnall 2014

More tomorrow ...

The Dualist - Chapter 2

A dead man is a dead man and unless he’s Lazarus (and you’re God) then nothing is going to change that. But appearances need to be kept up. People have to make a fuss to turn a buck these days and a lot of the time that simply involves making it look as though they are busy. That’s why the ambulance load of rubber gloved paramedics fizzed about all-business in the rainy rush hour with their clipboards and stretchers, drips and syringes, defibrillators and ventilators, blankets and bandages, stethoscopes and tourniquets, potions, lotions, laptops, flashlights, headsets and phones.

But they could’ve spared themselves the trouble.

The chap was already dead as a doornail.

Meanwhile, two chubby boy policemen in oversized hi-vis jackets, laminate ‘Garda’ logos cracked and fading away on their backs, stood guard nearby and took turns looking towards me every so often to check whether it was just their imagination or that I really did have two heads and two left feet. It may be my own imagination but every time I encounter them, or anyone else that exercises authority over me, I get the feeling that they believe I am guilty of whatever it is that shouldn’t have been done. It’s as though they are genetically, institutionally, suspicious of me and my ‘type’, that type being any man with a scar on his face. I suppose, this shouldn’t come as a surprise given that they are paid to be suspicious of the nips and tucks and cuts and grazes and welts and bruises that often come as a consequence of dodgy dealings and unsavoury behaviour. But I can’t honestly say that it doesn’t bother me. Or I try not to allow it at least

Still, standing there, my neurotic mind soon began its race to the prison gates, as a scruff ball of a detective in an old bargain basement anorak, cheap shoes, and some underclass of fart weary flannel trousers came over to me and muttered an introduction, Detective Inspector Barney Mulligan or something. He hovered about me for a while and started firing irritating questions at me as though angling for a quick solution to the case in the form of an admission of guilt from me - his tone implying that simply by my presence I had something to do with the man being dead.

I wasn’t in the mood for any wild accusations though.

“Woh, woh, woh,” I said. “Before ye even start.”

He looked at me.

I went on.

“I’ve never seen the man before in my life before today, I just picked him up in my taxi and he collapsed when he got out of it. That’s what happened.”

I half expected him to pose some outrageous, incriminating question but to my surprise, he woh-wohed as instructed, as though somehow my retort had defeated him – as though he was too jaded to argue with me. His tone changed and he became more civil, courteous even or perhaps despondent was the word. He asked me a couple more questions about where the guy was picked up and where he was left off. I told him straight and he penned the answers into his notebook. Then he asked me was there anything about him, anything unusual about him, about his look or demeanour, that in hindsight you could say might have led to this? Was he drinking or on drugs or medication that I could tell? I said I couldn’t be sure but that he looked sick from the moment he got into the cab. He scratched down bits and pieces of my answers and asked me for a number where I could be contacted and that a Garda or two would call to me to take a more detailed statement if that was okay by me.

Which it was.

Then he said thanks and disappeared over to have a word with the paramedics to see might they have anything to add but by then I could tell that he was convinced that this was an accident rather than a crime. A man had died in a taxi, or just outside one, and that was all there was to it. Make sure that procedures were adhered to, that the right personnel were called to the scene, that the time of death was recorded, that any next-of-kin were notified and that the media were briefed if they were interested and that would be the end of that.

Nothing more to see here ladies and gentlemen.

Which was fine by me too.

Routine and unfortunate deaths in taxis are all very fine and the Guards are welcome to investigate them in whatever way they want. The crux of the issue however, for me at the time, was the not insignificant matter of an unpaid fare to recoup. Before he’d left the scene, I had told the Detective about this but the gravity of the situation, my situation, didn’t really register with him. It didn’t register with him that this dead old codger had effectively done a runner on me (albeit to the other side), leaving me to carry the expense. All fifteen euro of it. That he had in a sense committed a crime of his own that should be investigated.

I am a working man after all and with twenty thousand cabs in operation in this town, a cab for every man, woman and child in the place, it sometimes seems, it’s hard to make ends meet. So when a fare does come along, it counts. Every penny counts and I don’t work for nothing.  For me there is no sense in accepting a fare unless I am going to get paid. I am making perfect sense here. In bad times like these even death is not a good enough excuse for not paying your bills. There are no excuses at all for that. The man in my back seat was alive (though hardly well) when the journey was completed. He was at his destination before he died. Now I don’t mean to split hairs here but I took him to where he wanted to go and he was alive when we got there. That means a contract was agreed.

I kept my side of the bargain.

But none of that registered with the policeman. It didn’t matter to him. Not a whit.

But it registered with me.

Lex talionis, an eye for an eye, you see? Man steal from you, you take from him. Law of the Israelites, law of the jungle, law of the streets. It’s a dog eat dog world out there and you have to claim what belongs to you using the most suitable means at your disposal. For some it’s gavels and wigs, for others it's fists and threats, for more again it's baseball bats and sawn-offs. But when I have to get what is mine in this here world full of scammers and scumbags and blackguards and knaves, I like to rely on two things.

My sleight of hand.

And my chancing arm.

So it was a good job, deft expert that I am, that I’d earlier used both of these talents to pick the man’s wallet as he lay there dead on the street.

© Séamus Bagnall 2014

More tomorrow ...